Social Media Celebrity Watching

Over the last few months I have been using a new metaphor to help explain the social media universe. I basically say it consists of:

* Galaxies: centers of gravity that attract the like-minded - e.g. YouTube, Digg and Second Life
* Stars: online celebs, such as Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk, AskaNiinja, etc.
* Planets: individuals who follow the stars, yet are influential in their own right
* Shooting Stars: insta-celebs that create viral videos or memes and then fade
* Comets: recurring themes, such as transparency, veracity and entitlement
* Asteroids: desolate, lifeless places with negative energy — think splogs

My advice from there is to explore the universe, make friends and build colonies. One of the hardest things to do is to find the stars that are relevant to you in the galaxies you care about. Note, that this doesn't always mean A-listers. It could mean finding the 60 people that have the most influence in your area of focus regardless of how many Technorati links or friends they have.

Increasingly I am encouraged that the big social networking sites (e.g. galaxies) and others are making it easier for PR pros and marketers to find the stars that are most influential on certain topics. For example, digg has the Top Diggers page. Another is Share Your OPML. Although it focuses on a relatively small universe of tech influencers, it is rich with data about who reads/influences who. Flickr Inspector helps us learn more about Flickr users. And finally Wikipedia publishes lots of great data. The Globe and Mail profiled the most prolific contributor.

Today we got another big chunk of data. This time it's from del.icio.us. Over on the Yahoo Search blog, they announced that del.icio.us is now publishing lists of the most active users by tags. For example, you can scan this list on the Flickr page to see who's posting most frequently about the photo site. Even better, I can pull up data for brands. This page shows me the most influential del.icio.us users who post on Apple.

So what do you do with this data? You use it to find your evangelists and your vigilantes. Basically, PR professionals should figure out how to make friends and build colonies with the evangelists while also engaging the vigilantes in dialogue. Data is your friend in the process.

Tags: del.icio.us