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HOW TO: Identify Online Opinion Formers

Right now, people are talking about you, your brand, your products, your services and your competitors online. The problem is that you don’t know what they’re saying or maybe even how to listen.

And it is a problem. Everyone wants to know what’s being said about them, not least clients. In the immediate term you need to fulfil their expectation.

But when you’ve done this you can really start adding value. You can provide both qualitative and quantitative analyses, by monitoring conversations and recognising patterns of ‘online buzz’.

Go further: you can start to engage in the community of influencers, realise opportunities for working with them. Meanwhile, internally you build up a great body of knowledge across accounts. Just think about all the benefits you get from your media relations. Same applies with bloggers.

But, let’s be clear: online is different. Given the vast number of online conversations happening throughout the blogosphere and the wider web every day, it’s impossible to, say, compile clipping books and analyse them in any traditional, ‘offline’ way.

This is why large organisations are dedicated to measuring influence, authority, buzz – whatever you want to call it. They employ sophisticated and expensive tools to do this. Using them requires a huge commitment of resource.

So, this is the Practical DIY approach. This is what you can do, quickly and easily and now, to get an idea of who you should be listening to.

HOW TO: Identify Keywords

It seems everyone is looking to identify online opinion formers. It's important - you need to know what is being said about you, your clients, products, services, brands and people, and those of your competitors.

However, before doing this you need to know exactly what you're looking for. You need to understand what your keywords are before you can identify who is talking about them - and, by definition, you.

What is a keyword? Quite simply, it's just a single word or combination of words that describe you. Single words can be broad descriptions that are less specific to you but which might be used by more people in their online conversations. Phrases are more specific but will be used by fewer people.

For example, one of Porter Novelli's keywords will be 'Porter Novelli'. That is, I'm not interested in Michael Porter or Jean-Christophe Novelli. I want to know about 'Porter Novelli', the company, the phrase. But Porter Novelli is a PR agency so PR would be a useful single keyword to find out more about the industry generally.

By identifying your keywords, you can find the people who are talking about them. You can listen to them and, over time, spot trends in the general 'buzz' about you by feeding them into resources such as Google Trends or Blogpulse.

But wait - there's more. You can incorporate them into your content planning, so that your messages are more closely aligned with your keywords and therefore with what people are talking about. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) pretty much depends on keywords, so you can make your online content more attractive to search engines and, again, people. To take but one example, your online press releases will pack more bang for the buck, and your clients will love you for it. And that's just the start.

Building great messaging into search-engine-friendly online media? Sounds like some sort of nirvana. If so, it's one you can achieve, now. Here's the quick, simple way to identify your keywords.

INTERVIEW: Kami Huyse, Communication Overtones

Kami Watson Huyse, APR, principal of My PR Pro, writes about public relations and communications. She has a background in crisis communication and reputation management, executing social media campaigns, conducting focus group research, and media relations. She runs the Communication Overtones blog.

Why did you start blogging?
I started in 2005 having just moved from Washington DC. It wasn’t just a change in place – I found that I’d moved from a vibrant communications culture to a much smaller market.

This was right after the first Iraq war and at this time I started to read Baghdad Burning, the blog direct from the conflict that told the truth about what was going on. All of a sudden, the world opened up again and it really changed my mind about blogging.

I could see that this wasn’t just a personal journal. I realised that blogs really are powerful communications tools. It was both fascinating and amazing to me that I could read the writings of someone in such a different situation from myself in a way which was simply not possible only a few years before.

As this relates to my profession, I’m very aware that two-way conversation just doesn’t scale. But since Baghdad Burning I’ve come to understand how potent blogging is as a scalable communications force.

interview