The Top Ten Cause Marketing Tweeters You Should Follow

A group of us from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide are attending the Cause Marketing Forum’s annual conference this week in Chicago. This is my fifth year attending this fantastic conference and I am really excited to connect with friends, former colleagues and the many industry experts that are always in attendance. I will be representing the WE Social Innovation Practice and at 3pm CT on Thursday June 2^nd, my colleague, Suzanne Zurn and I will be hosting a session called “Cause Attention: Using Social Media to Identify, Influence and Engage.” Suzanne is a digital advocacy expert and has tons of awesome experience and best practices to share on how to engage audiences online to take action. If you are at the conference, we hope you will join us. If you can’t make it, we will be posting our presentation on the Waggener Edstrom Slideshare channel after the session.

To get you excited about the content we are going to cover in our presentation, we want to share with you a sneak preview of the top ten Twitter influencers in the cause marketing landscape. The reason we are sharing this is because I am always aggressively looking for new people to follow on Twitter as I head to events. I want to find people who I can learn from who are connected to even more people I can learn from. That is one of the great powers of Twitter.   With a specific subject matter like Cause Marketing, however, people who write on the subject typically don’t have the mass following of a celebrity like Ashton Kutcher. On Twitter, I find time and time again, that the number of followers someone has collected does not always have a direct correlation to their ability to create thought provoking content (no offense to AshtonJ). For this reason, I turned to Waggener Edstrom’s proprietary Influence Ranking tool that helps organizations learn which media and individuals exert the greatest influence on their brand or cause. The tool rates Twitter handles against five important variables:

• Reach is an indicator of the size of the audience for a particular influencer, outlet or content producer. Measures of reach might include: circulation, unique visitors per month, followers, friends or views.

• Amplification measures the amount of sharing of an influencer or outlet’s content via social media channels. Measures might include: linking to blogs, Twitter or Facebook, retweets or presence on Digg, Reddit, Delicious or other social bookmarking tools.  

• The amount of dialogue with the audience is shown through the Engagement score. Measures for Engagement might include: on-site comments, comments on social bookmarking sites, and replies.

• The relevance of the influencer or outlet’s content is captured in Content Relevance. Measures might include: frequency of category or brand mentions, depth of category or brand mentions.

• The Audience score measures relevance to a list of target audiences for the particular brand or campaign. Primary research results or content analysis are used to rate audience relevance.

So…without further ado, we present to you the Top 10 Twitter handles in the Cause Marketing landscape you should be following to stay abreast of the latest industry news and best practices:

1. Beth Kanter - @kanter

2. Cindy Esposito – @CJ_Esposito

3. Causecast.org – @CAUSECAST

4. AOL 365 – @AOL365

5. Joe Waters – @joewaters

6. Noland Hoshino – @NolandHoshino

7. Kids in a Groove – @KidsGroove

8. David Hessekiel – @DaveCause

9. Seema Bhende – @seemabhende

10. CSIC at Georgetown – @GeorgetownCSIC

I must confess that I was incredibly humbled to be a part of this amazing list of cause marketing influencers and made our Insight and Analytics team conduct the research two times to confirm the data was accurate! They were able to explain to me that my score was strong given the engagement, content relevance, and amplification of my tweets in cause marketing.

I look forward to seeing many of the folks on this list at the conference! And for those of you not attending, be sure to follow the handles above and #CMF11 to keep abreast of the dialogue from the event.

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