Introducing My mPACT

June 27, 2011 Tweet

By: Gary Lee

Today we’re launching My mPACT, a free version of mBLAST’s mPACT software available worldwide at My mPACT. My mPACT was built to help people better measure their own impact and influence within the various communities of interest they have a voice in for work, play or fun.

My mPACT is designed to answer these questions:

1. What impact and influence am I having within the various market segments and communities of interest I actively engage with across online media (blogs, articles) and social networks like Twitter?
2. Who else is having influence, and how can I better follow these voices, interact with them and in turn help to boost my stature, impact and influence within the market segments and communities important to me?

At mBLAST, we believe there is a way to measure influence across the web, and we’ve spent the past 18 months developing very robust tools and software designed to not only store and index a massive number of blogs, articles, tweets, etc, but also to allow our users to mine through all that content to discover the voices making a difference in their chosen (and specific) market or community.

What sets the mPACT family apart from competing solutions is that we don’t believe that a single generic score showing how “influential” someone is across the web is very valuable or informative. While we do believe there are “raw influence” numbers that show someone’s potential influence based on the size of their number of followers, audience, reach, etc, we believe raw influence alone is not typically enough to truly measure influence – it’s simply a component of that measurement. Instead, we believe that everyone has measurable mPACT scores, each one specific to the various communities and market segments they participate in.

As we’ve written here before, despite all the buzz, hoopla, FUD, etc., this whole area of “Influencer Identification” and scoring is not a new concept. It’s been done forever in the world of marketing and today’s challenge is how to apply the well-understood marketing technique of finding the voices talking about things that matter and measuring their impact amidst the massive streams of data coming off the web daily from blogs, articles, Twitter and other sources.

Please come try out My mPACT today and invite others to do so as well. It’s free! Let us know what topics you influence and what you think of my mPACT, we’re all ears!

About Gary Lee

Gary Lee is mBLAST’s CEO. Gary has over 25 years experience in high-tech marketing, development and executive management. Prior to joining mBLAST, Gary was North American CEO of Mi liberty, a global PR & Marketing Services agency. Gary has also served as CEO of FlexLight Networks, President and COO of Home Wireless Networks and also various roles at General Datacomm, Sprint and Nortel. You can follow Gary on Twitter here.

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Filed in Category: Influence and Influencers, mPACT, My mPACT

http://www.webinknow.com/ David Meerman Scott

Gary, I think your system is deeply flawed. I was invited by Mary Sullivan to try the system out which I just did. I logged in with my Twitter ID @dmscott:disqus -

My Twitter profile reads: “Marketing strategist, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and the new book Real-Time Marketing & PR.”

Seems kinda obvious what I write about. Note that the terms “marketing” and “public relations” are in my profile and those terms are in some of my recent tweets. I have a link to my blog where I have written 600 blog posts since 2004 about marketing & PR.Then I entered “marketing” and “public relations” into the system to see what my score was. In both cases, I got “No Score Found” Huh? Something is flawed.Further, I did not recognize the names of any of the people listed as “top Voices” in these categories. This is strange. I have spoken at hundreds of conferences around the world where I meet all the influencers in marketing and public relations. I have consistently had the top book in the category (a quarter million copies sold in nearly 30 languages). Yet I do not know any of the “Top Voices.”Your system needs some work!!
http://www.webinknow.com/ David Meerman Scott

Gary – further to my last comment.

When I entered “Marketing” I got this for “Your Voice”: “We’ve scoured the mPACT database for the past 7 days of Twitter, 90 days of blogs and 365 days of articles to find your voice on this keyword / phrase, but didn’t find any results based on your current profile.”

Huh? You didn’t find anything from me on the two topics I write about every day?

Yet, the article links to the “Top Voices” include such headlines as (I chose one each from the top 5 “Voices”):
1. “One reason the street should love CH energy group’s Earnings”
2. “CBS Sports Net scores CableOne Affiliate Pact”
3. Verizon FIOS TV launches SWRV
4. Fed Keeps Options Open – Business Ohio”
5. Greek Hopes support European Stocks.

