Marketers can now identify their various industries' top 10 influential voices across blogs, articles, and social networks—and also see their own influence ranking vs. other voices in a given market—with the help of a free tool released this week.
mBLAST this week launched a free version of its mPACT Web-based application that helps marketers listen to, measure, compare, and engage with the influencers that matter most to their specific markets.
"To find the most influential voices, you have to start by examining which voices in blogs, articles, Twitter and other online media are talking about the things your target audience cares about and listens to. And then measure the specific impact each of those voices is having for that particular market segment. Specific marketing objectives require measuring and finding specific—not generic—influential voices. That's what mPACT does," mBLAST CEO Gary Lee told MarketingProfs.
In contrast to other first-generation tools, according to Atlanta-based mBLAST, the mPACT tool ferrets out influencers in niche markets, as defined by keyword or topic, rather than assign a generic influencer score.
"To properly measure influence, it must be viewed through the lens of topical relevancy. In life, you would not go to someone who is generically described to you as 'really smart' when you have a serious healthcare issue. You would find the best individual who understands and can help with the healthcare issue. Similarly, a marketing professional would not target an influential voice highly influential in, say, financial derivatives models, if the marketer is marketing a high-end fashion product designed for teenage girls attending proms," Lee explained.
mPACT continually indexes some 25 million articles, 8 million blog posts, and 753 million social media entries and mines terabytes of data daily for new topic information to ensure up-to-date results, according to mBLAST. The company uses a proprietary algorithm for measuring influence that considers what an influencer has written across online media (articles, blogs and social media), how frequently they've been sourced, how often they are quoted, the number of followers/readers they have, among other criteria.
The original tool, mPACT Pro, can dive deeper into a market and the influencers within it. It displays the top 100 influencers (instead of just the top 10), for example, and it gives a full report of what those influencers have written on the given topic, expands the keyword list options to allow the user to enter a greater set of keywords and filters for their particular needs, shows an influencer map for any topic, charts how influence changes over time, monitors opportunities, and tracks competitive mentions across the Web.
mPACT Free users can sign up for a 14-day trial of mPACT Pro that includes unlimited access to all mPACT Pro features, mBLAST said.
