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Men and women influencing religion is a modern practice. Lay people are holding unofficial roles in the church. There is a story about a woman who gave up going to confession because she no longer saw the point of it. One day she saw a bank president get in line for confession. The lady reconsidered her opinion of going to confession.

There are some passages in the bible that still believe women should be subservient to the man. There are some women who follow suppression of women. Women are directed to be quiet and submissive to their husbands. Man is in charge of his wife as Christ is in charge of the church.

On the other hand, there are 20 heroic women mentioned in the bible. Some of the women mentioned in the bible, Eve, Leah, Rebekah, and Delilah are depicted as bad influences on the men in their lives. Other women in the bible are saints or queens. Some of the women in the bible are known for being the mother of great men in the bible. Mary was the mother of Jesus, Rachel was the mother of Joseph, Hannah was the mother of Samuel, Bathsheba was the mother of Solomon, Elizabeth was the mother of John the Baptist, and Jochebed was the mother of Moses. Women like Elizabeth and Sarah were thought to represent patience because they became mothers at age 90. These women I mentioned represent the traditional roles of women depicted in the bible.

In the bible, the men are depicted as strong leaders, who many were fooled, such as Samson, Adam, and Jacob by women giving them what they wanted. For years, wedding ceremonies had women promise to love, honor, and obey. Recently, reformed gender roles given men and women equality in religion. Many women have acquired religious roles in religion that were once given to men, such as women priests. In the Catholic church, the religion goes under a little transformation every time there is a new pope. In the new religious revisions, women can be seen as liberated women, not property of men. Feminist Gloria Steinem gave the institution of marriage a try when it no longer stifled a woman’s mental and spiritual development. Women have the option of keeping their maiden names. Both men and women equally influence their children by being equal partners in marriage. Father Rutler is clearly aware of an ever changing Christian faith. The more Christianity changes, the more the religion stays the same. Women are becoming more independent and men more a partnership to the woman in the practice of religion.

The post How Men and Women Influence Religion appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

One of the subsets of social media marketing that grew substantially in the last decade is social influencer marketing. Some of you may have an idea about this new baby on the block while some of you won’t. Either way, things will really look interesting once you see some of the amazing statistics given below.

According to this survey, 67% of the marketing and communications professionals engage with influencers for content promotion. 59% of the marketers intend to increase their influencer marketing budget in the upcoming years. If all these doesn’t impress you, then wait for the next one. Businesses are making $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

So, who are social influencers and what makes them the favorites of marketers and businesses?

Social Influencers

Imagine you are planning to purchase a product. You see ads of various brands on television about that particular product. Soon, you find out that one of your colleagues has bought a particular brand of the product and recommends it to you. Would you still depend on ads or go with your colleague’s suggestion. In most cases, it’s the latter and that is exactly the concept of social influencer marketing.

When defining a social influencer, two major parameters are taken into consideration by businesses. One is his/her ability to influence the purchase decision of a mass segment of people due to their power, popularity, authority, and position in the society. The second is, whether he/she has a huge following in a particular niche which they actively engage with. If these two factors are ticked off the list, then the influencer is capable of generating revenue for a business and improve Google ranking of your website.

There are basically three groups of social influencers.

1. Micro-influencers: Micro-influencers form the lowest bracket of influencers in the spectrum. The follower count of these social influencers ranges from 5000 to 100000 typically.

2. Macro-influencers: They are the middle category with followers ranging from 100000 – 1 million. These people are usually experts in what they do and that is influencing people. They are mostly thought leaders, content creators, marketers and advocates for one or a set of niche segments.

3. Mega-influencers: People who fall under this category are usually film stars, singers or other popular celebrities. They will have the most number of follower count with more than 1 million followers.

Now, you might think that mega-influencers would be the obvious choice for businesses and marketers for a sponsored content platform. But the dynamics of social influencer marketing is not that straightforward. In fact, it is the micro-influencer that constitutes the majority of the influencers’ pool with the highest rate of engagement of 25 – 50%. This is because they maintain a personal level interaction with their followers.

Macro-influencers engagement rate falls somewhere in between 5% to 25%. However, they can reach 10x times more people than micro-influencers. Mega-influencers has the least engagement rate of 2-3% per post as their followers are diverse and global in nature.

How to work with a social influencer?

There are many ways to work with a social influencer. Following are some of them.

1. Sponsored posts
2. Guest blogging
3. Free giveaways
4. Exclusive discounts
5. Product review
6. Collaboration on events
7. Affiliate marketing

How to choose your social influencer?

