MackCollier.com

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Online Influence Is More Than Just Social Media Activity

I logged into Klout this morning, and was greeted by this pop-up ‘warning’.  It tells me that my Klout score is dropping, and that I can raise it by sharing more content, and engaging with my network.

Klout adds this explanation for what its score means: “The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence.”

So Klout tells me that it measures online influence, but that in order to increase my score, I should increase my social media activity?  Then doesn’t that mean it’s measuring my activity instead of my influence?

Likewise, Empire Avenue also explains that your score there is dependent on your level of social media activity: “When you join Empire Avenue, you can connect your Social Networking accounts, and we’ll score activity and engagement in each account and give you a virtual share price.”

Essentially, Klout and Empire Avenue are measuring your level of social media activity, not your level of online influence.

Simply sharing more content and engaging with my network isn’t going to make me more influential over them.  In fact if it’s not the type of content and engagement that they are looking for, my influence over them will fall, not rise as I become more active.

Also note that both Klout and Empire Avenue are encouraging you to participate with their site.  EA includes activity on the site as part of your score, and Klout is already encouraging you to give +K to other members, and I’m betting they will come up with other ways to reward you for interacting more with other Klout members.  Which is smart of both sites to do, but it doesn’t help either of them more effectively measure my perceived online influence.

What do you think?  What role does social media activity play in online influence?  Does one lead to the other?

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Wait, my blog’s search traffic is down, what happened?

Welcome to another edition of ‘What can we learn about our own blog from watching Mack obsess over his?’

Ok, as most of you know, in January I decided to ramp up my posting schedule.  Since this blog’s launch 2 years ago (BTW Happy Birthday!) up till January of this year, I had kept to a pretty consistent schedule of 1-2 posts a week.  Sometimes I’d have a bit more, sometimes a bit less.

But if mid January, I decided to really boost my posting here.  I went from 1-2 posts a week, to 4-6.  I immediately saw a huge spike in traffic, and along with it, search traffic.  Now to be fair, search traffic here was already increasing at a steady pace, but as soon as I started posting more in mid January, the gain increased.  Here’s a graph of my weekly search traffic over the life of the blog:

The X marks the spot at which I started posting more often in January, and as you can see, the last 6 weeks or so has been sideways.  Also note the slow and steady growth, but it seemed to kick up an extra notch right after the X.

Now this graph bugs me, because I want to understand why search traffic has flattened over the past 6 weeks.  I did some checking and thinking and I’ve come up with two possibilities:

1 – I haven’t been posting as much. Every week since April the 10th, I have posted a consistent 4 posts a week here.  The next week is when search traffic started going sideways.  The three weeks prior to that, I posted 5-6 posts each week.  That’s one possibility.

2 – I haven’t been focusing as much on specific search keywords and phrases.  I honestly think this is it more than posting schedule.  From Jan through March I really tried to focus on specific keywords and phrases not only in my post title, but in the post as well.  And it really worked, I got excellent search rankings usually within a few hours for whatever search keyword/phrase I had targeted.

So here is the (very) inexact method I have come up with to test to see which is the cause of my flatlining search traffic.

This week, I will post 5 posts here.  This one is the second for this week, so there will likely be a new one here on Wednesday through Friday as well.

Next week, I will go back to posting 4 new posts here, but each one will be search optimized with a particular search keyword/phrase in the title and the post.

Then in a couple of weeks, I’ll report back and share the results with you.  My guess is that 4 search-optimized posts will produce more search traffic next week, than 5 non-optimized posts will this week.

And no, this isn’t a perfect test, and it won’t definitively prove anything.  This is more about me wanting to get a better understanding of how my blog works, and what impacts search results.  That way when I am at a conference and someone asks me a question about search traffic, I can give them my own experiences, instead of just regurgitating what some other blogger wrote 😉

If you obsess over your search traffic as well, what have you discovered that impacts it?  Do you think posting more often or spending more time optimizing for search will help me?

