Measuring Influence or Sentiment: Which is the more important?

Following on my discussion with Richard Binhammer this morning in the keynote at the New Comm Forum, I was thinking there has been a lot of debate about influencer marketing. Discovering who is influential and who is not, but also whether basing a corporate blogging outreach campaign on the supposed level of influence of a blogger is actually the right approach. You can measure influence by the number of links and bookmarks, but is that really important in the scheme of things.

Several companies are describing the sentiment of bloggers towards their company, the range of description is typically:

Positive
Negative
Neutral
Positive/Negative (the blogger's post is both negative and positive)

This type of description if also related to products gives companies both a tactical basis for addressing concerns or thanking people for their good feedback. The description also gives companies a model they can use to benchmark themselves with against their competitors.

I wrote the same question in my Facebook group about effective corporate blogging.

What strategies do you use, and which approach is more valuable for your company?