Inlet MarketingBreaking the Ice – Bridging the Gap

Influence is a power that can affect, persuade and cause changes to someone or something. But, to attain this power to get intended output isn’t easy, especially when it deals with people. In order to influence people, we need to discover what is already influencing them. What makes them tick? What do they care about? What are they listening? And, Whom are they listening?

Recently  I was working on a formula for deriving most influential users on social media. This formula was intended to work across sources [Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit, etc]. The challenge was not to find people who are influencing others but to find how much influence they have. This was little tough when we had to measure it across sources of various nature. Nevertheless, the formula was constructed and we used it at ContextMine. Once this feature was added to the application, I tried to test it. The first thing I did was to find out who is the most influential user for keyword “Social Media”. I was amazed to see the output. It was showing Pete Cashmore and TechCrunch. You can get the list of most influential users for your own keyword here.

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Aggregation is not a new concept for marketing professionals, but, it’s usage in Social Media is certainly a new buzz for them. As we understand from my previous post [on Social Media Marketing], the need to address this emerging market is fiercely felt. Companies are aggressively placing their marketing budgets to this newly created sphere.

In IT, we have been using aggregation in various forms. Drudge Report and The Huffington Poststarted the news aggregation while lots of other RSS feed readers started aggregating syndicated web content. These services played a big role in taking the web content easily to million of users who didn’t have time to browse websites one-by-one. After the social networking boom the next round of aggregation started in the form of Social Networking Aggregation. Lots of products / services were launched to cater this need. The new era on Internet is the era of Social Media. It has become the numero uno reason for browsing internet, surpassing the previous popular reason, porn. Plenty of social media sites are running and by each passing day it’s getting crowded more n more. Tracking each of these services is tough, hence, we need another form of aggregation, Social Media Aggregation.

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