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Social Media Crisis Management: A No-Nonsense Guide

Past Social Media dramas involving The Red Cross, Groupon and Kenneth Cole are good reminders of the importance of having a solid social media crisis management plan in place.  At its very basic level, the proper handling of a social media crisis should consist of two thing:

1 – A quick response

2 – A proper response

Let’s look at both areas:

Responding quickly to a social media crisis

If you look back at many of the social media dramas that have played out for companies over the past couple of years, many of them were exacerbated by a slow response from the company or organization.  The delay in responding meant the people that were upset had more time to voice their displeasure with the company, to other people.  Which raised awareness of the problem, and made it far worse.  The Motrin Moms episode could have likely been defused very quickly, if Motrin and its agency had been proactive in responding to complaints on Twitter about one of its commercials.  But since the crisis occurred on the weekend, when the brand and agency weren’t monitoring Twitter, it was allowed to grow and fester.  By Sunday, most people were complaining more about Motrin’s lack of a response, than they were the commercial itself.

So you can’t respond quickly, unless you know what you are responding to.  That means you need to aggressively monitor your brand’s online mentions.  There’s no excuse for any company that conducts business online, to not monitor online mentions.  Even if you are a small company with a limited budget, there are still free tools you can use to monitor social media.  If you are a mid-sized to larger company, you should seriously consider investing in a premium monitoring suite that will track not only mentions, but trends and sentiment as well.  But the point is to know what is being said online about your company or organization.  Remember, when did Noah build the Ark?  Before the rains came, not after.

So now that you are monitoring online mentions, then you can see what is being said about your brand in (more or less) real-time.  This also means that when a situation arises that needs to be addressed, that you can quickly mobilize and formulate a response.  We’ll talk more about the tone of your response in a second, but another key benefit of monitoring is that it tells you WHERE you need to respond.  If there is a potential crisis developing on Twitter, then that’s where you need to respond.  If it’s on a single message board or forum, then you need to find a way to respond there.  The point is, you need to go to the source of the complaints, and interact with people there.

Responding properly to a social media crisis

So if you have identified a potential issue that you need to address, how should you respond?  Here are 4 common sense tips for handling complaints or negative online feedback:

1 – If someone is leaving negative comments about your company, respond. Even if they are intentionally attacking your company (or ‘trolling’), then invite them to please contact you directly so you can help them with their issues.  And remember, if someone is leaving comments that personally attack your employees or customers, or that contain profanity or inflammatory language, you should delete them.  Now if they are simply saying that they think your company sucks, deleting these type of comments will tend to draw more of the same.  People can see when someone has crossed the line with the tone of their comments, and they won’t fault a blogging company for deleting comments in this case.

2 – Be thankful and polite. Nothing escalates a negative comment into a full-bore flamewar faster than an ‘Oh yeah?!?’ reply from the company.  You have to always remember that the person commenting thinks their complaint is warranted.  And many times, they are right.

3 – If you are in the wrong, then apologize.  And mean it.  The two most magical words in putting out a social media crisis are ‘We’re sorry’.

4 – If commenters are jumping to the wrong conclusion about your company, kindly correct them with the proper information.  Just as you don’t have to accept profanity or attacking comments on your blog, you shouldn’t feel that you have to accept if a blogger or commenter is posting inaccurate information on another site.  But again, remember to correct the misinformation with a respectful tone.

5 – Thank them for their feedback, and encourage them to provide more. Leave your email address so they can contact you off the blog, if they choose.  This communicates to everyone that you WANT engagement and want to communicate with them.

Now for the elephant in the room

Even if you respond quickly and appropriately, you still have to fix the problem.  People are upset for a reason, and you still need to address that reason, and correct the problem.  It might not be a quick fix, but you need to let people know how you are handling the issue, and what steps will be taken to correct the problem.  This is where you can use your social media presences such a blog or Facebook page to communicate to customers and supporters what your plan is for handling the crisis.  But you need to have a plan, you need to communicate that plan (not every detail, obviously), then you need to execute it.