Before you choose a social influencer, it is important to have a clear objective for your campaign. Is it the visibility that you are looking for or revenue? Do you want to promote your brand value or bring in more sales? Social influencers are another marketing platform that requires a budget. What is your budget for a campaign? Having all these questions answered will lay the foundation for using social influencer marketing effectively.

For example, if you are a local business looking to increase the sales and understand your customer base, then finding a micro-influencer that operates in the same niche would be the best option. If it is brand visibility that you are seeking but on a tight budget, then a large follower count is needed and hence a macro-influencer would be the ideal choice. Finally, if you want a massive boost to your brand reputation and ready to splurge, then feel free to go for the celebrity with the most number of followers.

Tips for picking the right influencer

•  Set your goals clear as to why you want to partner with an influencer
• Find an influencer who operates on the same niche and shares the audience with your business
• Do a cost analysis and a comparative study – Find out the cost of one sponsored content and compare the cost and effort needed to achieve the same impact through other methods
• Find an authentic influencer who will convey your message with a personal touch and connects better with the audience

Conclusion

The bottom line is that social influencer marketing definitely has huge potential if leveraged the right way. With Facebook leading the influential marketing platform, followed by YouTube and Instagram, the marketing intensity is at an unprecedented level. Another interesting fact is that, according to this influential marketing survey, non – celebrity influencers are much more trusted and likely to bring in more sales than celebrity influencers.

It is very clear that influencer marketing brings in more revenue and increase brand visibility. Adding to that, it will also develop a trustworthy image for your business and increase reliability when endorsed by an influencer who is honest with his/her audience. It’s up to the brands to decide who should act as their face in front of their audience when leveraging the possibility of influencer marketing.

The post How to Boost Revenue and Brand Reputation With Influencer Marketing appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

In this final post of 2013, I asked a few people for their tips on keeping generosity alive in 2014. These are real people with really practical ideas.

Here are my two favorite.

Easy ways to keep Giving Tuesday generosity alive in 2014

1. Explore payroll deduction

   “If your employer has a program setup, make charitable contributions through payroll deductions. The advantages of this are:

   • It is much easier than having to write a check or enter your credit card online
   • It makes it easier to consistently donate, once you set it up, you don’t have to worry about it anymore
   • It makes your contributions more valuable if your employer has a matching program
   • At the end of the year, you have a record of exactly how much you gave for tax purposes
   • You can typically choose from a variety of organizations (both local and national) to give to

   Click Here for more information on how to give through payroll deductions.”

   Jay Kelly, VP-Operations, Social Media Explorer

2. Don’t wait for “influencers”

   “Be generous with your invitations; everyone has something to offer.

   “In this social media realm of experts, followers and Klout, it’s tempting to only extend opportunities and partnerships to certain ‘influencers.’ But this year, I’ve been amazed and humbled by what less ‘established’ people offer when invited to contribute. Be open to giving everyone a chance; the potential rewards are worth it.”

   Marlene Oliveira, Founder and Managing Editor, Nonprofit MarCommunity

What will you resolve?

Those are a couple ideas for helping keep generosity alive in 2014. What will you resolve to do?

Tell us in the comments!

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Tell Social Media Explorer about My Donation for Aggregated Reporting Purposes Here

Read more about Social Media Explorer’s #GivingTuesday program.

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I imagine that many corporate social media documents list engagement as a goal.  Whether it’s an individual initiative or an overall strategy, the word “engagement” has become the ultimate prize in the world of social media. Yet, gaming the system, creates only an illusion of engagement.

Try as you might to create massive amounts of engagement, it’s your mission—the meaning you bring to your community that determines genuine engagement. Joel Osteen has a mission—a higher calling.  But you don’t need to be a ministry to have a mission.

If your social media efforts strive to be helpful, inspiring, supportive, informative or fun and do so in a way that fits your brand and delivers value, you have a better chance of being engaged than if you goal is engagement.

Social media is the ultimate vehicle for spreading ideas and as Seth Godin says, “ideas that spread win.” Yet we see so many manipulative tactics being used to get people to like Facebook pages, to retweet updates on Twitter and to “engage” for reasons other than a desire to be part of something and spread the word. A mission to increase engagement is like a mission to make a viral video.  Other people will decide if your video or your idea is worth spreading.

How do you increase your Facebook likes or get more retweets?  If it involves giving people a secondary reason like the opportunity to win a prize or vote for a charity, the sharing is short term.  A relationship based entirely on this type of motivation is fragile at best.

