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PeerInterview: Shane Atkins

Feb 07 2013

PeerInterview

1. In 140 characters, tell us about you

Student, social media blogger and online marketer. A lover of infographics, statistics, gadgets and generally keeping fit and healthy.

2. Who is your favourite person to follow on twitter?

Well, that is a really tough question as there are so many good people that stand out. But I would have to say that my favourite person to follow would be Jeff Bullas with his excellent Tweets about social media marketing that just about anyone can understand.Perfect for small business owners and social media experts alike.

3. When has social media helped you achieve something great?

I’m not sure if it’s great, but social media has certainly helped me to grow from merely being a student learning business studies to becoming a partner in my big brother’s online marketing business in the matter of a few short months.

4. What makes you unfollow or unlike somebody?

There’s only a couple of reasons why I unfollow people on Twitter, if their Tweets aren’t interesting or add value in any way that’s a sure fire way to turn me off, but also generally people who just don’t interact with fellow Tweeters – it’s social media remember.

5. If you could have a topic trend on twitter what would it be and why?

I would love to see a trending topic about young people starting up in business and becoming successful despite the current economic hardships across the UK and the world.

6. Three links you recommend highly are:

sociable.co | This award winning technology blog with it’s simple elegant design is my favourite site to hear about technology news that matters.
Sproutsocial | After feeling disappointed with Hootsuite I tried SproutSocial’s free trial and never looked back.I love SproutSocial as it gives me suggestions on who to follow and unfollow next,when to Tweet and a some awesome reports for my clients to boot.
getprismatic | Is a unique site that gives you personalised news based on your social accounts. I love it as it saves me from having to subscribe to hundreds of blogs – I just receive the best of the bunch.

7. Which perk would you like to see PeerIndex run next?

I like receiving personalised perks, such as the Ford Fiesta Perk which displays my Twitter handle on the sides of the car. Anything that’s personalised I’ll be happy with.

8. If you were an animal, what would you be and why?

A penguin as they’re the coolest animal out there.

Don’t forget to follow @BlogShane on Twitter and check out his blog!

Tagged Blogger, PeerInterview, social media

PeerInterview: Cat Turner

Jan 17 2013

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PeerInterview

1. In 140 characters, tell us about you

Please see my Twitter bio, I’ve been honing that for years!

2. Who is your favourite person to follow on twitter?

I’m a big fan of @The_Dolphin_Pub – deliciously inappropriate.

3. When has social media helped you achieve something great?

I live and breathe social for my career, so I really think that this happens for me every
day – from connecting with people I otherwise wouldn’t, to discovering brilliant things.
For achieving something great, I think its all about the little things – so the ability to be
in contact with great inspiring friends is what I love the most – whether that be through
a G+ Hangout, collaborative Pinboard, tagging on a Facebook post or of course
Twitter

4. What makes you unfollow or unlike somebody?

I am super-ﬁckle when it comes to who I follow on Twitter. I go through waves of
following certain brands, organisations or individuals. I once heard that you can only
really have meaningful connections with 200 people at any one time. And I carry that
with me when I think of who I follow and what messages I’m happy to be seeing on a
daily basis. I do have a number of private lists – so I can still ﬂick between sector when
I need to.

5. If you could have a topic trend on twitter what would it be and why?

World peace baby! Anything that is an awareness driver is always incredible to see.
Meaningful and helpful campaigns that trend are always heartening. I must say I don’t
regularly look to trending topics to gauge importance – for me my news feed will
spring to life if there is an important event that everyone has an opinion or view on.
That is when Twitter is at its best.

6. Three links you recommend highly are:

The Verge, what do you mean you don’t follow this already? http://www.theverge.com/
Three in one, all are very excellent and I love the site design:

Fast Co Create: http://www.fastcocreate.com/
Fast Co Exist: http://www.fastcoexist.com/
Fast Co Design: http://www.fastcodesign.com/Veganasuarus

For lovers of amusing writing based around food, fashion and neat vegan stuff: http://vegansaurus.com/

7. Which perk would you like to see PeerIndex run next?

I’d really like to see how Perks evolve to bring out individuals and groups more. We
often discuss inﬂuence, but who are these inﬂuencers (ie. not the usual suspects) I’d
love to see how PeerIndex could showcase that more. And for ideal Perk -
photography!! I actually was just the INCREDIBLY fortunate recipient of a super
fantastic Perk from Samsung, so my dream Perk has already been covered.