Does this help?  Also, to get another real-world example of social media crisis management, check out this video from @GaryVee on how he handled a social media crisis he found himself in.

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Which is better for your company, a blog or Facebook page?

Facebook pages and blogs for companiesThat’s the question that David Griner is going to help us answer at tonight’s #Blogchat, starting at 8pm Central.  #Blogchat is a weekly Twitter chat that happens every Sunday nite at 8pm Central where we discuss a different blogging topic.  This week, David Griner will be co-hosting as we discuss which is better for your company, a blog, or Facebook page?

David is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company, a Birmingham-based marketing agency that’s been crafting Facebook strategies for clients for years.  One of Luckie’s bigger successes is the social media marketing effort it has crafted for iconic Southern snack company Little Debbie, including a Facebook page with over 750,000 likes.

So David knows the power of Facebook for companies and organizations.  And since a lot of your companies are curious about whether a Facebook page or blog is right for them, I decided that would be the perfect topic to hash out tonite at #Blogchat.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1 – Which is better for companies, a blog or Facebook page. David and I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both blogs and Facebook pages for companies.  We’ll need you to help us by giving us your thoughts on both.  We’ll stay with this topic till 8:30 CT, then we’ll shift to…

2 – If a company has both a blog AND Facebook page, what’s the best way to make them work together?  I think a lot of businesses have both, so if they do, how can they make them work together?  What’s the best way to use the FB page, and what should be the role of the blog?  And for those of you that work for companies or organizations that are using a blog and Facebook page together, we’ll need you to help us answer this question.

So join us at 8pm Central tonight for #Blogchat.  And before you do, make sure you are following David on Twitter, and that you have subscribed to his blog, The Social Path.  David recently wrote a post on the new Facebook redesign that’s been insanely popular, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

And if you’ve never joined #Blogchat, here’s what it’s all about.

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How The Red Cross defused a potential Social Media crisis situation

Coming off the heels of Kenneth Cole’s recent PR blunder on Twitter, the Red Cross found itself in a potential crisis situation on Twitter a couple of days ago.  Apparently, one of its employees that tweets from the @RedCross twitter account, inadvertently sent a tweet that was meant for her personal account in which she tweeted: “Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch beer… when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd”

To its credit, the Red Cross quickly acted on the ‘rogue tweet’, deleted it, and posted this response:


Now anyone that’s attempted to use multiple Twitter accounts, especially one for your employee or a client, knows how easily this can happen.  And then the employee that sent the ‘rogue tweet’ also acknowledged her mistake on her own Twitter account:

Now all week here we have been discussing the value that evangelists have for companies and organizations.  What happened next in this story perfectly illustrates today’s lesson: Your evangelists will come to your aid in a crisis situation.

The Red Cross’ evangelists on Twitter quickly latched onto the #gettngslizzerd hashtag, and used it to drive blood donations!  Many committed to donating blood and some even took pictures as they were:

And to their credit, @dogsfishbeer, which was mentioned in the ‘rogue’ tweet, also encouraged its followers to get involved in the donation drive:

One of the ways we talked about in the post on creating brand evangelists was speaking in a human voice.  The Red Cross did this, they quickly admitted their error, and apologized.  And did so with humility and a splash of humor.  Then Gloria tweeted out an explanation as well.  How the Red Cross handled this potential crisis situation went a long way in rallying its evangelists to come to its aid.  They quickly forgave Gloria for the tweet, then took the hashtag and used it to drive donations.

This is the power of connecting with your evangelists.  As we talked about earlier this week, they WANT to see you succeed.

What did you think of how the Red Cross handled this situation?  What did they get right? Is there any advice you could give them for avoiding a similar situation in the future?

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How Dell is using Social Media to connect with its brand evangelists and detractors

All week we have been talking about the value of brand evangelists and why companies should be connecting with them.  Today I wanted to look at a company that’s connecting with not only its evangelists, but some of its detractors as well.

