Introducing: The Blinkfire Index™

Once in a while, there are features we use internally or with our customers that we think should be free for everyone to use.  If you are already a customer, you know that we give every player in our system an Influence Score and an Activity Score.   As customers have found this valuable, one of the things they have been asking for is for us to benchmark this against other players and influencers with a normalized overall score.  No problem!  We’ve been doing this internally for some time, so now it’s time to simply expose this to everyone.

As a result, every player in the system has a score which we are calling the Blinkfire Index™, which is a weighted average of the player’s influence and activity.   Just to remind you (or perhaps tell you for the first time) – the Influence Score takes into account a player’s reach across the different social networks in which they participate relative to all other players, and the Activity Score is a measure of how active they are on those networks, including how often they publish and interact with other entities on those networks.    Our feedback has been that in the sponsorship realm, the influence is more important than the activity, so we’ve weighted the overall score accordingly.

We will continue to tweak this formula as we add more and more data to our system, including new leagues and sports.

Here’s how the Blinkfire Index manifests itself in the product right now:

1. Player Badges – On each player page, logged in users will see a badge representing the players current scores.  Did we take some “inspiration” from FUT?  I’ll never tell.  You can see the Özil example here (you will need to login with Twitter or Facebook).
   
2. Brand Rosters – For every brand in BlinkfireAnalytics we list the people who are sponsored by that brand.
   
3. Many more to come!

What does access to the Blinkfire Index cost?  Nada.  Zip. Zilch.  Bupkis.   Just log in to Blinkfire Analytics (you can log in through either a Twitter or Facebook account, currently).

As usual, we will listen to you for feedback in how to enhance this feature, but we anticipate working the Blinkfire Index into more and more of the site to make it easy to compare entities tracked by Blinkfire Analytics.

Enjoy!