PeerIndex Blog

This guest blog post was written by Sarah Marshall, technology correspondent, Journalism.co.uk

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Back in May, we decided to try creating a list of the The UK’s 100 most influential journalists online.

As a website for journalism news and jobs, with a strong online community of journalists, we thought curating a list would create a buzz. And it did.

We used PeerIndex, which ranks social capital by algorithmically mapping social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. 

Journalism.co.uk added the first 50 names and then crowdsourced our 40,000 Twitter followers asking people to nominate another 50 journalists using the #J100 hashtag.

It soon became apparent we needed to refine our parameters: Do we include UK journalists abroad? Overseas journalists based in the UK but working for foreign bureaus? Do we allow journalism students? And journalism lecturers? 

As is part of the crowdsourcing process, as well as nominations we were also told when names had been included that others didn’t agree should be on the list, or that had low PeerIndex scores, which was useful to give us a balanced view of our work-in-progress list.

What was quite amusing was the enthusiasm from those on Twitter and the lengths people went to in order to get noticed. We received emails, direct messages and appeals when the final list was released.

The exercise had several benefits. We attracted several prominent Twitter followers, including people not on the list but who were picking up on the buzz; the post which included the embedded PeerIndex list received thousands of web hits; and we attracted a large number of new visitors to our site.

We continued the theme by tweeting the post with the embedded list as a ‘follow friday’ #ff. We then tried adding our most influential journalists to Klout, which also ranks social capital, finding that we could only add 10 names to a list but it was interesting to see how scores varied.

Our next step was to create a master PeerIndex list of all UK journalists. We are up to about 2,000 names and growing. And the scores change week-on-week as the list changes. 

We next looked at how the five journalists with the greatest online influence use social media. This post generated significant web hits, presumably from journalists wanting tips on how to use social media more effectively.

What has been most rewarding from the whole process is to see how many journalists care about their online score and influence and are passionate enough to encourage their peers to nominate them.

As we announced our #J100 list we received several tweets saying things like “shame I missed out, maybe next year”. So it seems #J100 will become an annual tradition for Journalism.co.uk.

A full list of Journalism.co.uk‘s posts on PeerIndex can be found here.

Can influence be determined algorithmically?

Clearly the arrival of services such as PeerIndex suggest that it can.

But why is this of importance to PR and communications?

A key part of PR is managing reputation – that is, determining who (or what) may have an influence on audience behaviour – whether that audience be customers, employees, shareholders or the general public.

One of the key distinguishing features of PeerIndex is the notion of influence relative to a particular topic or issue. I may have an influence on certain people on certain subjects – on others, I may have no influence at all. This move away from a concept of absolute to relative influence is important. Not least for those working in PR.

Until recently, PR and communications professionals often made some basic assumptions about influence. For example, there was an implicit assumption that “the media” were influential – in an absolute sense. However, PR professionals who continue to see press relations as the sole raison d’etre for their existence are in for a rude awakening.

PeerIndex is a first step towards helping PR and communications professionals identify which individuals may have greater influence or authority with regard to a specific subject – irrespective of whether they are a journalist or not.  It will have major implications for how PR and communications professionals determine who to target and what the most appropriate methods of interaction might be.

On a practical level, there are already ways for PR professionals to utilise existing PeerIndex functionality to help improve the effectiveness of PR activity.

Peerindex’s group building function – introduced in March 2011 – is a good example.

Back then, I decided to conduct a small experiment by creating a list of UK PR Social Media Power Players, based on an original list published in PR Week, with a few more people added by me for good measure. I made use of the group function in PeerIndex to curate it. 48 hours after first building  it, the list had been viewed nearly 4,000 times, and saw people queuing up to be on it.

Some four months later, the list has been viewed over 22,000 times – and there are now some 337 PR people on this list.

All I can definitively say is that there is no doubt that PRs love a good list – and the people who were most skeptical about PeerIndex tended to be people whose ranking in the list was low or non-existent. 

