Want your message to spread like wild fire? Find the influencers .

Every topic, industry has people who are at the forefront, the innovators. On the hunt for what’s new and what’s happening.

Early adopters. Champions. They’re google alerts would cause the rampant onset of ADD in most of us. Their minds are scrolls of real time searches. They think like Steve Jobs, always connecting that which has yet been connected. Eternally curious. They follow words, ideas. They live to know and be ahead of the known.

And they can help you; spread your message.

Let’s say for fun’s sake that your passion is international development, NGO’, oppression as pedagogy and Africa specifically. Let’s further agree you have some ideas that could flip the development world on it’s ear, if only the development world knew of your ideas!

So who are the people that can get your idea out, who have credibility and whose opinion, likes and shares could unleash your idea like wild fire?

Conversation Monitoring

Conversation monitoring is nothing more than online listening and research. How do we do it? Well of course we can set up Google alerts for the keywords; Africa, development, international aid, africa development. But let’s not stop there. Let’s press into the online social tools available to identify who and where our influencers are.

On Twitter we will use

Twazzup.com . It’s a remarkable tool that not only shows you the latest tweets based on keyword searched, but also identifies current blog posts and influencers relevant to the keyword.

Then head over to Search.Twitter.com which provides a real time stream of tweets based on your keyword. From the tweet we can go to the profile page of the individual and hop over to their blog or website for more research and conversation monitoring.



For Blogs we search for influencers by topic, not keywords as our goal is to identify the bloggers who specialize in our topic, are prolific and who have credibility when it comes to development and specifically development aimed at Africa, not just bloggers who have written a random post on development in Africa. To find blogs of influence we use

blogsearch.google.com and Technorati

To follow all these influencers we can create a twitter list. We can sign up for RSS feeds, begin commenting on their blogs, reach out and engage. Remember we want to engage and listen before we show up with our project to ask them to look at, promote or share.

Eventually we will be sending email, twitter invites to them to share our edutainment storytelling video about our revolutionary development ideas for Africa.

For now – we are learning about the influencers and engaging with our tribe. We’ve found our peeps!

How to find influencers to spread your message.

Pam Hoelzle