8. If you were an animal, what would you be?

A cat, obviously.

Tagged cats, PeerInterview, social media

Introducing A Fresh Look

Sep 11 2012

1 Comment

Changes and Updates, Front Page, Influence

At PeerIndex, we believe that each of us has value, worth and reputation that we build through our ties and connections. We also believe that social media is giving us a fantastic lens into the hidden capital, social capital, that we’ve each built with our online connections. The goal of PeerIndex is to help each of us understand, improve and benefit from this social capital.

Our focus at PeerIndex remains on the ‘magic middle’: That is, the ordinary person (like you or your friends) who has influence or expertise in a particular topic. Many of us are in the ‘magic middle’ because we are the people our friends turn to for advice on cars, or because we are the first to spot a new trend on the Web, or simply because we share the best recipes for brownies.

Social Media Democratises Influence

In a world of traditional media, where authority and influence is concentrated in the hands of the few – journalists, celebrities, politicians – the rest of us can easily be ignored. But what we, the magic middle, lack in reach, we make up for in expertise, trust and authenticity.

Of course, influence isn’t a singular quantity. Your sister may influence your choice of airline. But you may turn to your best friend for advice on movies. And so PeerIndex builds its understanding of influence from the topics – and communities of topics – you engage in.

Today we release a new look for PeerIndex, together with some changes to our key offering. These changes are designed to make your PeerIndex more accessible and easier to understand.

What we’ve done:

Rebased our scoring by taking better consideration of the people you engage with.
Brought topic information front and centre
Provided richer data about who you engage with
Visually redesigned – replacing our scores (previously in a yellow box) with a simpler blue identity

To simplify PeerIndex we’ve also streamlined some features, as announced previously the key one is groups. We found that while groups received a lot of traffic, they were only actively used by a small minority of our user base.

For those ‘power users’ who still want to build groups, we will be releasing a separate service called ‘PeerGroups’ in ten days time. PeerGroups will provide a better, more dedicated mechanism for tracking and networking with people with similar interests and spheres of influence. Previously created groups will be migrated over.

What Comes Next

Apart from the release of PeerGroups, we have some additional goodies coming along.

These include:
Enhanced topic pages: We’ve got some gorgeous things planned for topic pages to help you navigate topical influencers. These topic pages will be available in the next six weeks.
Additional networks: We’ll be adding additional social networks in the next three months.
A range of fantastic PeerPerks for topic influencers.

Check back regularly to make the most of your social capital!

Best,
Azeem Azhar
CEO, PeerIndex

Tagged influence, PeerIndex, social media, Technology

PeerInterview: Gabrielle Laine-Peters

Sep 06 2012

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Influence, PeerInterview, Social Capital, Social Media

Gabrielle Laine-Peters is a digital and social media consultant with over 15 years of experience in marketing, PR and advertising. She is a 9/11 survivor and a New York City turned London expert. Gabrielle tells us about the benefits of being a digital and social media professional, her reasons to unfollow a person, three websites worth checking out today and more.

1. In 140 characters, tell us about you:

Curious, sassy, savvy, fun, compassionate, connector, enabler – 9/11 survivor & dirty vodka martini drinker. Lover of debate & spacegeek.

2. How do you use your digital and social media expertise to benefit/help others to change the world?

Change the world is such a big statement – it is all about small steps for me, building solid, organic networks. Social is all about the layers of connections and interactions. I have helped to build non-profit communities online that have reached out to help, inform and change lives- that is big.

3. When has social media helped you achieve something great?

Social media has helped me build a career in a sector that didn’t even exist 10 years ago, doing a job that didn’t exist 3 years ago. It’s exciting, new and challenging every day. On a personal note being active on twitter got me to Kennedy Space Centre, FL to watch the final launch of the Space Shuttle – this is turn lead me to consultancy work with NASA. That counts as a great achievement in my book.

4. What makes you unfollow or unlike somebody?

People who broadcast about themselves be that through a blog/product/cause with no other conversation. Passion is good, selfish passion is a turn-off.

5. If you could have a topic trend on twitter what would it be and why?

#WaterPoverty – Because it is going to be critical, bigger that the ‘Oil Crisis’ could ever be.

6. What does influence mean to you?

Influence is the ability to inspire action and reaction. In social media it’s not about the number of followers or likes (these numbers are the new ‘penis envy’ – yes I said it!), these can be gamed and purchased.