On a more serious point, you can easily see how a tool like PeerIndex could become a key tool in the PR toolbox

You can use PeerIndex to find individuals who appear to have high scores relative to a particular topic.  If these individuals aren’t already figuring in your audience influence assessment, maybe you should review that.

You can also instantly create Twitter lists based on your top PeerIndex influencers. This is an easy way to keep your finger on the pulse of a particular influence group. For example, it took seconds to create a Twitter list based upon my PR Week Power Book list (this in turn was based upon PR Week’s own assessment of who the most powerful and influential people are in the UK PR industry) – anyone subscribing to this list has a real time view of the thoughts and opinions of the UK’s leading PR figures. It shouldn’t take much imagination to extrapolate how this could be applied to your own sector or industry.

In summary, I do think there is role for algorithmically determined influence – and for tools such as PeerIndex to help identify that influence. I’m well aware that there are many that are skeptical – or dismiss it out of hand. Then again, people had a similar attitude towards statistics based language translation in the 1990s.  And later, Google.  I’m willing to bet that we will see the same story repeating itself in the realm of influence.

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About the author

Andrew Bruce Smith of escherman has spent 25 years in PR, marketing communications and journalism – always aiming to be at the forefront of communications innovation.

He is an Approved Trainer in social media, analytics and SEO for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). He also holds the Google Analytics Individual Qualification – currently the only PR professional in the UK to do so.

According to journalist Jack Schofield at The Guardian, Andrew was the second PR person in the UK to begin sending press releases via e-mail in 1991.

Technology and business journalist Sally Whittle has described Andrew as the “de facto godfather of PR blogging” in the UK (http://blog.escherman.com).

This is our guest blog post on Travolution.

Trust is hugely important to the travel industry, as holidays, hotels and adventure activities have such a great talk-ability factor.  People don’t tend to talk about which deodorant or dishwasher tablets they use – they talk about the more glamorous parts of their lives. There is a tendency for people to tweet about something they consider to be the attractive side of their life, about luxury products and unique experiences- and this is where Word of Mouth holds real power. People change their Facebook status when they are about to go on holiday, when they get there, 3 days in when they need to check everyone knows how much fun they’re having, and again when they get back, and they tweet just as much. So, it can be difficult to know who – amongst the cacophony of hundreds of thousands of voices proclaiming they’ve found the city’s most authentic restaurant – to listen to

Many travel agencies, hotel websites and comparison sites have gone to some lengths to help their online customers – giving them the ability to share their experiences with others and read other people’s views. However, the sense of community can be somewhat distorted in these sites, with people not knowing who each other are, and what makes “Jenny from Sussex” an expert on wind surfing in Morocco? For people to take more notice of the comments on review boards there needs to be a greater degree of transparency. People need guidance as to who they can trust.

 If you read the reviews online, there is currently no way of knowing which one to believe. Less than a year ago, there was the scandal of hotels posting their own reviews on websites to boost their popularity online. There have also been stories about people being paid to post five star reviews on travel websites.  So online scoring can help people know who’s experience they are reading about and whether or not they should listen to the advice. This is based on whether they are influential at all – a lot of people might be interested in whether Michael Palin recommends a destination or not, but not quite as bothered about their old school teacher’s opinions.

Knowing who to listen to can be important for airlines, hotels, cruises and any other kind of travel business that exists, from the extremely broad to the most niche.  A hotel could target someone who is authoritative in French cuisine with their service if they are located in France, or have a French restaurant in the hotel. What they need is to find people who have a good reputation and a good reach, in other words, influence online, and these are the people who these companies will want to target. If you know who is influential in a specific area you can find out who may have an indirect interest in a product – someone who engages with this influential person. As people are linked by characteristics and attributes, you can find where the overlap lies, which can lead to more potential customers being found.

Knowing who person A talks to and their interests is crucial, as it allows companies to see the overlapping areas, and then to find more customers. By knowing who person A is and who they engage with, person B can be targeted. Of course the more connections that person A has, the greater the scope the company has to find potential “B” people – not currently being targeted, but people who the brand is likely to appeal to. 