Recently, Dell held a CAP Days event in Germany.  CAP stands for Customer Advisory Panel, and it is an event where Dell meets with some of its customers that have had both good and bad things to say about the company.  This is the 3rd CAP Days event that Dell has held.  I am partial to this event since I helped Dell facilitate the first one last Summer in Austin, but I also think it’s an amazing case of how social media can help businesses connect with brand evangelists.

I talked to Richard Binhammer a few days ago, and he said that the participants for all the CAP Days events (there have been 3 so far in the US, China and Germany, with plans to expand to other locations) were identified via the social media and online monitoring that Dell is already doing.  A good example of social media making existing business processes more efficient.

But back to the most recent CAP Days event that was held in Germany.  Dell met with 10 customers that all had feedback for Dell, both good and bad.  What I found fascinating was that Dell was extremely open with what it learned about connecting with its customers at this event.  Here are the takeaways from the company’s point of view, and when you read these, keep in mind that this was published on Dell’s Direct2Dell blog:

  1. Our customers seem to have lost the emotional connection to Dell. They no longer understand the benefit of our direct relationships with our customers.
  2. We have reliable products and good support (if they pick the right support option!), but our advertising is misguided and an annoyance to some of our customers.
  3. Listening can be incredibly powerful. It’s unusual that a company the size of Dell listens to customers in such an open forum. Customers had never experienced such open dialogue with a global company.
  4. Customers do care about Dell, and they are spending their own time helping other customers and defending Dell online.
  5. We must deliver a better customer experience. There are millions of customers out there who will be loyal to Dell and buy more if we up our game and deliver the best Customer Experience!

As I was reading this, it seemed as if this was being written as an internal reminder and lesson for Dell’s employees, as much as anything.  But note the bolded areas (which I added).  How often do you see a big brand talking this openly and honestly about themselves?  Not very.

And let’s remember that Dell has this honest feedback available to them because they sought it from their customers.  They monitored the online conversation around their brand, identified key participants, and met with them directly to learn from them how they can improve their business and customer service processes.  Now they are taking that feedback and not only improving existing business and customer service efforts, but the CAP Days program itself is becoming a more efficient way to connect with customers.

And it is becoming a way to convert detractors into evangelists.  Think about yesterday’s post and how we talked about the ways that companies can create brand evangelists.  We talked about how companies should monitor online conversations, how they should respond to customers and talk to them on their level, and how companies should understand who their companies are.  All of these are present in the CAP Days program.

When I was involved in the first CAP Days event last Summer, I was talking to one of Dell’s customers that had some issues and problems with Dell’s products and services.  I listened to him tell me about his problems, but then he added ‘Mack I want to see Dell succeed’.  And then he told me how being involved in that event had opened his eyes to the fact that even though Dell was making mistakes, that it showed that they were committed to finding those mistakes, and correcting them.  He had arrived at the event skeptical of Dell’s commitment to improvement, but left feeling much better about being a Dell customer.

In closing, I want to restate the supreme importance of monitoring online brand mentions for all companies.  Especially higher companies like Dell.  While I am thrilled with the progress Dell is making, I also see that it’s putting their competitors at a self-imposed disadvantage.  Dell is taking the scary step of connecting directly with its online customers, and they are reaping the rewards of their bravery.

Here’s some very basic (baby) steps that your company can take to better connect with your online customers:

1 – Start monitoring online mentions of your company, brand, competitors, and industry.  If you’re a larger brand that has hundreds if not thousands of new mentions daily, you should probably invest in a monitoring platform to help get deeper insights from the data.  Or if you’re a small business, you can probably get by with Google Alerts or a free option.  Here’s a post I wrote on how to set up Google Alerts in 5 mins.

BTW a big reason why I think it’s important for your company to monitor online mentions is to get a better understand of WHO your online customers are and WHAT they are saying.  I still think many companies live with a largely unfounded fear that bloggers are people that are going out of their way to slam their company.  This is almost always incorrect, and companies can see this by monitoring and uncovering exactly what customers are saying about them online.