Prior to staring my own business in 2002, I was in the online news business for 15 years. Clearly, these writers are not writing about marketing. They are writing about the stock market.
http://www.mblast.com Gary Lee

First, thank you for your feedback. We depend on feedback from users to know where we are excelling and where we need to improve. Second, I am sorry our system did not meet your expectations. I’d like to explain how we work and why the system performed as it did.

mPACT keyword-indexes all blogs, articles, tweets and other content we can get our hands on, updating them daily. We index everything so that users can find voices talking about ANY set of keywords they wish to examine. We feel this is the proper way to implement this – it affords our users the greatest flexibility and depth in find voices writing on keywords that matter to their market / communities of interest. Our system scours the web (blogsphere, tweets, etc) to find your voice, but we need our users to setup the system – identifying themselves and their interests (by keyword) and then our software has to connect all the dots.

We ask users to register using their Twitter ID so we can link to their tweets, and also register blogs and other outlets they write on regularly so we can also capture their voice as they write.

So what happened to you this morning? A few things:

1) In many cases, when someone comes in to register, we already have their user profile pre-built since we have already uncovered their voice across the web. We have their Twitter ID, their tweets, their blogs, and / or their editorial contact profile.

In your case, however, I am sorry to say we did not have you already entered into the system.

For users we do not have pre-registered, when someone enters their Twitter information, or blog information, we then go off and analyze their data to uncover their voice. Due to the overwhelming response we’ve had so far this week to our launch, this is taking a little longer than we would like. So the system is off crunching your information and we will have something to show you as early as tonight or tomorrow. We’re bringing more servers online to speed this up – a nice problem to have, although it has resulted in stinging responses like yours using the word #FAIL! (grin)

2) Because we did not have your Tweets (and your blogs, etc), we could not do a keyword search based on your search terms to find your actual voice and what you have written that contains those terms. We did look by hand, and see that you’ve used the word “marketing” about 24 times in the tweets we analyzed; and you used “PR” 20 times. Whether that will propel you into the top 500 against other bloggers, twitter voices and journalists also using these terms will depend on their audience sizes, propensity to write on these search terms, and other criteria that we use to rank and score voices.

One thing to consider for future uses of My mPACT is that the quality of your search terms will go a long way to discovering voices in general, and your own voice in particular. So to use your examples, are you searching for “PR” in general, or are you really looking at people who write on not just the word PR (which can be very general), but instead “PR Measurement” ; ““PR” AND “Social Media””; ““Social Media Release” AND PR”; etc.?

One final note, when your profile is completed, we will also show you a keyword cloud for all the sources we find your voice. We’ll show you the keywords you write on the most and allow you to then click on those keywords and see how you rank with others writing on these.

In summary, on behalf of all of us here, we apologize for the delay in finding your voice which resulted in your frustration. We hope we can earn another chance to impress you, or at a minimum continue to get any additional feedback that you are willing to share.

As a former head of a PR agency, I’ve long respected your work, including your books “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” and “Real-Time Marketing and PR” . Thank you again for your feedback.
http://www.mblast.com Gary Lee

David:

First, thank you for your feedback.   We depend on feedback from users to know
where we are excelling and where we need to improve.    Second, I am sorry our system did not meet
your expectations. I’d like to explain
how we work and why the system performed as it did.

mPACT keyword-indexes
all blogs, articles, tweets and other content we can get our hands on, updating
them daily.   We index everything so that
users can find voices talking about ANY set of keywords they wish to examine.    We feel this is the proper way to implement
this – it affords our users the greatest flexibility and depth in find voices
writing on keywords that matter to their market / communities of interest.   Our system scours the web (blogsphere,
tweets, etc) to find your voice, but we need our users to setup the system –
identifying themselves and their interests (by keyword) and then our software
has to connect all the dots.

We ask users to register using their Twitter ID so we can
link to their tweets, and also register blogs and other outlets they write on
regularly so we can also capture their voice as they write.

So what happened to you this morning? A few things:

1)      In
many cases, when someone comes in to register, we already have their user profile
pre-built since we have already uncovered their voice across the web.    We have their Twitter ID, their tweets,
their blogs, and / or their editorial contact profile.

In your case, however, I am sorry
to say we did not have you already entered into the system.

