You can’t do influencer relations without a good set of tools for identifying influencers and measuring and tracking their influence. Here’s a new tool for your consideration: Edelman’s TweetLevel, by Jonny Bentwood. TweetLevel calculates an “importance” rating of 0-100 for anyone with a Twitter handle. And, it’s free to use.
Most of the big agencies provide their clients with pricey dashboards and services for monitoring company reputation, PR programs and more. So it’s refreshing to see this Twitter discovery and ranking tool out in the public domain offered free of charge.
The total “importance” score is based on measurements in 4 areas: influence, popularity, engagement and trust. The underlying data comes from a combination of respected 3rd party influence/activity ranking sources, such as TwInfluence, and original Edelman calculations.
TweetLevel saves you time and gives you repeatable results, which we all need. From there, it’s up to you. It can’t tell you who the influencer is engaged with or whether the Twitter exchanges are positive, negative or neutral.
How would you use it today? A couple of ways to consider even now, during beta:
Popularity: 14%
November 18th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Barbara,
What a great tool. This is the first time I have come across a tool that could be used to rate influencers. This data could feed in very nicely to a reputation monitoring dashboard (see Marty Weintraub’s blog from earlier this year: http://bit.ly/14SOtl).
Interesting post nonetheless.
Cheers,
Amanda
November 18th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Amanda,
Exactly right. It’s a multidimensional view of influence on Twitter, and I like that too.
Tempting idea to integrate with a dashboard.
Barbara
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Main problem with these tools is the lack of relevancy of their ranking system : influence is seen as a generic thing, not tied to a domain, topic or area of expertise. I don’t think Shaq or Ashton Kutcher are very influential in programming circles…
http://bit.ly/7zgjBl
Just wrote a post about their lack of relevancy
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:15 pm
That’s a good point Phil. We need to bring our own context to these types of tools.
Someday, tools might figure that out based on your behavior or a set of desired behaviors we specify.
For now, it’s a DIY world requiring you to bring your own context via keywords, locations, pairings, and other attributes.