"Influence" is a hot topic in social media circles. We're constantly looking to understand who is influential to which conversations and how we can leverage those influencers' voices with those conversations we're most interested. Like much of social media today, measuring influence is a tough nut to crack.
Leveraging influencer networks will be of utmost importance as we understand how information is created, shared, and acted upon. To a large extent, it's a subjective activity, but as the social metric market matures, so too do the means to measure and affect change.
Understand who within social communities and embassies are influential, why (volume, SME, position), and when (context, content, events).
Triage sales and support opportunities as needed. Track sentiment, share of voice, mention volume over time, based on topic, user, or channel.
Evaluate blogger presence and content engagement, in correlation with Google Analytics or Omniture reports.
Zero-in on influence by topic and interest areas. Identify external influencers and SMEs from discreet search profiles.
Understand and encourage how information is shared word-of-mouth across influencer networks through social and other online sources.
Use qualitative measures to make decisions on advertising spend across social properties. Is there potential as industry model for "Social CPM?"
How can we put this information to actionable use?
- Identify influencers (and sources) where we can apply thought leadership.
- Enable us to focus on the content and channel(s) most effective to a particular message.
- Understand how internal vs. external SMEs and content are used.
- Optimize how audiences consume information in more meaningful ways.
- Identify users' preferred online destinations and optimize spend based on actionable results.
- Measure and analyze social sharing patterns.