How We Provided Contextual Influence Scores for The Digital Power Index

Wednesday 27 June, 2012 at 1:52 pm by

As a follow-up from the release of the Digital Power Index by Newsweek/The Daily Beast, we’d like to provide some additional details on the digital influence scores we provided for the 100 individuals profiled in the feature. Newsweek’s excellent Methodology section covers the basics; this post will dive into the details.

To begin, here are few things to keep in mind regarding our Influence scores:

  1. The Influence scores we provide are always Contextual. This means we don’t provide “popularity” metrics. Our scores are always tied back to a context, such as: “Remodeling”, “Mountain Biking”, “Egyptian Revolution”, “SOPA”, etc.
  2. We calculate Contextual Influence scores for a particular search by looking at each individual’s Reach, Relevance, and Impact with regards to that particular search. We make each of these metrics available for each person as well.
  3. We’re not focused solely on social network data. We look across the entire public web, and collect all the information we can find on a person and particular contextual community before calculating Influence.

Check out the Product page for more details on the unique features of our data platform.

Now, let’s take a look at the process we went through to generate Contextual Influence scores on the 100 individuals profiled in Newsweek’s feature:

  1. Newsweek/The Daily Beast began by sending us the names & Twitter handles of the 100 Influencers they wanted data on. Additionally, they separated these 100 individuals  into 10 categories (Visionaries, Innovators, Evangelists, Angels, Personalities, Revolutionaries, Builder, Opinionists, Navigators, Virologists).
  2. For each of the 10 categories, they gave us specific search terms that they felt best represented the category. Spot Influence did not predefine any of the searches or categories; we gave Newsweek complete control of category representation.
  3. Spot Influence did a massive crawl to discover relevant people and content, then algorithmically calculated Contextual Influence scores for each individual around each of the provided search terms within each category.
  4. Finally, we performed a mathematical average of the various scores for each person to determine the final Influence score for each individual and provided all of the analyzed data to Newsweek/The Daily Beast for use within their feature.

We had a great time working with Newsweek on the Digital Power Index project. It was a great opportunity for us to demonstrate the accuracy and breadth of our data at a very small scale. We’re especially proud to say that the process we used to analyze the Digital 100 is the exact same process we use to analyze millions of people.

Interested in seeing how our data and insights can help provide new marketing insights and drive revenue? Check out our Solutions for details. Ready to speak with us? Head to the Home page and click “Get Started”. Dulcolax

Spot Influence featured in Newsweek!

Monday 25 June, 2012 at 4:45 pm by

Spot Influence had the honor of providing the quantitative scoring for Newsweek’s Digital Power Index.

“Newsweek chose Spot Influence because of their credible and independent analysis of personal influence across different dimensions. They leverage proprietary algorithms and reach across the vast universe of social media to deliver relevant insights that enable companies to discover, segment and target all of the people generating content online.”

The project provided us an opportunity to validate our algorithms on a very small scale. Normally we deal with providing contextual information on hundreds of thousands or millions of people where a little inaccuracy is expected. This project demanded us to deliver extremely accurate results on 100 people – in reality it was 10 people in 10 different categories – a different problem.

Internally, we had several discussions around how well we’d be able to perform given this playing field. As a team, we made the commitment that we would not make any special tweaks to accomodate this project, the results we would deliver for this very small set of people would be the same quality of results we deliver for millions of people. The only difference would be that now every single score would be looked at under a microscope.

The results speak for themselves. Newsweek was thrilled with our scores and the insights we provided on all of the people in their index. No other quantitative metric was required for them to compare the people in their index.

“Newsweek/The Daily Beast also partnered with social data provider Spot Influence — which tracks and measures the influence of content creators across all social platforms, using a proprietary algorithm — to measure the influence of each Digital 100 winner. Since Spot Influence’s algorithms are designed to measure a person’s influence in the context of a single topic, the overall Spot Influence scores we used were determined by the nominee’s level of influence in the digital landscape around a set of predefined topics and news events that were associated with the winner’s category. For example, it can measure the level of authority a digital activist may have regarding Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street according to social media chatter and sentiment. Search terms were consistent across all 10 members of each category.”

So, if you have millions of people you need to understand on the web (or less…) give us a shout (hint: click Get Started) – it’s what we do better than anyone else.

View the article – “The Newsweek Daily Beast Digital Power Index”
Read the methodology – “The Digital Power Index Methodology“