Following the main version 3.0 announcement yesterday we’d now like to spend the rest of the week giving a bit more info on the other new dashboard features.
The blog ‘influence’ ranking is the second most exciting feature and almost as important in adding value for marketers as the Brand Maps. This has been added to the dashboard in response to huge industry demand to provide some sort of measurement to blogs in the way ABCs are used for traditional media.
What do we mean by ‘influence’?
No one should get too hung up on the literal meaning of the term ‘influence’. Over the years various contentious lists have been created causing debate amongst bloggers and tradtional media over “what is influence?” and “who is influential?”.
It’s worth noting that anyone saying anything about your brand is important and can have both a positive and negative impact.
Marketing use of ‘influence’ really comes more from traditional PR term usage whereby communcations campaigns are focussed to look at:
- Who is a knowledgeable writer in this sector?
- Who listens to their opinion?
When social media came along a third level of influence was created due the tendency for news to spread across blogs and an article’s potential to be cross-linked to by several or sometimes even hundreds of blogs across the world.
So what constitutes Attentio ‘influence’?
(Popularity) + (Authority)
Popularity: the visibility of a blog on the internet and calculated using the number of references, or links, to it from other websites or blogs.
Simple definition: Circulation meets Technorati
Authority: the weight of a blog for a specific sector or topic (e.g. environment, automotive) and calculated by ranking the list of blogs in the Attentio Blog Index with respect to that area. So, an authoratative blog would publish many and qualitatively high articles about a topic and/or within a certain sector.
Simple definition: Niche expert or general opinion (or as they say in the UK sorting the wheat from the chaff)
Each of these two paramaters are also given a weight to determine the relative importance.
How is the ‘influence’ rank applied?
Previously we refined this algorithm fufilling client requests for bespoke lists of bloggers relevant to certain sectors or as commentators on a specific brand.
Within the dashboard a rank of blogs will be displayed alongside the articles in the Dashboard. Marketers can then choose to display blog articles by date and by influence.
Social media has increasingly put pressure on outdated AVEs to be abandoned as a relevant measurement so we’re really proud to offer a new, tangible metric for public relations and the media planning industries.