Besides Christmas, here's a gift to my readers. Finding influentials isn't that hard if you use Twitter and the right approach - and since it's Christmas ..... here's an example of how to find Influential Social Media Analytics individuals - but of course, it'll work only to the extend a individuals' twitter profile has that information in it (and if we get to point where Semantic Analysis will fill that information in, even if it's not entered anywhere in the profile - but it's accurate - we'll have something even better)!
Step One - go to www.TweepSearch.com
and enter "Social Media Analyst"
2. Use Excel Web Query to pull the entire page into Excel (will work with 2003 or 2007 versions)
Notice that I checked the entire page in the upper right - pull in everything.-
Press "Import". The entire page is imported minus any pictures. You can guess the rest. You can collect all 14 pages of data, paste it on the same page then do some formatting magic, which I won't go into here, and the collect the data into a nice, neat table.
Let's step back and talk about why I found influentials this way . Why didn't I use Radian6 or Sysomos or Alterian/Techrigy/SM2? I have access to all of them - and I use them a lot - and I tried Sysomos Map, and got some good stuff - but what I pulled from TweepSearch was actually better than anything I could get from any of the platforms above.
Here's why - my Christmas gift.
What people "say" when they speak, or when they write, isn't often an accurate description of "who they are". Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 and almost all the platforms for Social Media Monitoring work by canvassing the stream of conversations - but that doesn't tell us who they are - and we know - so we can decide if we want to contact them, or not.
What a person puts in their Twitter Profile, may or may not be accurate, but at least, it's a self identified deceleration of what they say they do, what they say the believe - and it's much easier to work with that than work with the "overall conversations".
It also makes me think I should update my own Twitter Profile to better reflect what I really do - and maybe, you should too.
Hey, it's Christmas, and I might not be able to give in every way I should - and .... maybe, in my own way, I came to the awareness, a long time ago, that the more we give, the more we receive - and the supply of knowledge is limitless.
So if you can't share money, share knowledge - give some ideas away, because there's always more - the supply of knowledge is inexhaustable.
Merry Christmas! Here's a painting I did last year, at this time.
Untitled - Marshall Sponder 2008
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