FreshNetworks Blog

The latest wave of the GlobalWebIndex report from Trendstream shows that use of social media among consumers has become mainstream. In the most active markets that they explored (Brazil and India) almost 90% of consumers are taking part in social media on at least a monthly basis. Even the least active markets they explored (Spain and the Netherlands) had more than 50% of consumers taking part in social media on a regular basis. This is the third wave of the report and is based on a panel of 51,000 users across 12 countries.

The clear message from the report is that social media is now mainstream across all of these markets, even those where consumers are least active in social media. It is also a reminder that in terms of proportion of consumers who are active in social media, the leading countries are not those that you might expect. The US comes 5th in the report and the UK 7th.

Across the board, the change in behaviour is not just uptake but also the rise of real-time social media. Micro-blogging (think Twitter), social network profiles and commenting are among the fastest growing activities and are all examples of people interacting with each other in real-time rather than contributing content that is primarily for people to find and use at a later date. They are providing real-time opinions and real-time information that others are then interacting with and using.

And whilst the growth of social media shows greatest penetration in markets like Brazil, India, it is in the UK, US and Canada that real-time interactions are strongest. This may be that Twitter and other similar tools have grown more quickly in English-speaking markets, but given the depth of involvement in markets such as Brazil, India, Russia and China it is to these markets that we should look for innovations through 2011 in the real-time social web.

You can read the latest GlobalWebIndex report below:

Image courtesy of Studio08Denver

There’s been a great deal of talk this week about influence. It’s been driven (dare I say influcenced) by an article in AdAge by Matt Creamer. He takes a swipe at Justin Beiber (dangerous) and points out that automated social media monitoring tools (or influence trackers) like Klout, need some human analysis and insight to get the most out of them.

Clearly there is more to influence than popularity (see this slidshare about online influencers), but popularity can be a pretty key determinant for some influencers. The Oprah Effect is worthy of note as a case in point.

Anyway, all this chatter reminded me of the Michelle Obama Influence Infographic.  The Harvard Business Review recently published reserach by academic David Yermack. He found that there was a strong correlation between the brands Michelle Obama wore and subsequent stock price increases. The percentage increases are small and there is a causation/correlation debate to be had, but when she’s potentially driving $2.7Bn in value for these brands, it’s worthy of note:

Influencer identification and tracking tool Traackr didn’t feature in our social media influencers report so we thought it would be a good idea to have a chat with Traackr’s CEO and Co-founder, Pierre-Loïc Assayag, about the tool and, more generally, the value of social media influencers to brands and businesses…

So Pierre, to kick things off, what do you feel is the most accurate definition of an influencer?

All of us are influencers and have been for a long time. What’s different is how we define influence in this new online information age.

For me, an influencer is a person who has a disproportionate influence on others – the influence they exert on others is greater than the influence others have on them. Influencers cause a voluntary change to someones behaviour.

There is no “trick” to influence and the best influencers are open and upfront in the way they engage their audience; if brands don’t interact with influencers in the same way they will fail to engage.

Do you think influencers are valuable to brands and businesses?

In short – yes. Our client, Honda UK , used our tool to identify and engage with influencers to launch their first hybrid car, the Honda Insight.

Honda originally set out to engage with influential people in the motor industry space. However, Traackr helped them discover that only half their influencers existed in the motor industry space; the other half where people who were interested in environmental issues surrounding cars and hybrid vehicles.

At first Honda engaged with both sets of influencers in the same way – by treating them like journalists and focusing on the PR side of things. They were offered free rides, VIP treatment etc. While this worked for the motor enthusiasts,  this did not appeal to the environmental influencers. So Honda reached out to these people and appealed to their interest in the environmental impact of cars in general not the launch of the Honda Insight per se.  Honda gave their environmental influencers direct access to their research team in order to discuss long-term environmental plans for Honda.

By learning to talk to different influencers in different ways, Honda managed to develop a long term relationship with their influencers. What’s more, Traackr’s reports showed that mentions of ‘Honda Insight’ among the top influencers increased by 300% and estimated coverage increased by 675% as a result of Honda’s influencer engagement.

But why is this story valuable to brands? Brands need to play inside an influencer’s story and must show flexibility with their marketing efforts in order to succeed with influencer engagement. From a brand and business perspective influencers are much more valuable than just for marketing and PR: influencer discovery can be used in recruiting/HR, Politics, research, etc…

What do you think is the most accurate way of identifying influencers?

There’s no tool out there  (including us) that can identify the top influencers with 100% accuracy. Influence is such a rich concept that I don’t believe we’ll be able to truly do is with 100% technology and 0% human input. Influencer identification is always going to be a mix between a skilled user, a meaningful, relevant search string and good technology.

With that caveat, Traackr’s influencer platform allows you to locate, qualify and track online influencers within any market, conversation or topic in real-time.  The tool covers all platforms (ie, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc) and our authority score (our measure of influence) identifies individuals wherever they publish online and ranks their influence in a specific conversation based on our proprietary scoring engine.

