Who are the top influencers in your space?
You can use a combination of tools here and it requires some basic searches in your category to determine who are the influencers in the blogosphere.
Here's how you do it:
Search Technorati and filter by "a lot of authority" - Use keywords in your industry to search Technorati to see who are the top people talking. Results are sorted by most recent posts, but look to the green bold indicator that tells you the authority level which in essence tells you how many other sites link to this blog. Those with the highest number are good indicators of industry influencers. Similarly, you can try using
BlogPulse which compares the relative traffic and influence of bloggers and Web sites.
Take a closer look - If they're a top influencer, meaning they're in the top 100,000 of all blogs, then use Alexa to see their Web traffic and how their influence moves up and down given blog posts.
Spend some money - The above suggestions are manual methods of tracking online influence. But for a really full blown analysis of what's going on out there, you can drop tens of thousands of dollars with Nielsen BuzzMetrics (owners of BlogPulse) or its competitor, BuzzLogic. Both services have far more sophisticated tracking tools that can follow online conversations and pinpoint the greatest influencers on any conversation. That information will help you target particular bloggers, blogs, and discussion groups. Only large clients with huge buzz (positive and negative) will require this kind of tracking. Smaller clients can be handled through the more manual methods.
