Where do we find the influencers?

Finding the right influencers, or "leaders", is one of the most essential things for any organisation that wants to approach social media. It is important to always aim for the viral effect to optimize the potential of social media, and by finding the right influencers your message can ramify in all directions and deliver a qualitative message to both present and potential audiences/clients/buyers.

At Forrester I found a classification of how people use social media:

Creators: People who add social content: in blogs, on websites, upload photos and music etc.
Critics: People who comment on other people's content. This group participates in discussions in forums, post ratings of other people's content, comment on blog posts etc.
Collectors: People who organize content by themselves and others by using RSS feeds, tags, voting systems etc.
Joiners, People who maintain a social profile at social network sites like facebook and myspace.
Sectators, People who take part of the content publish by others: blogs, pictures, music. They read comments and voting.
Inactive, don't do anything of the activities described above.

Influencers can be found in the three top groups. They produce content, they comment on other people's content and organizes and spread content from themselves and others. The people we want to target in our communication are however present in all the groups of this spectrum!

So, who are the influencers in your local area? 



There are tools that can help companies find this kind of information, like Radian6 that scores and analyses influencers and their impact according to criteria that you chose yourself. If you are in a small size organization this might be too much to wish for. And it might not even prize-wise or necessary. I believe that this kind of analysis can be made in-house in a medium and small size local organisation.

When searching for influencers you have to think about:

• Who are the creators/critics/collectors in your field?
  
• Who are the creators creators/critics/collectors in your local area?
  
• How is the quantity of their networks?
  
• How is the quality of their networks?
  
• Do they have a strong impact of the network?
  
• What social media tools are they using?
  
• Stay in their network for a while and get to know them to be able to make a real analysis.
  

It is important to have an open mind when analyzing the influencers since they may not be the persons that we expect to find. Any person can have a strong say today, so we have to get a very clear view of the quality of their network and their real impact.