Appinions  Case  Study      Summary&  Setup    As  part  of  a  partnership  with  Appinions,  Pivot  developed  outbound  marketing  programs  utilizing  Appinion’s  Influencer  Exchange.    The  Influence  Exchange  generates  a  uniquely  three-­‐dimensional  and  targeted  picture  of  social  influence.  As  Appinions  describes  it:    “While  influencers  have  always  played  a  key  role  within  the  media  landscape,  the  rise  of  social  media  has  made  it  increasingly  challenging  to  identify  and  engage  with  them.    “With  blogs,  Twitter  and  Facebook  attracting  more  attention,  there  has  been  a  democratization  of  the  influencer  landscape.  Anyone  can  become  an  influencer,  which  is  a  contrast  to  the  pre-­‐social  media  days  when  the  influencers  were  a  small,  well-­‐defined  group.    “Appinions’  Influencer  Exchange  tackles  the  influencer  ‘challenge’  by  giving  public  relations  agencies  and  brands  a  powerful  and  innovative  platform  to  identify,  analyze,  engage  and  monitor  the  leading  influencers  based  on  topics,  issues  or  products/services.”      What  We  Did    Using  the  Appinions  Influencer  Exchange,  we  created  specific  keyword  filters  related  to  eight  topics  drawn  from  the  content  framework  created  for  Pivot  2011  by  Brian  Solis,  Pivot’s  host  and  executive  producer.  We  also  used  the  theme  of  Pivot  2011,  “The  Social  Consumer,”  as  a  search  filter.    These  topics  included  in  our  test  were:    

1) Audience  with  an  audience  of  audiences  2) Brands  are  not  created,  they’re  co-­‐created  3) Digital  Darwinism  

4) Disruptive  technologies    5) The  new  media  landscape  6) The  people  formerly  known  as  the  customers  7) ROI  8) Social  CRM  9) The  Social  Consumer  

 With  the  help  of  the  Appinions  team,  we  created  a  standing  Boolean  query  that  translated  each  of  these  topics  into  specific  filtering  criteria.  For  example:      The  “Brands  are  created…”  query  =  “Crowdsourcing  OR  (social  AND  infrastructure  AND  engage)  OR  "adaptive  business"  OR  (human  AND  seismograph)  OR  (customer  AND  empowerment)”    Attendee  Outreach  Campaign    Using  these  queries,  we  went  into  the  Appinions  database  of  millions  of  news  articles,  blog  posts,  social  networks,  forums  as  well  as  radio  and  TV  transcripts.  In  just  a  few  hours,  the  Appinions  platform  was  able  to  crawl  the  database  for  all  nine  topics  and  returned  769  targets  with  a  high  degree  of  influence  related  specifically  to  those  nine  topic  areas.            Influencer  Analysis    The  Influencer  Exchange  platform  gave  us  not  only  a  list  of  targets  with  influencer  scores;  it  also  generated  a  highly  detailed  deep  dive  into  each  topic’s  unique  space.      We’ll  be  using  the  “Brands  are  not  created,  They’re  Co-­‐Created”  topic  for  illustrative  purposes  but  found  similarly  deep  levels  of  information  for  all  nine  topics.    Here  are  top  five  individual  influencers  based  on  the  Appinions  scoring  system  and  including  both  people  and  organizations.        

   We  can  see  the  volume  of  opinions  throughout  time  for  all  influencers  by  topic:    

     

And,  once  we  explored  the  basics,  we  could  view  the  list  of  influencers  filtered  by  whether  they  are  individuals  or  organizations,  and  by  whether  their  influence  stems  from  earned,  temporal,  or  long  tail  activities.    We  could  also  look  into  not  only  the  scores  and  sentiments  but  the  specific  opinions  about  each  topic  by  each  influencer  without  navigating  away  from  the  Exchange  interface.      

     Part  of  the  influencer  page  filtered  with  just  organizations:    

         

Topic  Analysis    Beyond  individual  analysis  for  each  influencer,  Appinions  gives  a  thorough  and  useful  analysis  on  the  topic  itself  and  its  related  informational  space.      Here  are  the  linked  topics  –concepts  that  are  frequently  brought  up  when  discussing  “Brand  Co-­‐Creation.”    These  are  basically  keywords  associated  with  the  topic:    

   Here  are  the  group  interests  for  “Brands  are  not  Created…”  This  is  a  list  of  other  concepts  our  influencers  are  actually  interested  in  and  talking  about:    

   

We  were  also  able  to  export  a  report  on  the  publishers  covering  the  space,  sorted  by  highest  frequency  of  opinions:    Brands are Not Created - They're Co-Created

 Publisher   Opinion  frequency  Twitter   134  MailService.com   60  MarkoWare.com   54  Marko.us   46  Mashable!   13  iRevolution   13  GigaOM   12  Girls  In  Tech   10  Betha’s  Blog   10  Fast  Company   10  Masters  of  Media   9  TechCrunch   9  Planet  Geospatial   9  Ulitzer   9  rethinck  by  Jason  Wilson   8  Triple  Pundit:  People,  Planet,  Profit   8  SwBratcher's  Posts   8  Latest  Marketing  News  from  Marktd.com   8  iCommunity  Health  Center  Go  International  News   7  Visible  Banking   7          

And,  finally,  we  were  given  an  option  to  create  an  SEO  optimization  report  to  help  us  position  our  SEO  best  practices  for  each  topic:      Brands are Not Created - They're Co-Created

 keyword   Opinion  frequency  Social  Media   57  Consumer  Brand  Marketing   32  Wikipedia   25  crowdsource   21  AntiSpec   12  The  Daily   12  English   11  San  Francisco   11  Microsoft   9  The  New  York  Times   9  designer   8  Home  Depot   8  monetary  compensation   8  crowdsourcing   7  German   7  LinkedIn   7  New  Orleans   7  Youtube   7  Amazon   6  crowd  help   6      What  We  Learned    Appinions  Influence  Exchange  was  released  just  weeks  before  the  2011  Pivot  Conference.  As  a  result,  we  were  not  able  to  implement  programs  as  complete  and  rich  as  the  data  we  uncovered  would  allow.  We  did,  however,  generate  a  long  list  of  marketing  programs  we  wanted  to  run  using  the  Exchange.    Our  feeling  based  on  the  test  is  that  the  Appinions  Influencer  Exchange  creates  a  unique  and  highly  actionable  set  of  data  about  influencers  related  to  extremely  granular  information  areas  along  with  a  startlingly  rich  set  of  corollary  information  about  how  that  influence  is  generated  and  relates  to  other  influencers  in  the  set.  For  that  reason,  we  believe  that  Appinions  is  an  exciting  new  social  marketing  tool  and  one  we  intend  to  use  actively  in  the  outreach  for  Pivot  2012.