7. Three links you recommend highly are:

a) For all things internet and tech this is one of the best online – TheNextWeb

b) A brilliant social media curating tool – Storify

c) If you work across time zones this is great and simple – WorldTimeBuddy

8. If you were an animal, what would you be?

A monkey – inquisitive, intelligent, social and mischievous!

Follow GabrielleNYC on twitter to stay updated on politics, social media and the latest in technology.

Tagged Digital, influence, social media, twitter

PeerInterview: Ally Manock

Aug 30 2012

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Influence, PeerInterview, Social Capital, Social Media

Ally Manock is the Head of Digital Strategy, Planning & Insight at Brass, a Digital Marketing agency. Ally has always had a passion for digital stats, insights and research, and has been working in digital marketing for the past 15 years. Check out Ally’s blog about social media brand statistics, infographics and useful websites to look out for.

1. In 140 characters, tell us about you:

15 yrs working on digital marketing for big brands and I am still excited by it! Digital diva, lover of the colour orange and devourer of cake.

2. If you could have a topic trend on Twitter what would it be and why?

#DifferentWaysToEatYorkshirePuddings

I love Yorkshire Puddings, maybe even more than cake. I’m looking for more ways to get them into my diet.

3. What five tips can you give on being a good influencer?

1. Read a lot;
2. Listen to wise people;
3. Add value to those that follow you;
4. Don’t be an ego;
5. Smile

4. Who influences you most online? And why?

Paul Mallett. He’s been my boss for many many years and is a constant source of advice, wise words and intelligence.

5. How would you differentiate impact versus influence?

Impact gets your attention, it catches your eye and makes you look. Influence is softer, it’s a feather that affects an action. Whether that is a thought or a purchase.

6. When has social media helped you achieve something great?

Social media is integral to my life. It’s a big part of my work, but I’m also very active personally in social networks. I started a social network back in 1999 using Yahoo Groups (remember them?!) for a band that I liked. It quickly became their official fan club and I became great friends with the band.

Social media helps to bring you closer to the things you are interested in. It deletes distance and erases boundaries.

7. Three links you recommend highly are…

digit*ally: My blog, focusing on digital marketing insights, stats and current thinking.

Econsultancy: A very talented bunch of people and their blog is an excellent source of tips, advice and benchmarks.

Google: With this website, the world is your oyster.

8. If you were an animal, what would you be?

A magpie. Spotting fantastic things (which means that it could be a great article/stat or if it’s a beautiful dress) makes me happy.

Be sure to follow Ally Manock on Twitter to get the latest social media updates and insight on digital marketing.

Tagged Digital Marketing, influence, social media

PeerInterview: Hung Lee

Aug 16 2012

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Influence, PeerInterview, Social Media, Twitter Marketing

Hung Lee is no ordinary social recruiter. He specialises in technology startup recruitment and uses social media to research and network for these purposes. Hung is also proficient in lighthearted humour and football. In this PeerInterview, Hung tells us about the role of social media in recruitment, how undergraduates and CEOs are just as influential as one another, and the value of social networks like Twitter. If you want to know more about how social media is transforming the recruitment industry check out Hung’s blog for wise words and personal insights from a skilled recruiter’s point of view.

1. In 140 characters, tell us about you:

I advise companies on recruitment, social media and football.

2. How do you use social media for recruitment?

Social has gone mainstream so it’s impossible to talk about recruitment without social media being at the heart of the conversation. As a recruiter or employer, you can think of social channels as being useful in four ways: to find, to engage, to attract and to validate. What you do more or less of, depends on your imagination, your resources and how patient the boss is.

3. What kind of accounts do you follow on Twitter?

Twitter is my No.1 channel and so I follow a load of people who tweet about recruitment, technology and the social web. But I also follow people like @MrChuckD, @DerrenBrown and @DrSamuelJohnson because you need to laugh and learn now and again. Of course, I make a point of following my friends – even those who don’t get it yet – it’s endearing to watch them try. Finally, Twitter is immediacy so I make sure to follow the microbloggers who keep me in the loop.

4. Who influences you most online? And why?

I have to say I don’t really have any permanent heroes that I look up to online. Everyone is fallible and social media exposes that – it’s a great leveller of hierarchy and hubris. I’ve found I’ve learned as much from an undergraduate intern as I have from any CEO of a multinational business when I’ve been online. Perhaps this is social media’s greatest contribution – it demonstrates – paradoxically – that we are all human, online.

