As we discussed in “The future of influencer relationship management”, one of the issues with influencer rankings, and influencer platforms in general, is that they most often look solely at social media – measuring followers, connections, tweets, likes and shares.
This can be highly valuable if you’re looking exclusively for influencers who can help amplify your message via their social networks, but there are two key issues: firstly, it can be susceptible to individuals who are gaming the system and secondly, it misses the bigger picture regarding the influencers’ broader thought leadership portfolio, or lack thereof.
Typical influencer rankings and platforms, while highly valuable, do not measure thought leadership, are susceptible to brute force (i.e. excessive postings to move up in the rankings), may rank individuals broadcasting only third-party content, have limited measures of content quality, and the gamification nature of the rankings often encourages spamming. In addition, the social media “fake follower” crisis has compounded the need to find authentic influencers as well as authentic thought leaders who are experts in their fields.
In identifying and working with authentic experts, organizations need tools and techniques to help them understand not only who the authentic experts are, but the kind of hats they wear as a thought leader – i.e. are they primarily an academic, an author, an influencer, or a speaker, for example, or perhaps a unique combination of several of the above?
Today’s expert marketplace platforms too often serve up one type of expert – i.e. an author, influencer or speaker – but do not provide the means to find authentic thought leaders who may be powerful combinations of the above. This can be a serious issue for brands, because what if you need an influencer who’s also a respected author and authentic thought leader on specific topics, or a speaker who’s also great at facilitating critical workshops?
One of the unique differentiators of Thinkers360 is that we utilize a patent-pending algorithm to analyze an influencers’ entire portfolio so that you can take a holistic view across their many roles as an academic, author, entrepreneur/inventor, influencer and speaker.
In addition, we curate each influencers’ thought leadership content so that you can easily browse their “collected works” – including articles, blogs, books, media interviews, podcasts, social media, speaking events, webinars or whitepapers – so you can get a real sense of their portfolio and repertoire.
The Thinkers360 patent-pending algorithm helps to produce ratings and rankings that look across all thought leader roles and across the quantity and quality of their thought leadership. We believe it provides a better measure of thought leadership, encourages genuine content creation, incorporates influence as one of the measures, and encourages richer profiles and portfolios.
If you’d like to discover your next set of world-leading influencers, we invite you to request a free consultation on our enterprise platform for thought-leading brands and organizations here. We also offer advisory and consulting services, as well as sponsored leaderboards, and would be delighted to speak with you any time.
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