Slicing Radian 6 for Key Properties

I'm often asked for a list of key properties or spaces where conversations are occurring.  I'm trying to avoid using the word "influencer" here as anyone who reads my blog likely knows my views of such.

But let's face it.  A week doesn't go by in our industry that we aren't asked to find "influencers."

Here is a common request.

"Find the mommy bloggers that are best aligned to our brand or a new campaign we are running."

I was recently chatting with the awesome folks from Radian 6 and thought I would run this kind of request past them as I had traditionally wasted a lot of time trying to answer it.  I got the typical response.  Search for phrases most likely to identify these types of people/sites and then use the tools to narrow down to a set of key places.

Note to anyone trying this at home.  It won't work, or at least not well.  Which made me realize that I should likely share with the world how I now go about answering these types of requests. (Note:  Using Radian 6.)

Let's assume that the brand/campaign is a new type of cell phone.

The Wrong Way

We've been asked to find Mommy Bloggers so the first approach is generally to think of what types of conversations Mommy Bloggers are having that might be relevant to this campaign.

How young is too young to get a cellphone?

Impossible to keep in touch with my kids.

My phone always loses its signal at soccer practice.

Then we start to wheedle down to a list of phrases, includes and excludes that would narrow down to the conversations of interest.  This takes quite a bit of time configuring and reconfiguring your search parameters and slicing and dicing the data.  And we are faced with an immediate dilemma.  How do we specify that the conversation is taking place on a Mommy Blog?

Social Media Monitoring tools (at least the ones I work with) focus on the actual conversations (blog posts, forum entries, comments, tweets) not the source.  So we need to come up with phrases that only Mommy Bloggers would say when speaking about things pertinent to our campaign or brand.

Hopefully you are saying to yourself, "What??!!"  What would a Mommy Blogger say on her blog that wouldn't also appear on a parenting website?  Well, as a Mommy Blog IS a parenting website, the answer is "nothing".  So this simple sounding task quickly becomes a prolonged exercise in frustration. 

Note that it can be done and you will find results, but it can take you days.  And frankly, it's faster (if less comprehensive) to manually visit each of the top Mommy Blogs you know of and just do a search using their sites' search feature for conversations you are fishing for.

A Better Way

When the request (find the mommy bloggers that...) assumes that we are looking for the hottest and most relevant nodes of conversation within a "defined" slice of the Internet, then it is quite straight forward to just limit our listening tools  to that slice of the Internet. 

For example, we are looking for Mommy Bloggers in the opening objective.  So, let's limit our tool to only be sniffing the Mommy Blogs.  Simple and straight forward, no?  All great ideas are.  Or so I tell myself.  ;)

In the screenshot below, I'm loading in a list of all the Canadian Mommy Blogs we know about. I'm limiting Radian 6 to look only at the conversations from a defined list of sources that match the keywords we are looking for.

So now I can search for the conversations likely to be of value to our client and not worry about whether the conversation is happening on a mommy blog.

Takeaways

I have spent days configuring the first approach and would consider myself lucky to have 1 mommy blog in my top 10 influencer view.

Or I can spend 30 minutes on my "Better way" approach and find 10 hot mommy blogs of interest immediately in the top 10 influencer view.  And even better, I can remove a lot of bias by looking at trending phrases, top conversations, etc. versus just searching for the conversations I want to find.

Photo Credit: hownowdesign