By Mike Nelson
The primary challenge of successful social media is being able to listen and communicate with the broader community. This requires knowing who your community is, and where to find them online. To do this, engaging top influencers is essential, but how do you find them?
Generate top keywords
Think about how the community likely identifies itself online. For example, if you are searching for the “polar bear community,” write down a list of keywords related to the community’s interests. Additionally, consider the breadth of the community’s focus. If the target community is exclusively people interested in polar bears, the search will be focused; if a broader community is needed – e.g. environmentalists or people concerned about endangered species – keywords should encompass its broader interests.
Label keywords as primary or secondary, based on relevance; if representing an automobile company, primary keywords would be what the company does – company name or automobiles. Secondary keywords would be what the company makes – hybrid cars or station wagons.
General search
Conduct a Google search of the keywords:
- Using an advanced search, scan the top 100 results of primary keywords and 30 results of secondary keywords.
- Track blogs, social networks, multimedia, and other social media sites.
- Conduct a secondary search by coupling the keyword + company name, and search the top 30 results.
- Track the number of results and top themes found within them; new themes that arise should also be added to the list of keywords.
Top blogs and bloggers
There are many tools available to search for influential blogs and bloggers. Several especially useful tools include:
- Technorati and S.Technorati: Track search results of blogs and blog posts, looking for influencers that are repeatedly top sources of information. Ask yourself if the blogger is part of the target community, or if this is a random post on the topic: A climate change blogger may mention polar bears in a post, but that doesn’t mean they are active members within the polar bear community. Further, don’t let the Technorati Authority or ranking play too large of a factor. A top influencer in the polar bear community may only have an Authority of 50; whereas in a large, broad community – auto enthusiasts – top influencers would expectedly have over 1,000 Authority.
- Google Blogs: Is particularly useful for finding the volume of conversation occurring on particular search terms. It is also a useful for finding posts within a period of time.
- socialmention: socialmention allows searches across blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, and Q&A. This social search engine searches for unique posts across Technorati, Google, Yahoo! Wordpress, Wikio, Twitter, YouTube, Delicious and other social sites and search engines. It also provides a Social Rank within every category of media for the keyword search, and an overall grade across all categories. Rankings are out of 100, and are based on level of activity. Moreover, the frequency of new media related to the search term is also presented, letting you know of the latest video, blog post or tweet was added to the social web, and how often content is added. The tag cloud, linking to other popular related keywords, is also a useful feature.
- Delicious: Search for popular posts regarding the keywords. Track top taggers, and top tags based on the keywords. It is useful to search top tags to better assess a specific keywords popularity compared to the broader conversation.
- daylife: Is useful to find topics, photos, and articles by keyword. In particular, daylife provides top quotes on the search term, and it highlights themes of articles that mention the searched keyword. For example, top topics of articles that mention “polar bears” include the Environmental Protection Agency, Barack Obama and others.
- AllTop, the online magazine rack, is useful to find an assortment of top blogs by category. If there are no categories in AllTop for a particular keyword – polar bears – expand the search to include broader terms that would encompass the original keyword – Green.
Visit the blogs
Many top influencers have blogrolls. Read through this list of blogs, visit those that appear to fit within your community’s interests, and add relevant blogs to the growing influencer list. Often, these new blogs have blogrolls of their own. Spending the time navigating through blogrolls and top blogs will begin appearing repeatedly; these are often the community’s top influencers. Another tip is to keep an eye out for the blogger’s Twitter handle while visiting their blog. Influencers usually share blog posts from within the community on Twitter too, introducing you to other community influencers.
Message boards and forums
Message boards and forums are primary meeting places for some communities. Developers frequently use forums to discuss code, ask questions and offer suggestions. BoardReader and Board Tracker are useful tools for tracking conversations happening within forums. They aggregate discussions across all forums and message boards under one site.
Search social media sites
Using the list of keywords, conduct searches on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. Use TwitterGrader.com’s search feature and Twitter Search to find top Twitterers in the community. Additionally, YouTube and Flickr both offer easy Google Searches that make finding content by search term easy.
Throughout your search, don’t simply track the top influencers, consider what they are saying.
Listen to the conversation that is happening, and consider ways of adding your own thoughts and opinions. Once you have listened, begin nurturing relationships with these influencers through thoughtful and continuous engagement.
I’m interested, how are you finding influencers?
