Is the FORMULA

more important

than the DATA you

collect?

As we progress forward building, tweaking and learning how to Rank over 30

million people in the US. It struck me that the formula is such a small part of the

over all process.

The tipping point in determining whether or not the data is more important than the

formula has three big elements:

1. What is the context of the data you have crawled

2. Can you tie the data crawled to the person you are trying to ascribe a value to

3. Can you determine the importance of one persons social contributions relative

to another based on numbers one and two

I know this all seems a little bit confusing and at first it is but let me walk you

through it.

As a marketer I am either going after my customer direct or indirect through

influencers and thought leaders usually one in the same. In this example I’m going

to focus on the influencers or indirect channels.

More often than not we know our end customer, what they look like and where

they are located. What is missing is the trust and equity required to drive them to

take the desired action this is where the key influencers come in.

It’s tricky to calculate who actually has impact on a specific vertical market.

Determining if an individual or firm has relevance in the twitter-sphere or blogger-

sphere is straightforward. Whether or not that same individual dominates and

influences a specific market is another matter.

Ok enough on that topic, lets get back to the formula versus the data. You can

create the world’s most complicated formula but without the data it’s virtually

impossible to generate a meaningful result without the requisite fuel (data).

Understanding the data you have crawled, it relationship to the key influencer and

how important each piece of data is lays the foundation for building a Social Rank.

What is missing for me when I look at the competitive landscape is depth. Taking a

few “key markers” and using those to INFER the impact and relevance they have

on an entire market is very ballsy. Would you bet your career on such a non-

scientific process?

In my experience that is exactly what most marketing departments do. They use

their thumb waive it in the air (a single person who does a few hundred searches)

for a quick litmus test and plow forward. It seems if we could identify the surface

area of the market that would be a great first step.

Once we know who is in our market the next big step is to figure out where the

influencer is generating their power. In our experience there are 14 possible

channels a person can derive their power from not three (Twitter, Facebook,

Blogs).

Now that we start tracking where they generate their power the challenge is to

figure out what they are saying and how important their content and comments are

relative to the rest of the market.

Last, is to compare each of the influencers in the market to each other and develop

a Social Rank for each. This is where the formula comes in at the end of the

process not the beginning.

So don’t be confused or mislead with the magic formula siren song from many in

the marketplace. Ask your vendors how they collect, organize and analyze the data.

Let me know what you think about the formula vs data driven approach.

Look forward to seeing you on-line.

Take care,

Jim

@jimweldonjr

Posted in: Influencer Formula