Rating Influence

While nothing beats a manual, check into what your best brand promoters are all about online; it’s pretty great to have tools available that can drill deep down into the information in seconds while you check your e-mail.

These tools are also useful for discovering new influencers to follow who may be helpful to you in the future:

Followerwonk (http://followerwonk.com ): Followerwonk (see Figure 14-8) is a surprisingly robust platform for evaluating followers. Within only a few hours, you can pull up an astonishing amount of quality information. The free version lets you

• Search Twitter bios

• Compare Twitter users

• Analyze followers/follows

• Overlay your social graph from other accounts to find overlaps in followers

The paid version does much more, and subscription prices range from $40 to $2,000 a month.

Klout (http://klout.com/home ): Klout just keeps getting better and better. It started by tracking Facebook and Twitter alone, but now it includes LinkedIn and many more platforms. Check out your brand promoters’ profiles on Klout, if they have one, and see what areas they’re influential in and how they’re rated.

Traackr (http://traackr.com ): Traackr is a much more sophisticated tool than Klout and has a $399 monthly subscription rate to go with it. Tracks “A-List” individuals who are thought leaders about a specific topic. This is a very good tool if you can justify the business expense.

eCairn (http://ecairn.com ): Listening platform that creates influencer lists of bloggers. Has a lot of flexibility for more in-depth searches. Average user spends $99 a month. Main features include

• Brand monitoring and reputation management

• Tracking social media initiatives

• Identifying brand advocates or influencers

• Improving customer insight and market research

• Gathering competitive intelligence

PeekYou (http://peekyou.com ): If you don’t mind looking past a few ads, this free influence-rating tool is a real gem for checking out who your brand ambassadors and influencers are, as well as to assess their online influence. You can use it to search according to

• Name

• Interests

• Work

• School

• City

• Phone

• E-mail

• Google

PeekYou also allows you to track comments made to periodicals. See the earlier section, “Periodicals,” for more.