5. When has social media helped you achieve something great?

Greatness is not something you award to yourself, so I’ve got to spin this question around. I’ll tell you what has given me most satisfaction on social because it’s always the same thing. Being able to connect people who need each other but would otherwise never have met is the simple, regular occurence but something that never gets old for me. It’s great to be able to help, and social unlocks many more opportunities to do so.

6. If you could have a topic trend on twitter what would it be and why?

#SebCoeforNo10. We have serious problems when name recognition is the only qualification required to get a cheer and a vote.

7. Three links you recommend highly are:

War Nerd:
An essential voice in the era when we are all propogandists for causes we don’t understand.

Clusterfuck Nation:

James Howard Kunstler’s blog on happy topics such as Peak Oil, permanent economic crisis and the end of civilisation as we know it. I read it, for the writing.

Zoologger:

Newscientists blog on mother nature being weird and wonderful. Life is cool, we need to care for it.

8. If you were an animal, what would you be?

Caesar, out of Planet of the Apes.

You can connect with Hung on Twitter

Tagged Hung Lee, Interview, Recruitment, social media, twitter

Rate My Mates: Our Facebook Experiment

Jul 25 2012

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Facebook Marketing, Influence, Social Media

We all have those Facebook friends we look out for on our newsfeed, the ones who post great links or pictures that we can’t resist but sharing. Or the personal reviews of a film that have us booking our tickets to the same. Each of us knows which of our friends influence us in one way or another.

The trouble is lots of that information is locked up in our heads! (Or an ‘implicit understanding’ as @fhuszar, our data scientist says.)

Of course, the core function of PeerIndex is to find and evaluate that influence. The key thing we do is analyse billions of tweets and other status messages and figure out the influence and authority of users from these explicit data. How do memes flow across the social network? Who starts them? Who amplifies them? All of this activity is baked down into a series of PeerIndex scores across more then 1,600 different topics.

But our data science team is always looking for ways to test our assumptions, identify new sources of data and shine light on the problem in a different way. So we have created a little summer experiment to tap into the question of influence from a totally different direction.

Welcome to RateMyMates!

The RateMyMates game is a simple quiz designed to elicit our implicit understanding of who is influential in particular topics and express it in explicit ways.

RateMyMates asks you to compare which friends influence you on what topics. It’s a bit like a sports knockout tournament, a random draw followed by a head-to-head until there is a winner. We will show 16 random friends from the 128 you have most recently enaged with. Each time you do the test, a new selection will show up. Do the test as often as you like!

You may evaluate people on topics you had never associated them with before, which will make you think about influence and how it relates to your personal circle of friends in a whole new way.

We will record the outcome of each match by asking specific forced-ranking questions that will help us explore how individuals define influence. We will share some of our findings later this year.

If you share RateMyMates with your friends it will increase the amount of experimental data we can gather. Please do share it, we need a minimum of 10,000 participants to have a useful dataset to explore!

And you might find a friend who reckons you’re da boss!

Tagged Facebook, influence, PeerIndex, social media

WE WANT YOUR VIDEOS

May 30 2012

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PeerPerks

We’re very happy to see that people who received our newest PeerPerk, the #bmaxhologram were very impressed with the Ford B-MAX and its ingenious Zebra Imaging technology. The hologram has managed to blow the minds of the technological savvy from around of the world.

With great comments like “you made one geek family happy and a social media fan impressed” from clever users like Sylwia Presley we have been extremely chuffed. Check out her great blog about it.

Now here’s the challenge: We want to see unique and creative videos/images of your B-MAX hologram. It is an ingenious piece of technology, and we want to see how creative you can be displaying it (on the mantle, using strobe lights, lasers, cats, surprise us!).

The most creative video will receive our undying respect and a reward that is still to be determined… we’re open to suggestions, what do you want? (Sorry we can’t boost your score.)

So post your clever videos, images and comments on Twitter - don’t forget to tag (#bmaxhologram, #PeerPerks) and on our Facebook page.

If you don’t have a hologram yet there is still a chance to win one here. Hurry up though, our supplies are dwindling!

What is the Ford B-MAX hologram?
How can I get it?

Tagged Automobiles, B-MAX hologram, Challenge, Ford, Ford B-MAX, influence, PeerIndex, PeerPerk, social media, Technology, Urban Design, Video, Zebra Imaging

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