I have written about Traackr before on this blog (see Traackr Enhances Its Web Influencer Monitoring Tool). As I wrote then I have been using Traackr for several months. For those who want to better understand the influencers in a field, Traackr provides a comprehensive, yet very easy to use, tool set. As a disclosure I have no connection with Traackr but they have given me limited free use of their tool so I can better understand it.
Traackr has now launched a series of curated alpha-lists on different topics. As they write, “There's a human element to measuring influence that technology will never substitute. It has to do with someone's unique way of defining a topic.” With this series they are letting industry writers define their topic and create a public alpha-list.
The way Traackr works is to have you first define a topic through a set of key words. They let you test these words, and offer advice of effective key word choices. Traackr scans the social web to identify the 25 most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your list. There are three distinct categories with separate scores:
Reach - Ability to generate views based on audience size
Resonance - Ability to spark conversations based on such measures as retweets comments, and links
Relevance - Ability to cover specific topic/market based on relevance to your selected keywords
The placement on the list is determined by the combined set of scores. The curator does not directly control the choices or the ordering. Once people do appear you can star them so they always show up even if they fall out of the top 25. In this case they are listed at the bottom of the list and unranked.
When Traackr let me try out their tool as part of a review, I choose Enterprise 2.0 as my topic. They asked me to include in this topic list in their first set of alpha-lists. Despite appearances, I did not try to influence the list beyond the key word choice but perhaps there is some indirect influence as I picked key words that are a personal interest to me.
Here is their first set of alpha-lists. As you can see the topics are quite diverse.
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