Traackr uses 3 scores to measure influence:

• Reach -   We measure the size of an audience across various data points and platforms. Influence is fluid and so we measure continuously over time as someone that got 7,000 hits to their blog 1 year ago may only get 7 today.

• Resonance - this looks at the number link backs, retweets, comments etc. The tool looks for signs that a person can engage users around their content. We also include things like ratings and reviews on Amazon, Facebook likes, and YouTube comments and favourites.

• Relevance – I love my brother very much and he does influence my life but not when it comes to financial advice!! Influence is highly contextual and identifying influencers that are relevant to your needs, market, sector, focus or whatever is vital for success. We use keywords and search strings to help measure relevance over time.

We’re going to be adding in 2 new scoring systems during Q2 of 2010. One will be based called “Relationships” and will be based on the social graph – it basically looks at who your connections are, how tightly you connected to them or whether your connections are influencers themselves. We’ll also be looking at a “Reputation” score and how people are percieved online by other people.

So why do you believe that Traackr is an effective tool for identifying influencers?

Traackr has been built solely to identify influencers. And our algorithms and measurements are so much more than just a popularity contest – context and relevance are quintessential to everything about Traackr.

The other difference is that we track a person not a platform. We follow the breadcrumb of a user across platform different platform types. Even if a person uses different names on different platform our search engine has been programmed to not only look at user name but also real name, keywords, location etc. However if a person is trying to keep certain channels separate or anonymous, Traackr won’t force the channel reconciliation as it’s usually a sign that the person doesn’t want brands to reach out to them on their personal channels.

We also use human validation if we find 2 channels that may or may not be from the same person. This process has been conducted internally at Traackr so far and will be opened to our user base in our next release next week.

Image via FlickR coutesy of Dom Dada

London just discovered Quora, the new social question and answer site. During the last week I’ve gone from getting a handfull of Quora followers a month to one every twenty minutes. The service has exploded.

I imagine the uptake has been driven by a mixture of Twitter excitment and traditional offline media coverage of the start-up. Of course that’s combined with Quora offering an excellent service coupling social media Q&A with simple navigation.  And a further draw has been the often frank and detailed discussions on a variety of issues.

Whilst the way people use Quora may evolve, I have found myself asking: how well does it function as a Q&A site? So I decided to put it to the test. I took a simple question:

“Where is the Centre of London, England?”

and I compared the results across Google, Yahoo Answers, Ask Jeeves, True Knowledge, Bing and Quora. I first asked this question on Quora in May 2010. It took me six weeks to get two answers, both of which were incorrect. I tried again today:

Quora’s answer:
I recieved two replies within five minutes. Both were spot on, with David Quaid answering:
“The Centre of London, used for calculating distances from London to X, is South of Trafalgar Square, where the statue of King Charles I now stands.”
He also added an excellent link to a BBC article on the subject. Thanks David!

Yahoo Answers:
I got seven responses within 24 hours. They included two correct answers, two useless answers: “Def Oxford street” and “Centre Point on New Oxford Street”, and one amusing answer:

"it's between the n and the d"

Google’s answer:
Google jumped in with a map at the top of the search results. Great anticipation. What a shame that it was a map of “The Centre” a shopping mall in Feltham.

Thankfully they redeemed themselves with three great text links to The BBC, Wikipedia and The Londonist. All of which state the right answer.

True knowledge:
“The worlds first Articifical Intelligence answering platform”. It claims to understand questions and then answer them and in 2010 was getting some great traction. Sadly it did not have an answer for me. I submitted the question to other users, but did not get an immediate response.  So I thought I would train the engine a little and see if it really could learn.

I added Charing Cross as a location in London. I didn’t mention anything about the centre of London, however the site instantly populated a page with facts about Charing Cross including that it is sometimes related to the search string “geographic centre of london”.

So perhaps once the database is updated, the system will indeed have taught itself the answer. This would be very clever. But there is little doubt, the crowd at Quora and the social aspect of that site is a more fun to be part of. This battle feels rather Kasparov v’s Deep Blue.

Ask Jeeves:
Ask prides itself as a site synonymous with questions and answers. Having scrolled past four irrelevant adverts, I was provided with some good links. The top 3 results where:
1. The Answer Bank (another Q&A site) had five responses to the quesiton. Half of them were wrong or misleading. One was spot on with some useful history thrown in to the mix.
2. Wikipedia’s Charing Cross page – this correctly pointed out the centre of London as the point now occupied by King Charles’ sculpture
3. The Londonist – also correctly naming the centre

Bing’s answer
Bing’s top three results were mixed at best. First up was Wikipedia which leads to the right answer. But for some reason the second result was The Docklands Equestrian Centre and the third the Business Design Centre. Way off course.

Conclusion on Quora
Not only was Quora the most fun to use, it also came up with the best set of answers (this time round, not six months ago). There is no doubt it’s one to watch in 2011.

How have you been using Quora? any ideas on how it will develop? Will it be bigger than Twitter?