Good post – while I do searches on many of the options you recommended, I haven’t done the first step as thoughtfully as I think could. Thanks for the tip. Part of the way we go about finding influencers is listening to LinkedIn Q&A, matching our member/prospect lists with subscribers/users. Interested in hearing what folks are doing in the next step – now that you’ve found influencers and all that “data” you’ve gathered. Have some thoughts, but sure that I haven’t thought of all.
Oh man, there is so much to learn. Where does a rookie start? I am totally intimidated by the the intricacies of SEO.
This post gives me about a month of research to do!
Awesome step-by-step guide. I get asked this question all the time… now I can just point them here! Thanks for taking the time to outline the process in simple how-to terms.
Excellent post. I really like the tip about finding more influencers from a particular influencers tweets.
A poor man’s guide = a student’s guide, too! My PR students at Clemson do an assignment that requires them to find influencers, so now no need for class lecture, I’ll just send them to your post! Very detailed and useful, thanks for writing it up!
This is hardly a poor man’s guide – this is an exceptional resource. Thank you!
@Peggy, Thanks for the tip about LinkedInQ&A. I agree, LinkedIn is a great place to find thought leaders.
@Adrian, my intent was not to make this into a daunting undertaking. Given the usefulness of the tools mentioned in the post, you will likely find understanding the social media jargon is your greatest challenge.
Thank you all for your comments and feedback. I’m glad you found this useful.
I’m so stoked to see this meme around “cheap and free” SMM picking up. I did a screencast on this using SocialMention, FeedRinse, and PostRank you might want to watch:
http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/social-media-monitoring.html
And here’s a plug for a few more free search tools:
http://addictomatic.com/
http://dataopedia.com/
http://www.perspctv.com/
http://www.howsociable.com/
all in one search engine
You can give yourself a leg up by using my quick ‘n’ dirty free OPML Maker tool. Choose your keywords, choose your sources (YouTube, Blogs, SocialMention etc) and then import the file it gives you into Google Reader… tada! Instant Reputatation Management…
You can try it with a list of your competitors’ names or products too… great fun!
Oops… did it strip the URL? Here it is…
http://everythingability.com/make_opml_form/
These are good tips to get started. This method is limited though by the amount of searches and data crunching one can handle manually, thus only offering very rough results. This is why TRAACKR exists: to find and qualify online influencers.
Pierre: And coincidentally, you have a Traackr URL! BTW, that’s why it’s called Poor Man’s guide :)
Geoff, you’re right, TRAACKR doesn’t belong in the Poor Man’s guide :)
Though we have a free Beta search function for influencers already in our system that we’re planning on solidifying and expanding, the current version (http://traackr.com/user_profiles/explore) is not ready for prime time.
One more site for your list of venues to search: Amazon. Search products in your market area and find top rated reviewers. Amazon reviewers are often overlooked as influencers but they have a direct and measurable impact on a product’s sales rank in Amazon.
Good points in here to follow up on. I use Twitter, YouTube and Facebook but probably won’t be scrolling through Flickr and MySpace… the point about using Amazon is interesting, too.
Thanks again, I’ll definitely be reading this a second time.
Brilliant resource, Mike. I enjoy using Google keywords and incorporate Google Page Rank into my analysis. Important thing to remember is that while this is a great list, it is very easy to go down a rabbit hole using these tools. Keep your objectives in sight!
Great article, with tons of helpful links and advice.
Tom and Pierre, the OPML Maker tool and Amazon tips are interesting, thanks for sharing.
Additionally, I agree MySpace’s relevance is fading; however, Flickr is often a gathering place for influencers. If frequently posting on Flickr, they likely also blog, tweet, etc.
Lauren, great point; focusing on clear objectives is very important. These tools uncover vast online spaces. Without continuously reevaluating your search and the community’s technographics, it is easy to go down the wrong path. Thanks for sharing.
All these are very useful. I have found that using these social networking sites is more useful at connecting with people because you can personalize your profile. People like to see pictures and if you take the time to personalize your profiles on these sites, it makes people more comfortable. I also use Google search and the Google toolbar.
Very helpful. Nicely distilled action plan.
Very nice and easy to follow guide. Thank you! SocialMetion is a bit slow sometimes though, gonna do a search for alternatives.
Excellent guide. I also use TweetDeck to find influencers and related resources.
Thank you!
Hi – just to say that this blog was useful when kicking off the buzz monitoring strategy for my young dads project – so cheers!
( . . . and here’s how I’ve used it in case you’re interested: http://digitaldads.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/young-dads-buzz/ )