One of the VODO team just pointed out BackType, a Y-Combinator funded social media analytics company. Backtype is trying to help companies understand their social impact. It’s certainly helped us already, and we aren’t even one of the private beta testers, so we don’t have access to the juiciest information.

In a couple of searches on BackType, we found that the link to Pioneer One has seen 976,228 impressions on Twitter since June 1, 2010, from a total of 1,241 Tweets. That’s an extraordinary number, and it explains why Twitter has become such a prominent referrer for VODO. We’d been concentrating on the tweets themselves as the main metric, but not really bearing in mind that a single tweet can have thousands of readers, depending on who’s tweeting.

It’s very cool to be able to see who our top ‘influencers’ are (is that a BackType term, or an emerging convention?) BackType shows us that the biggest tweeters pushing the Pioneer One release out to their network were prominent film critic Roger Ebert (207,200 followers), blogger Mark Parent (78,700 followers), filmmaker/entrepeneur Kim Sherrell (71,000 followers) and social media marketer and John Newell (42,200). Between them, these guys have an audience of nearly 400,000.

The Yes Men Fix The World has scored an equally impressive 651,005 impressions since its release last month. Top influencers were teenage entrepeneur Josh Lam (96,900 followers), geek curator Maria Popova (25,100) and promoter/skater/punk Foo (20,200).

Influencers like these are obviously going to be key to the success of VODO’s creators. One of our beliefs here at VODO is that the ecosystem that makes VODO possible should be respected and utilised as much as possible — from bloggers, to trackers and indexes to Twitter influencers, we need to put the whole infrastructure to work for our artists to help promote their work and open up revenue opportunities for them.

Spotting who the heavyweights are is really great (thanks, Backtype!). It would also be cool to know how many retweets result from each tweet, because the raw impressions become most significant when they lead to further influence. An influencer with ‘only’ a thousand followers could be really helpful for creators if their followers really trust them, retweet and/or actually download the film, or if they’re very active tweeters themselves. It’s probably pretty hard for Backtype or anyone else to find out how many click-throughs a tweet gets, but these sort of retweet metrics would be pretty handy for us.

The question we’re consequently throwing around at VODO is: what’s the appropriate way to message these key influencers? In the old days, they’d have been taken on junkets, wined and dined, and so on. This feels like the wrong way to do things now. What feels right is that these influencers have actually just discovered our releases in the ether, and chosen by their own volition to push them out there. Interrupting that natural dynamic with aggressive messaging (“Mr. Ebert, would you like to tweet this…?”) seems to us like begging, and a lot less graceful than the way things are happening right now.

Some social media expert probably has ideas on the right way to approach these highly influential individuals, in a way that fits with networked media. We’d be delighted to have your guidance!