1. Building a Better
Influence
Mousetrap
So you know who the big trade pub authors are but do you know all the relevant
bloggers? You may know who the top journalists are covering your industry but do
you know who on YouTube or Twitter is currently influencing your potential
customers? Marketing has changed. The days of only sending out press releases is
dead. There is more opportunity to create rabid brand ambassadors than ever
before. Do you REALLY have the information you need to be competitive?
Turns out it’s a
lot harder than
everyone thinks!
The idea for SocialMatica was born out of necessity. We were manually trying to
do a “simple” task for a client. The client provided a list of players (the usual
suspects!) to contact to spread their message. We just scratched the surface in
asking: “ how did you come up with this list of individuals”. There didn’t seem to
be any definitive reasoning behind it. The answer we received was “those are the
people we always contact”.

2. Our research uncovered a list of over 100 individuals that were unknown to the
marketing person but were just as (or more) relevant to the topic at hand. These
individuals weren’t even on their radar. The interesting part about this revelation
was the person supplying the information turned out to be a marketing executive
from a big name company and not some underling in a small unknown company.
SocialMatica was
born!
SocialMatica is a silicon valley startup company created with the sole purpose of
uncovering the most influential people in your market. We designed this software
to pull information from across the web to produce a scientific list of influencers
currently available to the marketing profession.
The success of that project was a real eye opener. If a client that was as well
funded and connected was not aware of how to reach an entirely new audience of
influencers then what chance does the smaller, underfunded company have? The
opportunities are limitless in this new area of marketing. Kind of like “where no
man has gone before”.
We gathered a very talented team together with the sole purpose to identify
influencers. It didn’t take long to see this was a complex task. The simple question
“what is an influencer” resulted in hours of long conversations. It was essential to
answer this question in order to move forward and build the software to extract this
information. Another question that popped up during our discussions was “Does
Twitter really matter?. The experience of figuring out all the details and at the
same time building software in parallel has been challenging to say the least

3. How do we
explain what
SocialMatica
does?
It’s easy to say we provide you with a list of Influencers. But HOW exactly do we
explain all the complexities of this challenge we’ve undertaken? Believe it or not it
was our CTO, Marty Harris, who provided the best answer, and that answer is in
the napkin sketch below. At first it was just a fun way to talk about what we were
doing internally but the more we referred to it the more we felt we needed to share
it.
I’m currently running a contest over at our favorite crowdsourcing design
website 99designs to turn it into something slightly more PowerPoint-friendly but
the first draft is simply too good not to share!

4. Posted in: Influencer Formula