mBLAST recently launched a free version of its tool mPACT which claims to find influencers based on topics or keywords. mPACT looks through, “a database of over 25 million articles, 8 million blog posts, and 753 million social media entries.”
So there’s no doubt that there is plenty of data to be had. But does their algorithm work? mPACT assigns an influence score as well if you sign up for the Pro account, but it’s unclear what metrics factor into this score.
I ran a couple of tests to see how well the tool works for finding influencers.
Keywords: “public relations”
Results:
3. Tom Withers
5. Tonya Garcia
6. David Cohen
7. Michael Malone
8. Jon Lafayette
9. Don Hazen
10. Robin Hicks
Recognize any of these names? Most are journalists in some capacity, but I don’t know that I would necessarily call them influencers in public relations. I’m sure they are all people we may want to know at some point, but are they PR influencers?
Keywords: “PR”
Results:
1. Tonya Garcia
3. Kit Eaton
4. David Cohen
5. Rachel Kaufman
6. Patricio Robles
8. Ben Smith
9. Robin Hicks
10. Seth Godin
Again, a bunch of folks who may be influencers we would want to know about as PR folks. But are they really influencers on the topic of PR?
Keywords: “social media”
Results:
1. David Cohen
2. Kashmir Hill
3. Tonya Garcia
4. Jake Coyle
5. Matthew Lee
7. Chris Crum
8. Alison Diana
9. Robin Carey
10. Dan Gould
Again, I would never think of any of these folks first if asked to come up with the top 10 influencers of social media.
Perhaps the Pro version of the tool provides some more in-depth influencers, but so far it seems as though the keyword match does not provide relevant influencers. Not to say that any of these folks are not influential, they most certainly are. But I would not necessarily say any of these folks are influential on the topic for which they were selected.
Have you tried out the free version? Have you found any searches that work?