One of the questions that inevitably comes up when talking to customers about social media marketing is “How does Collective Intellect determines who the influencers are in social media?” This is a great question, because unlike traditional media – where you have existing criteria – circulation, source credibility, advertising rates based on impressions – social media influence is dynamic, not static. If you take away the top 3% of bloggers – the “A” list, if you will – what a marketer is typically left with is really difficult to figure out. Depending on what you’re tracking, there may be lots of posts from different bloggers, and heavy discussion on certain message boards and forums, plus video post sites such as YouTube might garner high interest in your area. The question is, which posts, which conversations in social media are the most important to you right now?

There may be lots of results associated with a keyword you search on in Google, or any of the low-priced keyword-based tools, but which results are the most important? Time-based search gets you just that – the most recent information. Certainly valuable, but how do you know of those recent conversations, which hold the most weight, which will spread the farthest, where will you get, so to speak, the most bang for your buck?

The question to ask is not who has the largest audience. The question should be: who – right now (today, this week, this month) – has the widest influence within the area I hope to impact?

So, if you’re interested in issues around dog food (to use a favorite topic of DK) what matters is finding the influence communities that have the greatest opportunity to impact current discussions around dogs, and more specifically dog food. Finding influencers in a general pets area might be helpful to a degree, but the more laser-focused you can get, the more relevant you are. This means what you are looking for are those social media content creators and commmunities where the content is really high value.

What do you think? I have some successful examples of this idea in action that, hopefully soon, I will be able to blog about.

My main point: Social media is a moving target – what today is an influential source or community might lose that status by next week or next month. Waiting for a quarterly report from market research may not be the best approach when pulling together campaigns.