Influence and Traakr

If you’re doing any kind of social marketing either for an organization that you work for or just for yourself influential marketing should be at the top of your list. There are many tools that you can use to listen, monitor and track conversations in the social space however there are few that help marketers expand into new communities.

Today Traackr just release their Online Authority List at DEMO to make it easier for community managers, brand managers, PR fold and marketers to identify the top online influential voices. A few of the metrics that they use to identify influencers is by measuring their reach, resonance, and relevance around specific campaign initiatives.

The main concept around Traackr is to find individuals with the most “influence” so that you can directly interact with them. Now this isn’t completely new Radian6 has an influencer listing as well as some other tools. From my personal experience most of these tools are of little use, however they can give a quick snap shot to make sure the right people are picking up your story however it’s very difficult to find influencers in new communities that you haven’t reached out to yet. Moreover, from my experience, if you haven’t launched a campaign yet and you are trying to figure out whom you need to contact based on influence these tools rarely pick up on the right people.

It’s going to be interested to see how companies start addressing this issue. Let me know what tools you use to identify influencers.