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c h a p t e r7:FIVE ESSENTIAL TIPS■How do you find them? Sure, there are A-list bloggers within most or larger indus-
trial and social/lifestyle verticals, and there known media pundits and subject matter
experts who blog, write columns, host news shows, or produce similar commentary.
While you may not be able to directly influence them, at least you can spot them and
build appropriate relationships with them. But what about the smaller-scale or niche
bloggers whose 1,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 subscribers also comprise a meaningful
slice of your customer base?
Influencer identification—as a part of your overall listening program—is all
about spotting and building functional, productive relationships with these individu-
als. This means taking an additional look into your influencers to pick out specific
behaviors—what is it that a particular blogger is focused on within the larger industry
covered, and what are the larger industry or cause-related issues that most or all of the
bloggers you are following are themselves focused on? Understanding the interests and
hot buttons of groups or specific types of bloggers that matter to you is as important as
picking out specific bloggers. These people too are influenced by their peers and operate
with the benefit of their own collective knowledge. That means you need to understand
this as well. The tools used to develop marketplace and specific influencer profiles—
recall Buzzstream from Chapter 2, “The New Role of the Customer,”—include crawlers
that navigate the Social Web looking for connections between people, so they can be
used to spot both individual and group behaviors.
One other point is in order here: On the Social Web, it’s not so much about
the journalists, A-list bloggers, and influencers as it is about understanding who is
repeatedly at the center of the conversations that matter to you. If the A-listers are at
the center of your conversations, congratulations! You’ve got mail! More likely, it’s
the enthusiasts, individual industry professionals, consumers with a knack for social
media, and similar with whom you’ll want to create relationships. These people don’t
have nametags and titles. Instead they have something that’s even better: a personal
profile and a social graph that links them to the people who make up your target mar-
ket. The challenge is finding these sources of influence, and tools like Buzzstream and
Sysomos are designed to not only pick up on the listening aspects of your influencer
research and baseline construction, but also to identify and connect you with the spe-
cific sources that are important to you.
In a socially connected setting, the influencers in a decision process are very
often the actual users of the product or service who have also established a meaning-
ful presence for themselves online. This person might be a homemaker who blogs
about health, nutrition, or family vacation planning, or a photographer who publishes
reviews of cameras along with techniques for lighting and subject composition. These
are otherwise ordinary people, with a specific passion or interest, who have also made
it a habit to publish and share what they love, hate, find useful, or otherwise want oth-
ers like themselves to know about. These are precisely the people you want to find and
build relationships with.