Once you know who is influential, what do you do? Be a mensch. Toby Bloomberg explains the steps she uses to get connected and stay connected to bloggers who matter to her business. As I said a while back, 99 percent of social media is relationship-building rather than crisis management. Knowing where your efforts should be aimed makes the battle more efficient.

Ragan's blog has a good plan for approaching Web metrics. But what if, in addition to the steps for launching "TheyOwn.com" outlined in the posting, a marketer could also recruit bloggers who care about the message the company relies on? All of the site metrics—page views, unique visitors, etc.—would be kick-started by the traffic from those people who would endorse and evangelize the idea. Using BuzzLogic's tools, we'd begin by identifying bloggers interested in the topic (corporate control of media) and reaching out well before the launch to get their feedback on the tools and service. Exploratory market research can be combined with outreach and evangelism.

Lee Hopkins is skeptical about "engagement." It's an intriguing as an analogous business problem to the one we address. He's worried that tools can make communicators lazy and much of what marketers do can't be measured. Hopkins focuses on employee engagement, because questionnaires cannot be developed to really touch the employee's motivations, not to mention the rapidly fading memory, both institutional and individual. This is interesting to us because the tools for measuring influence depend on expressions of ideas that are recorded over time and analyzed for the repeated attention paid to a particular topic by a blogger or media source. Early in BuzzLogic's life, we studied models for internal communications analysis and it may be the case that influence analytics can help solve these employee engagement challenges.