In the online sphere, influential customers are invaluable as they have the potential to bring in huge business and big spends of a myriad of people. Perhaps person B (that person A has introduced to the company) will be loyal to the new brand and spend a great sum of money on this brand during their lifetime. The number of so-called “life time spends” person A may bring in is dependent on their reach. Companies are well aware that the most influential people buying into their brand have the power to multiply their reach because of their online impact.

A customer who is kept informed – who knows who to trust in relation to the company or service – will start to build up their trust in the brand. In turn the strength of the brand will be increased. With such a vast index of hotels and travel deals online it would add value to these websites if people knew who the reviews were written by. Someone looking for a holiday online would be able to take the advice of someone who has a good online reputation, or who is authoritative in a particular area. The customer would be able to disregard the eight or nine positive reviews from people who have no experience in the fled and pay attention to the one that really matters to them – the one from a trustworthy and authoritative source.

And in general the travel industry has a great deal of social potential: people like to talk about their experiences. Promoting transparency and trust by knowing who is talking about what and who else they are engaging with could help travel companies to have a better relationship with its customers. In the offline world not everyone’s opinions are of equal value, and this is also the case online. While it is obvious to the user that each comment does not have an equal weighting, there is nothing in place to signal this to the people browsing online – potential customers.

In niche communities, where brands are looking for a specific customer and that customer is looking for a quality service or product, authority scores and online transparency can bring “niche” customers to the brand. People who are interested in similar subjects and who are ranked accordingly are likely to bring people with similar interests to the brand. For sailing trips, for example, a good review online from somebody influential in the topic of sailing would attract quality customers that already have an interest in that particular market.

Knowing exactly who the comment writers and reviewers of the travel industry are would highlight the top influencers and would make their impact far more visible online. Knowing who the most authoritative people are in specific groups within the market would enable those seeking advice or expertise to search by topic, and therefore obtain results more tailored to their needs. Both of these can help to create intimate communities of people with local or specific knowledge online and valid conversations in the travel industry.

This guest blog post was written by Tom Wood Joint Managing Partner, Foolproof

Today Foolproof launches the ‘UX Power 500 Index’, a list of user experience (UX) opinion leaders from around the world, ranked by their social influence.

http://api.peerindex.net/1/embed/group?profile=foolproof_ux&group=user_experience_ux_social_influence_power_list

We hope it will be a useful resource, giving the UX community a view about who’s who in the field. It might also offer ideas about people to follow, befriend and spark up a conversation with.

We decided to create the list after analysing the results of a survey we ran in preparation for Elsa Plumley and Dan Sorvik’s presentation at last month’s UPA Conference in Atlanta.

The focus of their talk was the challenge of embedding social networks within the fabric of UX research. But one data point in the survey highlighted a different use of social media within the UX community: professional networking. It told us that 77% of UX professionals use social media for this purpose. This relatively high figure makes sense; social networks present a fantastic opportunity to us to share ideas, experiences and tradecraft. So we created this list as a resource for people who want to join the vibrant global conversation on user experience.
 

Why Peer Index? Quite simply because Peer Index is firmly established as one of the two global leaders – the other being Klout – in the scoring and ranking of social influence. We carefully analysed the methodologies of both systems and concluded that Peer Index is the most sophisticated and accurate independent measure of ‘social capital’.
 

 If you, or your company, are not on the list and you feel you should be, please do let us know! Although we’ve put a great deal of work into trying to ensure the Index is as comprehensive as possible from day one, it’s inevitable that a few people will have slipped through the net. So if you’re involved in UX in some way, and Peer Index shows you as having a score high enough to place you in the 500 (simply use your Twitter ID to log into PeerIndex if you want find out your score), get in touch with us right away and we’ll be sure to add you to the list.

You can message us via Twitter: @foolproof_ux.