How to find influencers in Asia

We have been working all week to apply our process for identifying influencers in specific categories across the region in Asia. We have a model for rating "influence" amongst bloggers. The elements include:

• Affiliation of blog writer(s)
• Number of links to the blog
• Number of feed subscriptions
• Search engine results position for relevant keyword searches
• Last update
• Industry mentions/lists of top blogs
• Inclusion in Technorati Blog Directory and other online directories
• Discussion Analysis – true discussion or bantering

In English-language, US-centric content, we can generally start the process of identifying potential candidates via search; usually either Technorati, Google or Google Blogs. Then we can refine down into highly linked sites ("most authority" in Technorati lingo).

This doesn't work so well in Asia. We ran tests for influencers in the following markets and in-language for that market:

• Hong Kong
• Mainland China
• Taiwan
• Korea
• Phillipines
• Singapore
• Japan
• Australia

Here's what we found:

1. Technorati Japan, searched in Japanese, did not provide useful results. There is some question amongst the team as to how fully-developed the service is in this market.

2. Most english-language searched via Technorati or Google not surprisingly brought up the foreign-bron, English language bloggers. It was very hard to find influential Chinese bloggers this way.

3. Baidu seems to work much better in this region and there is a recognizable bias for it (vs. Google). I am pretty sure this goes beyond hometown favorite to some superior performance or features.  (Baidu just launched Video search - you can reach Tangos' quick review here)

4. In all markets, search did not help that much. Even in Australia, we found that Technorati is far more useful to verify ranking (links-in) once you know the url. Now that being said, I have had a lot of trouble in the past with Technorati indexing my own site. I am not sure how realiable those rankings are.

5. The key seems to be following some of the disparate aggregations out there. That means contest sites like Best Blogs in Asia or regional groupings like AustralianBlogs which has a great organization around tags (why do we even bother with categories when we have tags?). There is a real gap in search as well as aggregations across regions and within native speakers.

6. Another emerging resource for finding Taiwanese blogs is LiliNa.

7. In Taiwan, it may be easier to look into the large blog service providers (bsps). There are 3-4 and each lists top blogs. You can use this as a starting point.

Finding influencers is a bit of an art right now. We'll see if any of the usual suspects or emerging Web 2.0ers fill this gap in find, classify and rank. 

 

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Comments

[Ng Sze Hin Leonard]

Very interesting finding. Something beyond our little own world. It is always good to observe something that is "not me", and that's could be one of the best way to understand the fundamental of "me".

Do you mind if I quote this article, translate it into Chinese, and share it to my readers in my own blog?

[Ng Sze Hin Leonard]

Oh, by the way, just to look after my English reader like yourself and your folks, I have tried to put a tag "English" on my posts for those posts which are either written in real English, or have zero or minimum Chinese characters in it, so that you guys could still read "some" of my writings.

And here is the address of that category (same as the one on the signature):
http://ngszehin.mysinablog.com/index.php?op=Default&postCategoryId=64693

[John Bell]

Leonard - be my guest!

[Gene (Black Tapir)]

Hi, John, ...

Sidekick, she told me about your blog. I think this is a good blog to discuss about blogsophere.

Introducing a website we created, called "Blog Look", the URL is "http://look.urs.tw/", but this is only for "Big-5" encoding.

The chart of "Blog Look" display top 300 blogs in Taiwan, based on the parameter you mention, we collect more than 20 data to compute the ranking.

There are more than 14000 blogs data entered, and more than 4000 blogs use our badget, and most of us think the rank covered most of blogs in Taiwan now.

You may take a look and give us comment, we will appriciate.

[Jon Y]

Hi John,

Thanks for the plug. We're big fans of tagging...it's a lot more 'granular' and transparent. Check out our new project www.BuggerAll.com.au - I'd love to hear your feedback.