Appinions Case Study Summary& Setup As part of a partnership with Appinions, Pivot developed outbound marketing programs utilizing Appinion s Influencer Exchange. The Influence Exchange generates a uniquely three- dimensional and targeted picture of social influence. As Appinions describes it: While influencers have always played a key role within the media landscape, the rise of social media has made it increasingly challenging to identify and engage with them. With blogs, Twitter and Facebook attracting more attention, there has been a democratization of the influencer landscape. Anyone can become an influencer, which is a contrast to the pre- social media days when the influencers were a small, well- defined group. Appinions Influencer Exchange tackles the influencer challenge by giving public relations agencies and brands a powerful and innovative platform to identify, analyze, engage and monitor the leading influencers based on topics, issues or products/services. What We Did Using the Appinions Influencer Exchange, we created specific keyword filters related to eight topics drawn from the content framework created for Pivot 2011 by Brian Solis, Pivot s host and executive producer. We also used the theme of Pivot 2011, The Social Consumer, as a search filter. These topics included in our test were: 1) Audience with an audience of audiences 2) Brands are not created, they re co- created 3) Digital Darwinism
4) Disruptive technologies 5) The new media landscape 6) The people formerly known as the customers ) ROI ) Social CRM ) The Social Consumer With the help of the Appinions team, we created a standing Boolean query that translated each of these topics into specific filtering criteria. For example: The Brands are created query = Crowdsourcing OR (social AND infrastructure AND engage) OR "adaptive business" OR (human AND seismograph) OR (customer AND empowerment) Attendee Outreach Campaign Using these queries, we went into the Appinions database of millions of news articles, blog posts, social networks, forums as well as radio and TV transcripts. In just a few hours, the Appinions platform was able to crawl the database for all nine topics and returned 6 targets with a high degree of influence related specifically to those nine topic areas. Influencer Analysis The Influencer Exchange platform gave us not only a list of targets with influencer scores; it also generated a highly detailed deep dive into each topic s unique space. We ll be using the Brands are not created, They re Co- Created topic for illustrative purposes but found similarly deep levels of information for all nine topics. Here are top five individual influencers based on the Appinions scoring system and including both people and organizations.
We can see the volume of opinions throughout time for all influencers by topic:
And, once we explored the basics, we could view the list of influencers filtered by whether they are individuals or organizations, and by whether their influence stems from earned, temporal, or long tail activities. We could also look into not only the scores and sentiments but the specific opinions about each topic by each influencer without navigating away from the Exchange interface. Part of the influencer page filtered with just organizations:
Topic Analysis Beyond individual analysis for each influencer, Appinions gives a thorough and useful analysis on the topic itself and its related informational space. Here are the linked topics concepts that are frequently brought up when discussing Brand Co- Creation. These are basically keywords associated with the topic: Here are the group interests for Brands are not Created This is a list of other concepts our influencers are actually interested in and talking about:
We were also able to export a report on the publishers covering the space, sorted by highest frequency of opinions: Brands are Not Created - They're Co- Created Publisher Twitter MailService.com MarkoWare.com Marko.us Mashable! irevolution GigaOM Girls In Tech Betha s Blog Fast Company Masters of Media TechCrunch Planet Geospatial Ulitzer rethinck by Jason Wilson Triple Pundit: People, Planet, Profit SwBratcher's Posts Latest Marketing News from Marktd.com icommunity Health Center Go International News Visible Banking Opinion frequency 134 60 54 46 13 13 12 10 10 10
And, finally, we were given an option to create an SEO optimization report to help us position our SEO best practices for each topic: Brands are Not Created - They're Co- Created keyword Social Media Consumer Brand Marketing Wikipedia crowdsource AntiSpec The Daily English San Francisco Microsoft The New York Times designer Home Depot monetary compensation crowdsourcing German LinkedIn New Orleans Youtube Amazon crowd help Opinion frequency 5 32 25 21 12 12 11 11 6 6 What We Learned Appinions Influence Exchange was released just weeks before the 2011 Pivot Conference. As a result, we were not able to implement programs as complete and rich as the data we uncovered would allow. We did, however, generate a long list of marketing programs we wanted to run using the Exchange. Our feeling based on the test is that the Appinions Influencer Exchange creates a unique and highly actionable set of data about influencers related to extremely granular information areas along with a startlingly rich set of corollary information about how that influence is generated and relates to other influencers in the set. For that reason, we believe that Appinions is an exciting new social marketing tool and one we intend to use actively in the outreach for Pivot 2012.