Free 'influencer' search engine mPact launches, inadvertently insults everybody
This week, social media marketing company mBlast released a free Web-based tool called mPact Free that lets users search for the most influential people in the media by subject matter.
MBlast is offering the solution as an alternative to social media "scoring" services like Klout, which rank people according to the amount of influence they have over the public, thereby singling out the most desirable people for marketing companies to target. The belief is that a company can establish a positive relationship with a particular "influencer" in hopes that that person will organically spread the word about the company's products or services.
"We believe the only way to measure the influence of a voice is by looking at the topics and keywords that voice is writing about," mBlast CEO Gary Lee said this week. "Measuring influence can never be properly done by assigning one score to an individual that is based on a series of somewhat generic measurements. Influence simply does not work that way."
The free MPact search tool lets users input keywords and phrases, and it returns a list of the people it considers the most influential individuals on those keywords.
Typing in "Red Hat," for example, tells the user that the top influencers for that subject are Computerworld columnists Joab Jackson and Jon Brodkin.
It gives the top ten influencers per keyword or phrase, and includes profiles of writers, journalists, pundits, and bloggers and lists of their top 20 most commonly covered subjects.
Though mBlast says it uses a proprietary alogrithm to determine influence based upon publication reach, social media audience size, and a number of other factors, mPact's influence is ultimately based on the appearance of keywords. Because of this, people become the principal influencers in subjects they probably would not want to be associated with simply because of the keywords mPact groups with their name.
For example, playing around with the service today revealed the biggest influencers for:
Having bad taste: Sam Carchidi, Philadelphia Inquirer
Sensationalism: Bruce Schreiner, Associated Press
Making snarky comments: Gregory Katz, CBS News
Having no sense of humor: Kathleen Parker, Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist
Being dreadfully boring: Terry Koshan, Toronto Sun
Lacking perspective: Charlotte Cowles, New York Magazine
Offending Everyone: Carolyn Hax, Washington Post
Taking the Walk of Shame: Katherine Noyes, Computerworld
Not knowing when to quit: Thomas Alter, Huffington Post
Rudeness: Matthew Gannon, Bostonist
These are just the more tame queries we attempted, some of the results are really quite shocking. Without the ability to filter out non-essential keywords, mPact turned a couple of tech influencers into experts on illegal sex acts.
So if you're curious about the most influential voice about cartoon vomit or drowning baby puppies, give it a shot. It might also point you in the direction of an actual expert on a legitimate subject, too.