Why is your algorithm more accurate than a human?
There's no question that highly-engaged people are great at identifying Influencers within a given topical community. But there's also no question that there's a limit to how much data we're able to take in and absorb. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop a depth of understanding about the social patterns within a group. Because of this limit, we have to pick and choose which topics we want to immerse ourselves in. For example, because we were a Boulder TechStars company, we know a lot about the community around "TechStars" and relatively little about the people who talk about "Y Combinator." We humans can get overly reliant on and tied to our personal social graph and our geographical location.
To be clear, we LOVE human signal - that's why our system tracks and measures so much data on the human actions on content within a topical community.
Back to TopWhat’s your algorithm for determining who’s influential on a topic?
Unfortunately, that information is proprietary. Without getting into specifics, we can say that we score everyone in the topical community around Reach, Relevance, and Impact for that topic and take that into account when calculating influence.
Back to TopHow do you get around Facebook's data restrictions?
We don’t do much with Facebook. We’re interested in public personas rather than what people say behind closed doors.
Back to TopHow many topics do you cover?
Our goal is to provide coverage for any search, just like the search engines you now use to search for pages. So far, we’ve identified influencers for 100,000+ terms, and this number continues to grow on a daily basis. If you send an API request for a term that we don’t cover, the term automatically goes into a queue so that we will have the answer ASAP.
Back to TopHow many influencers have you discovered?
To date, we’ve identified tens of millions of people who are influential about one or more of 100,000+ terms. For every one of those Influencers, we’ve figured out the outlets where they publish or act on content, and the searches where that person has shown up as influential.
So, for a term like "flat screen TVs", we rank the influence of every member of that community around that search – and also provide the Reach, Relevance, and Impact measurements that go into the contextual Influence score."
Back to TopHow many influencers can you identify for my search?
That depends on the number of people creating and responding to content around that search. Our aim is to identify everyone who is either creating or acting on content, and provide accurate Reach, Relevance, Impact, and Influence scores for each member of that topical community. So, if there are 30,000 people who care about the topic of a search, we can identify those people and their level of influence. This is important since sometimes it’s useful to know who’s interested, as well as who’s influential because it gives you a more robust data set.
Back to TopWhat social platforms do you cover?
Our system can consume any content with a publicly available URL or API. This includes but isn’t limited to social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn, news outlets, blogs, Plancast, check–in services like Four Square and Gowalla, and photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube.
Back to TopHow are you different from Klout & Peer Index?
There are three main differences:
1. We are contextual.
At Spot Influence we believe influence is always contextual, so any scores or data we provide are always tied to a specific context. True influence just can’t be described with a single number, and identifying when popular people use your keywords doesn’t give you a list of contextual influencers.
2. We track more outlets and types of data.
Spot Influence is capable of consuming any publicly available URL or API. [See What social platforms do you cover?]
3. Influence is not ephemeral.
Contextual social capital is built up over a long period of time, so we don’t believe that short periods of activity or inactivity (like when someone goes on vacation) should have a huge impact on Influencer rankings. Taking a brief sabbatical from online life doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly lost your influence – it means you’re a healthy, balanced human being. Besides, there are plenty of places where content has a longer half–life (like blogs) and where your influence never sleeps.
Back to TopMy Klout/PeerIndex score is 57. Where do I find my Spot Influence score?
You don’t have one.
We believe that influence is contextual, so we don’t provide one influence–score–to–rule–them–all. Our influence results are based on the result of a given search. A person’s influence ranking for "rock climbing" for example, is likely to be quite different from their score for "kitten juggling." As well it should be.
Another big difference between Spot Influence and Klout and Peer Index is that our focus isn’t on helping individuals determine their "overall influence." We focus on finding and ranking topical communities and making that data easily available via API.
Back to TopWhy do you limit search results to top 10?
We don’t.
At our core, we’re a data company, not a dashboard company. The search results on our site are built on top of our own API and we provide contextual Influencer search on our site as an example of the power of our API.
In fact, the results we show are just a fraction of what’s available via our API. We believe there’s enormous benefit in identifying and engaging with the "magic middle" of Influencers on a topic – those people who might not have 25,000 followers on Twitter, but are highly–engaged, extremely knowledgeable, well regarded within the relevant community, and often much easier to reach.
Back to TopHow can I get access to the beta?
Right now, we’re making sure the data is the best it can possibly be and we have a very limited number of beta users. Request an invite to the Beta or drop us a line. In filling out the Beta request form, you can also sign up for access to the API.
Back to TopI don’t have time for all this API business. Can I just pay you to tell me everyone who cares about my topic and rank them for me?
Um. Sure. I mean... we’re a startup! Send an email to sales@spotinfluence.com and we’ll find a way to make things work. Remember though, we’re a data company, not a dashboard company. As we build out our Developer community, we’ll be providing tools to make it easy for you to find quality folks who can help you.
Back to Top
