I read K.D. Paine's post on "Sometimes, metrics that ignore relationships are worse than no metrics at al," citing a weakness of having measurements program that only crunches numbers while failing to look at the people and the relationships behind the numbers. It reminded me of lazy thinking (a.k.a. Paul Krugman's blog post on Shiny Lazy People recently). But the same thing could be said about Klout.net vs. mPACT for Influencers. Klout is looking at a more narrow set of data signals coming from Twitter, making it more "correct" in how it calculates influence via Twitter/Facebook activity, but less correct than more expansive approach (taken by mPACT).
A recent M.I.T. study on the use of Analytics in organizations found something I'm pretty familiar with: technology issues are not as much an obstacle in business, but lack of understanding of how to apply metrics within a business is. That got me thinking on my paper about Rainbow Analytics and Ultraviolet Data I did with Compete.com last fall where I cited a common issue in the lack of coordination between business strategy and tactics and measurement strategy and tactics, both cases being rooted in a lack of understanding around metrics and analytics tied to a specific business.
Which reminds me, in little more than 3 weeks I will be speaking at Social PR in London, on February 28th on How to identify influencers & create brand advocates
So far, what I have been seeing is that mPACT is the best Influencer platform I've worked with but I'm still finding it challenging to translate the kind of queries I have used in platforms like Sysomos into something that works in mPACT.
The other thing I noticed is traditional keyword research for Search Engine Optimization is often too large and cumbersome to be useful for influencer mapping. Typical case in point, searches on a popular movie title give many variations of the same movie title in Google Keyword Tool, and while it makes a lot of sense to use this level of details for ad buying, it makes next to no sense to use it for influencer identification. I also think it's a mistake to rely on a single metric as does Gary Lee of mBLAST/mPAth
Why Influencer Marketing Needs to Go Beyond Follower Counts
Related articles
- Why Influencer Marketing Is a Dangerous Fad (mashable.com)
- Social Media Metrics Influeners - mPACT Analysis (webmetricsguru.com)