2 – Start reaching out directly to customers that mention you, especially bloggers.  If you see a blogger that’s covering you, offer to connect them with someone at your company that can give them better information.  For example, Richard mentioned CAP Days in Germany to me, I told him I would like to do a post on it (this one), and he had Carly Tatum (who helped facilitate CAP Days Germany) to give me more information on it.

Your company should be doing the same thing, you should be reaching out to bloggers and other online customers that are talking about your brand, and interact with them.  This will help ensure that these customers get accurate information about your company, and if you handle the exchange correctly, it will encourage more coverage from bloggers.

3 – Act on feedback you get from online customers, and let them know you are doing this.  If a customer raises a valid point or complaint online, help them, but then you can use that exchange to let other customers know that you want their feedback as well.  By listening to customers and acting on their feedback, you are ensuring that you will get more (and better) feedback, but also, you will improve customer satisfaction.  Customers want to be respected and heard by the brands they buy from.  They appreciate the ones that show a willingness to do this.

So those are some ideas on how you can better listen to your customers’ online conversations, and act on them.  Oh and if you are curious, here is a short video (in German) that Dell created to document their CAP Days event in Germany.  It will give you an idea of how the event was structured.

What are your thoughts on how Dell is using CAP Days to directly connect with its evangelists, as well as detractors? Is this something that other big brands should be doing? What could be improved about the process?

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5 Reasons why Evangelists are better than Influencers

As you might have guessed by the volume of coverage it’s getting here, I am thrilled that the ‘online influencer’ debate is heating up.  Why?  Because it gives me plenty of chances to tell smart companies like yours why it makes far more business sense to empower and embrace your existing evangelists.

If smartly done, targeting influencers has real business value.  But it’s more for creating short-term buzz rather than sustainable growth.  And even IF you do target influencers, it should often be done in conjunction with connecting with your company’s evangelists.

Here’s 5 reasons why I think it’s better to target evangelists rather than influencers:

1 – Evangelists don’t have to be paid, just acknowledged. You don’t have to pay customer evangelists to promote you, they are already doing that.  And they aren’t doing it FOR the money, they are doing it because they love your company and believe in your products.  So you reward them by acknowledging them.  By pointing out who they are, and thanking them.  All that does is validate their love in you, and it motivates them to promote you to even more people.

2 – Evangelists have a vested interest in promoting you to their networks. With influencers, you are trying to give them something, usually cash or a gift, in an effort to convince them to promote you to the network that they have influence over.  But evangelists are already interested in promoting you to their networks.  Think about it, when we have a product that we love, that we buy consistently, we tell others about that product, right?  If you love your Honda, guess what happens when someone tells you they are in the market for a new car?  You tell them how much you love your Honda.

I love this quote from Bill Samuels, CEO of Maker’s Mark on the philosophy behind his company starting a brand ambassador program (emphasis addded): “We enjoy talking to our customers one-to-one. It really is in our nature. We never worry about the fact that this is inefficient because we are only talking to 50 or 60 or a thousand or ten thousand instead of a million. Which you do when you try to slap everybody on the ass with an advertising message. Because we know that our next customers are going to come from their efforts, not from our efforts.”

3 – Evangelists can help you reach your target market. In their groundbreaking business book Creating Customer Evangelists, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba had a wonderful quote that illustrates why evangelists are your best salesforce.  They said “They know your target audience better than you because they are the target audience!”  How efficient would it be to have a direct and uncluttered line to the exact customers you are trying to reach?  That’s access that your evangelists have, and you have access to your evangelists.  All you need to do is make the connection and reap the rewards.

4 – Evangelists will tell you what you are screwing up, then they will help you fix it. One of the big fears that companies have about social media is that they fear hearing criticism from customers.  But evangelists are a different breed of customer.  Whereas other customers might blog that ‘You suck!’, an evangelist will say ‘I think Company X got it wrong here.  Here’s what they should have done.’  Evangelists may criticize, but they also offer solutions, and will help you IMPLEMENT their suggestions.

