I have written about Traackr before on this blog (see Traackr Introduces αlpha‑Lists). 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 that gives you a list of the top 25 in your topic of interest. 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.
I recently spoke again with Courtney Vaught from Traackr to see their excellent new analytic tools. They provide some useful visualizations with this new capability, so there will be more than the usual number of screen shots in this post. For many of the analytics examples we used the Traackr campaign I set up for Darwin Ecosystem on influencers related to keywords relevant to our Awareness Engine™. We began by looking at the location visualization (see below). This shows the states within the US where your top 25 influencers are located. You can drill down within each state to see their location within the state.
Next we looked at the distribution of key words used by all of the influencers to see what is prevalent in their conversations (see below). Creating the original list helps you discover who these influencers are. This keyword analytics feature and some of the other following tools helps you listen more closely to what they are writing. The original top 25 lists, along with the analytics pieces are updated weekly. These keywords not only give you a good sense on the topics of interest, but can also help you adjust the keywords you use to derive the top 25 list. We can see which ones are being used and which ones are not used. The results on our list made sense to me and were useful.
Next we look at the scores table. Traackr uses three measures to determine its top 25. Reach is the ability to generate views based on audience size. Resonance is the ability to spark conversations based on such measures as retweets, comments, and links. These first two are actually independent of your keywords. Then relevance is the ability to cover specific topics based on relevance to your selected keywords. As you can see below you find reach and resonance on one axis and relevance on the other. This grouping makes sense and I find the results helpful. In our case the scores are stronger for reach and resonance and less for relevance. This seems appropriate as we are trying to create a new market with our Awareness Engine.
Lastly we looked at sentiment. Here we moved away from Darwin examples as it takes some elapsed time to set up and run a sentiment analysis because of the factors involved and we had not started one. The actual user time is short, it just takes time for the process to run. Sentiment analysis can be marked in the monitor tool and further broken down and reviewed in the analytics suite.
Sentiment is determined by users as they manually rate each piece of content by the influencers as: positive, negative or neutral. I actually agree with this manual approach for two reasons. The data set is small and the automated sentiment tools are still quiet primitive and often return “unknown” as a result. Below is a screen shot of sentiment within analytics where you see the percentage of positive (red), negative (black), and neutral (grey) sentiment.
Sentiment can also be found in the Traackr monitoring tool. Here you can see the absolute number of positive, negative, and neutral content instances. See the example below for the same data as the analytics visualization above.
Monitoring gives you much more functionality than this sentiment reporting. For example, you can put in up to five keywords and monitor their use by your top influencers. These new keywords do not have to be, nor should they be the ones chosen from your original list used to determine your influencers. For example, if your list is for hybrid cars you can monitor specific cars as shown in the example below. You can also select a subset of your influencers as also shown below.
I really like the analytics features and look forward to using them. I will also make greater use of the monitor feature. Traackr provides a nice balance of ease of use and useful features. It is great tool if you are trying to discover and understand the key influencers on your topics of interest.
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