For users we do not have
pre-registered, when someone enters their Twitter information, or blog
information, we then go off and analyze their data to uncover their voice.    Due to the overwhelming response we’ve had
so far this week to our launch, this is taking a little longer than we would
like.    So the system is off crunching
your information and we will have something to show you as early as tonight or
tomorrow.    We’re bringing more servers
online to speed this up – a nice problem to have, although it has resulted in
stinging responses like yours using the word #FAIL! (grin)

2)      Because
we did not have your Tweets (and your blogs, etc), we could not do a keyword
search based on your search terms to find your actual voice and what you have
written that contains those terms.   We
did look by hand, and see that you’ve used the word “marketing” about 24 times
in the tweets we analyzed; and you used “PR” 20 times.    Whether that will propel you into the top
500 against other bloggers, twitter voices and journalists also using these
terms will depend on their audience sizes, propensity to write on these search
terms, and other criteria that we use to rank and score voices.

One thing to consider for future
uses of My mPACT is that the quality of your search terms will go a long way to
discovering voices in general, and your own voice in particular.   So to use your examples, are you searching
for “PR” in general, or are you really looking at people who write on not just
the word PR (which can be very general), but instead “PR Measurement” ; ““PR”
AND “Social Media””; ““Social Media
Release” AND PR”; etc.?

One final note, when your profile is completed, we will also
show you a keyword cloud for all the sources we find your voice. We’ll show you the keywords you write on the
most and allow you to then click on those keywords and see how you rank with
others writing on these.

In summary, on behalf of all of us here, we apologize for
the delay in finding your voice which resulted in your frustration.   We hope we can earn another chance to impress
you, or at a minimum continue to get any additional feedback that you are
willing to share.

As a former head of a PR agency, I’ve long respected your
work, including your books “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” and “Real-Time
Marketing and PR” . Thank you again for
your feedback.
http://www.webinknow.com/ David Meerman Scott

Hey Gary, that makes sense. Thanks for the detailed explanation on what happened in my case.

I’d like to offer a suggestion:

Mary Sullivan, on behalf of your company, sent me a PR pitch yesterday with the subject line: “Who has more influence via social media: you or Justin Bieber?”

The first paragraph of the body copy of the PR pitch was: “It’s you! Though tools like Klout will show you your influence compared to the likes of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, smart brands want to engage with you because of your expertise on a topic that benefits their business: marketing. But is there a way to dig in to see who is influential in marketing, not just the loudest mouth on social media?” (The pitch then went on to tell me about the service).

The pitch worked because I did go to the service. (Way less than 1% of pitches get me to respond in any way.)

So I naturally assumed from the pitch that you had already vetted me in the system.

So my suggestion is simple — when you pitch people like me, you should have their profile pre-loaded and then point then directly to their stuff.

Anyway, thanks again for the detailed explanation. I look forward to seeing the product in action at a future time.

Best, David
http://www.mblast.com Gary Lee

Thanks David
http://GrowMap.com Gail Gardner

Although it has great meaning, mPact isn’t a great choice for a name because the word impact contains the entire name. Any time we use a keyword tool searchers will find every time the word impact is used and have a hard time finding your solution. I notice that Google can find mPact and there are many other companies using that word too.

I save notes on everything I research and I already know I better remember your solution’s name because there is no way I’ll ever find it in the keyword searchable notes system I use.

I ran into the same issue David did so I’ll have to come back later and see what your system finds out for me. Obvious searches did not work (for the same reason he ran into) and it is only now finally pulling some keywords in related to what I’ve tweeted very recently.

I was unable to get Open-ID to work. It is giving me errors in both FireFox and Chrome and no matter which log-in method I try – all of which seem to want to use Twitter? Although it could be an issue on my end, you may want to test that part of the system.

You may want to preload those who are highly active on Twitter in the Social Media and Blogging spaces. I have a list of Social Media Blogging Influencers you may find useful for that.
Anonymous

Gail,
Thanks for the feedback (and for sharing your list!). We’re checking out the OpenID issue you ran into now. Hope we can get some more feedback on your search results as your profile finishes getting built out.

Your thoughts on the name are appreciated and they sort of play into how we’ve built My mPACT (and our mPACT Pro product), with a pretty robust search interface (available in the Advanced Search mode) that lets you use Boolean AND/OR searches and also use exclude terms in searches. So using mPACT as an example, it would be easy to search our database excluding the term “impact” or even something more specific like “Mpact Memphis” (a charity in Memphis with a similar name), so you can focus right in on the relevant results.

Thanks again for trying us out and for giving feedback!

Introducing My mPACT

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