For example, my friend Melody is a HUGE Starbucks fan.  And she has one of the more popular Starbucks blogs on the planet, devoted to the company she loves.  Notice in this post, she reviews a new Starbucks drink, and explains that she’s not sure if ‘it will work’, then explains WHY she thinks this way.  She gives Starbucks actionable feedback because she cares about the brand.

But notice something else: That post has *72* comments!  Melody isn’t just blogging about her love of Starbucks, she has created a place where other Starbucks evangelists can gather and discuss the brand they love!  Passion attracts passion, and it’s on display in the comments section of every post Melody writes.  How valuable is the feedback that Melody and her readers leave via comments?

5 – Evangelists want to see you succeed. This might be the biggest misunderstanding that companies have toward evangelists.  These people really do love your company, and they want to see it be as successful as possible.  Why would you not do everything possible to embrace and empower these special customers?

To perfectly illustrate this point, I wanted to return to an example that Ben and Jackie shared in Creating Customer Evangelists.  As you might recall after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the airlines industry was devastated, as were all the airlines.  In October, SouthWest Airlines received a letter from one of its customers, Ann McGee-Cooper.  In that letter, McGee-Cooper told SouthWest that “We are encouraging our clients to fly Southwest Airlines.  We are buying more stock…and we stand ready to do anything else to help.  Count on our continuing support.”

And McGee-Cooper included something with that love letter to Southwest: A check for $500. With the check came an explanation that McGee-Cooper understood that at that time, Southwest needed the money “more than I do”.

How amazing is that?  This one example perfectly illustrates why evangelists are far more valuable to your company than influencers.  And a perfect love story since this is Valentine’s Day 😉

So there’s 5 reasons why I think evangelists are better than influencers.  If you would like to hire me to help your company use social media to connect with your online evangelists, click here to get more information, or email me so we can discuss your needs.

Wait…is your company looking for ways to create evangelists for your brand?  Check back here tomorrow and we’ll show you how!

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What I learned from going on a 3-week blogging bender

On Jan. 18th, I made a commitment to start posting every day here.  No set schedule in mind, I just wanted to start posting every day, and to track what changed here.  I had a few set things in mind that I wanted to track, but I also wanted to see what would happen/change as a result of switching my posting schedule from 1-2 posts a week, to 6 or 7.  Here’s what I learned about blogging from posting 22 out of the last 23 days:

1 – Momentum is everything.  I keep an eye on my traffic every day, I know in general how my traffic will ebb and flow throughout the day.  Prior to Jan. 18th, my traffic would normally dip to only 2-3 visitors an hour from 2am-5am, then inch up, and be up to around 15-20 visitors an hour by 7am or so.  By 8am on most days, the traffic here would be around 60 visitors for the day.

This morning, there were 158 visitors for the day here by 8am(it’s 11 am now and traffic is at 428 for the day).  And for the past couple of weeks, there has been around 100 visitors for the day by 8am.  My ramping up my posting schedule has meant that more content is being shared, and as a result, my visibility has increased.  I assumed this would happen, but it’s still cool to see the numbers in action.

2 – Visibility for individual posts fell, visibility for the entire blog rose.  This is a ‘duh’ lesson, but one that’s important to consider.  Before Jan. 18th, every post I left here would have 3-5 days as the ‘top’ post and more chances to be viewed.  After the 18th, some posts only had a few hours as the top post before being replaced.

The 10 posts published here prior to Jan. 18th averaged 104 ReTweets each.  For the posts since Jan. 18th, they have averaged 53 RTs, almost half as many.  But traffic has continued to rise, as you can see here:

So RTs are down, traffic is at record levels.  Now this has me wondering, what would traffic here look like in another month if I can keep this volume of posting up?

3 – It’s imperative that you try to ‘break stuff’ on your blog if you want to be a better blogger.  With EVERY post here, I had an experiment in mind.  I was changing something to see what effect it would have on something else.  I learned a TON, some of what I learned I am sharing with you here, and some of it I’m keeping to myself 😉  You should do the same thing.

