Measurement for Influencers & Thought Leadership

Kroger will again be used for this assignment as it is what was used for the last one.

 

What might be key goals and metrics for your company?

 You may notice I reversed the order of these questions and I did so for an important reason. That reason being that I think you should determine your goals and metrics before setting up a program to measure anything. So for this post I will do just that by beginning with defining the goal in relation to influencers. 

 

The main goal I see of measuring influences is to generate free advertisement to current and potential customers. Most of the sites included in my last blog post do just that by advertising deals and coupons. This helps establish your organization in people's minds and possibly brings them in to take advantage of the deals. Other sites I included focused on reviewing of the store and their own brand of products. This is again an important form of advertisement which influences what people think about a company. Assuming the review is good then it may make someone more likely to shop at Kroger. If it's negative news or information it may mean a customer was lost however. Because of this it's important to respond to criticism and try to maintain a good relationship with the influencing site owners/authors.

 

A number of metrics can be used in this measurement. A company could just review the number of positive to negative articles and comments and use that to learn how people feel about an organization. A conversion index -- which measures a companies ability to attract people through marketing -- can be used to periodically measure and determine the success of online marketing. Sites like Hubspot marketing grader can also be used to generate related information. The numbers of times an article is linked elsewhere, as well as its number of comments/responses can also be used to measure the reach and/or strength of an influencer.

 

How would you setup a program to measure influence?

So now that we know what our goal is and what metrics to use we can plan to setup our program to measure influence. With a list of the top influencers I would employ a system which checks them daily (maybe even hourly for certain organizations/topics) for anything said related to my organization and my closest competitors. I'd then monitor the comments or responses to that article or post, including keeping tabs on whether it was reported on other sites. Using this you can measure both the strength of the influencer as well as have an idea on the positive or negative feedback. 

Over time this constant generation of information can be used to see what's working and what's not. Strategic business decisions can be influenced by it as an organization typically desires to remain favorable in the eyes of those that have significant control in the public's perception of a company. Forecasts and trends can also be measured using competitors to generate a benchmark to measure against.