Brass Invent unveil monitoring and planning tools during Insight Show at Marketing Week Live 2011

During the recent Insight Show, part of Centaur's Marketing Week Live at Olympia, brass showcased the suite of unique online insight and planning tools we've created this year...

Our Online Landscape model:
At Brass we like to understand where your audiences are online, and what they're doing there, before recommending engagement strategies.

Just like the real world, the virtual world contains areas where people are in completely different mindsets, whether that's looking for entertainment, chatting to friends or seeking specific information. Brands whose content strategies are mindful of this are more successful in engaging consumers than those relying on traditional interruptive broadcast strategies.

Online landscapes are relevant to an individual brand's target audience. The following example landscape is for professional services personnel, surfing online during working hours. But data is available to create a landscape for any audience, demographic or interest group.

The landscape above represents a 'macro' or 'bird's eye' view of an audience.

Identifying the most influential bloggers
It's possible to then dig to a 'micro' level, by understanding the most authoritative and connected influencers around a given topic or demographic.

We unveiled our new data visualisation tool at the show; a scraping and categorisation tool which identifies top bloggers in any given field (through categorisation, readership, and search factors such as inbound links, popularity & visibility). Using the tool, we can whittle a huge list of bloggers down to a more manageable Top 50...

 
Colours above represent sub-topic, bar height represents readership.

It is then possible to overlay data from our scraping tools in order to see how influencers link to one other:

The graded colour of each line represents the direction of the link, blue links to pink

The pink 'hubs' are the bloggers linked to most by other bloggers - it's easy to see the implications for listening and content strategies.

Not only can the top one, five or ten influencers across the blogosphere be identified, they can be cross referenced against influence on platforms like Twitter (or any social platform with publicly available data).

How individuals are influential across specific sub-topics, even more tightly relevant to brands or specific communication strategies, can also be overlaid.

Twitter leaderboard tool
Also showcased at Marketing Week Live 2011 was our Twitter influence leaderboard, which not only captured conversations about the event (by monitoring #mwl2011) but also displayed live updates from the most influential tweeters and top tweets.

The leaderboard allowed us to monitor live twitter activity surrounding the event and identified influencers with whom we could directly communicate and start to build relationships, allowing us to network digitally as well as physically.

What's next for measuring online influence?
We are developing phase two of the Twitter influence leaderboard to incorporate additional functionality. This evolution will allow us to monitor keywords as well as hashtags to capture wider events and topics, making returned data even more insightful.

These insight tools allow brands to develop specific online contact strategies for a manageable number of individuals and groups, often in tandem with real-world stakeholders and key media.