Kathy Sierra once said that the people that are the experts are the ones that always assume that there’s a ‘better way’ to do whatever it is they are good at.  They are always looking for improvement and ways to become better.  If you want to be a real social media or blogging expert, you need to do the same thing.  Constantly break stuff and see what happens.

4 – Blogging every day was EASIER than blogging once a week.  This one totally blindsided me.  My biggest fear in starting the experiment of posting every day was that I would have to ‘mail in’ a few posts to keep the streak going.  I definitely did not want to do that, but I was committed to this experiment to see what I would learn (see previous point about the importance of breaking stuff).

What I learned was that there were a lot of blogging opportunities that I was leaving on the table.  A perfect example of this is this post I wrote on using Tweetdeck to track who is favoriting your tweets.  I was having a Twitter conversation with @be3d one night, and I favorited one of his tweets, and he mentioned that he knew I had done it.  I asked him how, and he explained how he was using TweetDeck to track it.  That was a great tip, so I decided to turn it into a blog post!  All I had to do was take a screenshot, and just recall the above conversation.  But I realized that I am constantly learning tips and tricks on using social media tools like that, why not share them?

5 – You don’t know what you don’t know.  I made a lot of experiments and changed a lot of things here over the past 3 weeks.  Often, I wanted to change something because I knew it would have an affect on something else, and I wanted to measure that impact.  But sometimes, changing one thing would alter something else, when I had no idea the two things were connected.

So while it’s great to listen to and get advice from the so-called blogging expert, you still need to go out and make your own rules.  Figure out what works perfectly for YOU, and you do that by experimenting.  So go break some stuff 😉

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Measuring online influence and the elephant in the room

Klout is super hot right now among social media talking heads because it’s attempting to assign a number to measure online influence.  We in the social media fishbowl love numbers, because they tell us who is ‘winning’.

But I think there’s a huge potential issue facing Klout and any of the likely competitors that will soon be popping up that will also want to measure online influence.  That issue is, what happens when people start trying to game the system?  When people begin to understand how to influence their influencer score, then the score won’t be measuring influence, it will be measuring our abilities to game the system.

Any decent attempt at measuring online influence has to evaluate existing behavior, not influence future behavior.

For example, do you remember the backlash that Fast Company received over it’s Influencer Project?  Instead of telling us who the real influencers were, FC build a system where the influencers would reveal themselves by whoever did the best job of leveraging their online networks and convincing them to push them to the top.  IOW, the project rewarded the people that did the best job of spamming their own networks.  It didn’t measure existing behavior, it influenced future behavior.

This is one of the potential problems I see for services that attempt to measure online influence, especially if they have a scoring model like Klout does.  Joe did a great job of explaining how Klout works in the last post, but in theory, people with higher Klout scores will likely be more coveted by partner companies.  So if you knew how to use Twitter in a certain way to raise your Klout score up to 80, would you do it?  Before you say ‘no’, what if the difference between having a Klout score of 70 and 80 was getting a Sony PSP, versus getting to drive a new Camaro for 6 months?

These are real issues that Klout and any of its competitors will have to address.  And for the record, I do see potential for services like Klout, if companies are smart enough to leverage the information they provide.  As I said in the previous post, I think it starts with targeting evangelists for your products, moreso than influencers.

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What every company needs to understand about influencers and reaching them

Last week I received a package from Klout and TBS.  It was a Sony PSP 3000 loaded with a 1-min clip promoting TBS’ show Are We There Yet?

First, it should be noted that I am not a fan of this show, in fact I’ve never seen it.  The only reason why I can think that I might have been targeted for this promotion was that I sometimes tweet about TV shows (Mostly BURN NOTICE!).

Second, this was part of the Klout Perks program, where Klout apparently works with certain companies to offer certain products/services to people that are deemed to be influencers.  I got this offer right after my Klout score hit 70, so I assume that’s the activation point for the Perks program.

