Ranking the Rankers: The New Industry of Influencer Relations

产品和服务排名的持续增长构成了当今组织面临的最重要挑战之一（Espeland & Sauder 2007）。经济和社会的各个方面都受到各种形式的排名的影响。然而，在这个时刻，排名正在扩大和深化其覆盖范围。某些现象可以通过不同的线下和越来越多的线上指标排名多次。新的社会媒体正在被使用和挖掘，以提供新的排名和评估形式。由于负面评价或未能出现在重要排名中，会对消费者或客户的决策产生直接影响，因此别无选择，只能认真对待这些评价。但这给企业提出了一个新的紧迫问题：鉴于数量和种类的不断增加，它们应该对哪些排名做出回应？以及如何?这个项目调查了新的专业形式的技术和市场专家是如何出现的，以帮助组织面对和应对这种日益增长的压力。新的“影响者关系”专家团体可以在各个工业部门找到。在这个项目中，我们关注的是信息和通信技术（ICT）领域的大学，在这些领域，有证据表明，它们在为地方对全球排名的影响力创造机会方面非常有效，而且它们的存在正在更广泛地影响（重新）塑造排名的力量。然而，尽管他们的重要性显而易见，我们仍然对这些专家以及他们所产生的知识或他们所施加的影响知之甚少。我们研究这些新群体，因为他们变得更有组织，并试图从一种职业转变为一种“职业”。我们对他们的工作和专业知识进行了细致的分析，其中包括探索他们的“计算实践”和新“技术”的使用。所考察的计算实践是，他们努力寻找在特定产品或服务领域产生影响的排名，以便组织能够优先考虑对这些排名的反应。我们还特别关注新社交媒体技术的破坏性潜力，这些技术构成了搜索过程的核心部分。数据分析工具和“大数据”正在被用来帮助衡量排名的影响力。我们研究了两个这样的测量工具“TweetLevel”和“BlogLevel”的影响，它们包含抓取博客和社交网站的算法，以根据有关排名影响的各种加权指标返回“分数”。最后，我们还研究了其中一些专家如何建立独立的机构和咨询公司，并试图为咨询和与排名相关的补充知识产品创造一个新的市场。使用的方法将是定性的，包括半结构化访谈和民族志。我们已经获得了在一个关键机构——行业分析师关系研究所（IIAR）——内观察这些参与者的特权，该机构在正在进行的专业化项目中发挥领导作用。我们的经验重点是在不同的层面：历史上，我们研究这个新职业的出现和形成超过30年；在地理上，我们将这些参与者的增长与美国以及欧洲大陆（在较小程度上）之间的联系联系起来；在实践层面，我们对比了这些参与者群体的（可能不同的）计算实践，并调查了这些专家使用新的社交媒体技术的不同方式。

The continued proliferation of product and service rankings constitutes one of the most important challenges facing organisations today (Espeland & Sauder 2007). Few aspects of the economy and society remain untouched by rankings of one form or another. At this moment in time, however, rankings are both broadening and deepening their coverage. Certain phenomenon can be ranked many times over by different offline and increasingly online measures. New social media are being used and mined to provide novel forms of ranking and assessment. Since negative assessments, or a failure to appear on a significant ranking, can have immediate impacts upon consumer or client decision making there is no choice but to take these evaluations seriously. But this presents a new and pressing problem for organisations: given the increasing number and variety, which rankings should they respond to? And how?This project investigates how new specialist forms of technical and market specialists have emerged to help organisations confront and respond to this growing pressure. New groups of 'influencer relations' experts can be found across industrial sectors. In this project, we focus on those within the information and communication technology (ICT) area where there is evidence emerging that they have been highly effective in creating opportunities for local influence over global rankings, and that their presence is having consequences for (re)shaping the power of rankings more generally. Yet despite their obvious importance, we still know very little if anything about these experts and the kinds of knowledge they produce or influence they wield. We study these new groups as they become more organised and attempt to move from an occupation to a 'profession'. We provide a fine-grained analysis of their work and expertise, which includes exploring their 'calculative practices' and use of new 'technologies'. The calculative practices examined are their efforts to search for the rankings that make a difference in a particular product or service area, so that organisations can prioritise their response to them. We also pay particular attention to the disruptive potential of new social media technologies that form a central part of this search process. Data analytic tools and 'big data' are being deployed to aid the measurement of a ranking's influence. We investigate the influence of two such measurement tools 'TweetLevel' and 'BlogLevel', which contain algorithms that crawl blogs and social networking sites to return a 'score' based on various weighted metrics concerning the impact of a ranking. Finally, we also study how some of these experts have established independent agencies and consultancies and are attempting to create a new market for consultancy and supplementary knowledge-based products related to rankings. The methodology used will be qualitative and include semi-structured interviews and ethnography. We have secured privileged access to observe these actors within one of the key bodies - the Institute for Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) - which is taking a leadership role in the ongoing professionalisation project. Our empirical focus is at different levels: historically, where we study the emergence and formation of this new occupation over 30 years; geographically, where we draw broad-scope links between the growth of these actors here and in the US and to a lesser extent mainland Europe; and at the level of practice, where we contrast the (potentially different) calculative practices of these groups of actors and investigate the different ways in which these experts employ new social media technologies.