How to Identify and Monitor your Brand Influencers

In this post I’m going to show you how you can find out who’s influencing your brand online, and by monitoring their online conversations, identify new opportunities.

Recently, there have been many heated debates over the usage of the term “brand influencers”.

What are the metrics behind how we measure and define a brand influencer, and what is it exactly they have influence over?

It is all starting to look a little bit like the Return on Investment (ROI) debate; unless you can perfectly attribute everything you do, you can’t measure ROI.

The problem with that avowal is that we will never be able to perfectly attribute everything we do, hence any ROI calculation will always be to some extent estimates and predictions.

The same thing goes for identifying a brand influencer.

There are things we can measure and there are things we can’t measure (yet). It may even be so that the things we can measure, won’t justify the use of the term influence.

But rather than getting lost in definitions, I suggest working with what we have to make the best use out of it.

Everything Starts with a Good Query

Running a search query that looks for online mentions of a particular brand can identify the authors of the mentions. This could be blog posts, news articles, tweets or public Facebook updates.

In this example I am going to focus on a well-known premium Champagne from Reims, Krug Champagne.

Since Krug could be associated with more things than Champagne, I’ve set up the search query so that it will only look at mentions near 20 words of Champagne. I do this using the NEAR/n operator.

In this case we’re seeing an average 250 unique online mentions per week which is reasonable given the query filtering and the brand size.

Similarly, we could set up a search for Moet and Chandon like this:

“moet & chandon” OR “moet chandon” OR “moet and chandon” OR (moet NEAR/5 (chandon OR champagne* OR drink*))

How to define an influencer

If we only look at authors who have mentioned ‘Krug’ the most during any given period, August ’13 in this case, we’ll most likely see various shops trying to promote their Krug inventory.

For example, strictly looking at this information returns 15 mentions from a Facebook page called

Does this Facebook page qualify as an influencer?

Even though it authored more Krug Champagne mentions than anyone else during the time period, it is certainly not the type of online brand influencer that Krug Champagne are looking for.

Instead of looking at how often someone mentions a search query, identify their estimated impact. List the top 20 most impactful authors and manually filter out shops, identifying the ‘real’ people.

Doing this gives us a chart showing the volume of mentions for each author, or influencer, during the month of August. This example focuses on 9 brand influencers.

I’m interested in knowing how active these 9 authors were during the rest of the year. Did they author any Krug Champagne related content during a longer period of time, or was it just a one off?

Looking at their activity over time, we can see that everyone except Krugoli and Eric iFune only authored Krug related brand mentions during August. This means that authors talking about Krug in August did not talk about them any time before that.

The man behind the author Krugoli is Oliver Krug himself, but anything he posts on his social media channels will remain content owned by the brand.

To scale their online mention audience, Krug need to leverage on the people authoring brand mentions.

What opportunities does the Krug brand have for keeping Eric iFune, Mike Hawkins and the Local Miami talking about its Champagne curves over the coming months?

Christina S has been dining at the lavish Petrus restaurant in downtown Knightsbridge, London, saying that it’s the best experience she had in a restaurant yet:

A variety of Krug Champagnes were served during the 7 course tasting menu and Christina loved it all. She’s also rated Senior Contributor on TripAdvisor making her reviews even more impactful.

I don’t think the people working at Krug worry too much about verdicts over their Champagnes (they already have the best rating and their products are truly unique), but I think they do worry about peoples experiences with drinking Krug. Any emotional sentiment being shared beyond plain reviews & ratings should be very interesting for the marketing team.

Christina’s primary objective was to write a restaurant review, but she happened to mention Krug in the review hence qualifying her as an online brand influencer.

Krug could leverage on this through simple things, such as inviting her to join Krug Lovers community.

The same goes for The Local Miami, could the US PR team provide the blog with Krug content or put them on the invitation list for the next #KrugKitchen event?

Thomas is a Swiss based wine and car lover sharing two chilled glasses of the Krug Grand Cuvée.

He seems to be pretty comfortable with digital technologies and particularly Twitter.

What do you think one could do to get Thomas speaking a little bit more about Krug? Let’s discuss in the comments below.