In 2011, many companies are now looking for a way to connect with online influencers.  If you are wanting to reach influencers, here’s some points to keep in mind:

1 – Target people that already have an interest in promoting you.  Too many programs attempt to give an influencer a product hoping that will convince them to promote the company/product to their networks.  It’s far better to connect with an evangelist for your company/product.  This is someone that is likely already promoting you/your product to their networks.

But perhaps the bigger point is, an evangelist is passionate about you.  You can’t buy my passion for a show I have never seen by giving me a $150 toy.

2 – Giving someone access to something they want often works as well or better than giving them products.  In this case, the approach of giving me a 1-min clip of a show on a PSP really doesn’t make me any more likely to blog about how amazing the show is.  But since I cover how companies can and are using social media effectively, that would be a great way to reach me.  What TBS could have done is reach out to me and see if I wanted an exclusive interview with the company’s CMO about how they are using Klout.  Or maybe when I am in Austin next month for SXSW, offer to take me out to dinner and tell me what your company is doing in the social media space.  THAT is access that has value for me.

3 – People that are influencers (especially online) often become influential by creating value for others.  Klout sending me a PSP isn’t going to convince me to blog about Are We There Yet because doing so won’t create value for my network.  If you want to gain access to the network that I am influential over, then you first need to give ME an incentive to connect you with them.  That incentive is value.  If you can give me a way to create value for my network, then you’ll win my attention.  This goes back to the previous point about giving me access to how TBS is using social media, vs a toy.  Because if you give me that access, then I can create content that will have value for my network.

4 – Target influential evangelists.  Let’s again look at what TBS did: They sent me a PSP with a 1-min clip about a show that I have never seen, and never tweeted about.  I’ve already said that access would have worked better in this case.  Such as TBS giving me access to how they are using social media to connect with viewers online.

But notice I mentioned that while I never tweet about Are We There Yet, I do frequently tweet about the USA Networks show Burn Notice.  So what if USA contacted me and offered me access to their Social Media Director to tell me exactly how Burn Notice is leveraging social media to connect with viewers?

THAT would be the best of both worlds.  USA would be targeting an influencer correctly, but also an influencer that is a huge FAN of Burn Notice.  It wouldn’t be a question of if I would promote Burn Notice and how they are using social media to my network, but how soon and how often 😉  Again, target people that are already passionate about you and your product.

Here’s how I think TBS could have improved this effort:

1 – Give influencers real exposure to the show.  As I said, I have never seen Are We There Yet?  The promotion should have included a couple of episodes so I could actually watch it and decide if I liked the show.  A few ‘behind the scenes’ clips would have been nice as well.

2 – Give influencers customized content.  What TBS could have easily have done was have one of the stars of the show, or Ice Cube, create a ‘customized’ greeting.  A very short video, about 10 seconds in length, where the star says ‘Hey Mack, thanks for participating in the TBS/Klout Are We There Yet? Promotion.  We wanted to show you what we are up to so check out the clips and media we’ve included, and thanks for watching!’  And of course, the name of each influencer could be changed, so all of the ‘customized’ clips could have been recorded in an hour, tops.  That would have definitely prompted me and anyone else that got the video to want to include it in a blog post.

3 – Give influencers a Social Media Pack.  Include a ton of high-resolution pics and videos with instructions for how they can be embedded/shared on my blog and with my networks.  Again, if you are wanting to target influencers so they will promote your show to their networks, make the content creation process as seamless as possible for me.

4 – Focus on more than just Klout score.  I’m not certain how I was chosen for this promotion, but it seems that my Klout score hitting 70 was the activation point.  For example, I would have also looked at how often influencers are tweeting about TBS/Are We There Yet?, and what the sentiment of those tweets are.

Then TBS could have decided: Is it better to target someone that has a Klout score of 70 that never tweets about our show, or someone with a Klout score of 45, that tweets about Are We There Yet? every week while the show is on?

Those are my suggestions, what am I missing?  How can we build a better way for companies to connect with influencers?

Disclaimer: Klout sent me the PSP3000, along with TBS.  Here’s the details, Klout didn’t pay me for this post, and my receiving the product wasn’t dependent on my posting about it or receiving it.

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