Scalable Intimacy

Branding in the age of social media.

Who’s Driving Your Online Conversation?

Posted on | October 17, 2009 | Comments

Friends of mine started a company a while back, and like all good entrepreneurs they’ve been iteratively refining their model to find a problem people would pay them to solve.

They hit paydirt a few months ago with something called Traackr:

Discussions on brands are no longer controlled by marketers. Influential bloggers, reviewers, gamers and digital creators are now at the center of these exchanges. These online influencers mastered the art of capturing the attention of an audience and sparking conversations on the web around issues, products and brands they care about. What started as a counter-culture is now making an imprint on society and the economy.

Communication professionals realize that they have to acknowledge these exceptional media contributors find a way to collaborate with online influencers. New opportunities are emerging for those ready to lead the transition from “paid” to “earned” media.

Here’s Pierre-Loic’s pitch for the product at DEMO a few weeks ago… If you’re struggling to figure out who’s driving the conversation you care about online, check them out.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Category: Social Relationship Management, Technologies
Tags: > > > > >

Comments

  • Hey Mike...check out the last paragraph of your bio. Chris might prefer a different take. :)
  • Oh, right. Been meaning to change that. Thanks, Jules.
  • michaelcarney
    Fascinating new tool, Mike, thanks for the heads-up. I know my PR colleagues would love to learn about TRAACKER -- I've already sent them the link to your blog.

    Raises some interesting conceptual questions, as well. Those of us who live online all the time are clearly potential influencers/influencees, regardless of the mechanism (blog, twitter, facebook, whatever). But what about those whose primary residence is elsewhere?

    What if we could rank traditional journalists up against the new breed of commentator by similar metrics? Would a Wall Street Journal beat outrank the blogger in metrics (page views versus pageviews)? Does an old-media property still outweigh a new-media home? How does one measure the rise and fall of influence anyway?
  • pierreloic
    very interesting point. we're actually coming across the questions you're raising while performing searches for our clients: many old media journalists now have a strong new media presence and get scored alongside the "new age" bloggers, twitterers, etc. for example, it wouldn't be unusual to see CNN's Sanjay Gupta in the results of one of our searches.

    in the long run though, this artificial divide between on and offline expertise or influence is bound to disappear.
  • Amazing how the world of "brands" has changed so dramatically in the last 18 months.
  • pierreloic
    Thanks much for the shout out, Mike! I'll take a look at this post's comments and see if there are questions I can help answer.
blog comments powered by Disqus