Consider three types of engagement:

Organic engagement

Organic engagement happens when people choose to like, share or comment on your Facebook status, share your tweets, or comment on your blog without prompting or reward. Because of your content or your product, they are moved, on their own to talk about and to you.  They feel something  about your product or your content that drives their behavior.

Encouraged engagement

Discovery sometimes needs a little help.  People may not be aware of your Facebook presence or they may be standing on the sidelines and need some encouragement to participate. Encouraged engagement comes from promoting the fact that your content exists and making the “ask .”   And, it should be accompanied with an explanation of what to expect from your social media account.

Encouraged engagement also includes asking for the “like” or the comment. It’s a gentle reminder that you want to have a conversation.

Incentivized (or Forced) engagement

Now we are getting into murkier territory.  Almost everyone incentivizes engagement at some point. You run a contest to get people to interact on Facebook or Twitter.  You offer a reward for sharing content.  “Come by our booth and tweet about our product for a chance to win an iPad”

As a short term result, you’ll get more likes and more people talking about you on Facebook or more Tweets because you paid for it in some way.  But it’s not sustainable.  Forced engagement is not a long-term strategy.  If people don’t ultimately connect organically, you will be caught in a never ending cycle of having to offer a reward.  You don’t build trust and nobody really cares that much because as soon as a better offer comes along they will disappear.

So the next time you sit around the table hatching a plan to “increase engagement” ask three questions. 

Is this engagement sustainable?  Does it build trust? How will people feel (about you) when they are sharing? The answers to those questions will tell you whether you can expect engagement that adds value to your brand or the illusion of engagement.

The post How To Avoid The Illusion of Social Media Engagement appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Not a bit of it matters. If you’re looking at influence, you aren’t looking deep enough. It’s like judging a car by its color and not its engine. Influence is only a coat of paint. What drives influence is trust. He who has earned the most trust wins.

Do you trust Guy Kawasaki? Perhaps. But when you find out he has a team of people tweeting on his behalf, your trust in him is likely diminished. He has influence, but not as much trust as some. Do you trust Perez Hilton? I sure hope not … or at least not for most things. But Perez Hilton has a great deal of influence.

The difference in influence and trust is the difference in quantity and quality. Perez Hilton can get you a lot of eyeballs, but are they the right eyeballs and will they do anything with your information? Louis Gray won’t get you a lot of eyeballs, in comparison, but the ones he gets are golden. He gets them because his audience trusts him.

Stop looking for the candy apple red and start looking for the V6. It will make you a smarter PR pro.

The post It’s Not About Influence, It’s About Trust appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

So, surprising to those who know me, being tagged by Ike Pigott in Kami Hyuse’s “Thanks for the Influence” meme is a welcome project as the holiday approaches.

And for the record, I have been promoted from eighth generation meme tag-ee to second generation (Kami started, tagged Ike, who tagged me.) so I’m moving up in the world. For that, I am thankful!

Kami’s original question:

“Who had a big influence on you and how did that affect the direction of your life or career?“

Would it surprise you to know I can think of about 30 people? I think we all can. But here are the top folks whose ripples continue to guide my ship, in no particular order:

1. Robert J. “Jake” Bell – Quirky old bird from Carlisle, Ky., and legendary Southeastern Conference basketball official Jake Bell was my boss and the athletic director at Georgetown College, where I cut my teeth as a sports information director and PR hack. His military-like meeting regimens (Never more than an hour, never late, always with a typed agenda that we stuck to.) and odd-ball sayings helped shape my professional habits and leadership skills. I still say, “If it happens once, shame on it. If it happens twice, shame on you,” because of him.
2. Randy Stacy – My first real boss, Randy was (and is) the sports information director at Morehead State University, my alma mater. He took a snot-nosed sports columnist for the student newspaper and offered me a $36 per week work study. My career in sports was born and the next 11 years of my life went down the tubes. (Joke) Randy tolerated a lot from me but cleaned me up, polished me as much as he could and let me loose on the world. I’m sure he regrets it, but Randy’s patience and willingness to trust me to handle a lot of responsibility at a young age are the primary reason I have an insatiable work ethic to this day.
3. Hank Newsome – When Hank, the resident computer guru in my little hometown (a gangly, 13-year-old) showed me how download games from the only bulletin board in Eastern Kentucky, I forced my mother to cash in savings bonds and buy my first computer. I’ve been addicted to them ever since and, while I was too extroverted to spend hours behind one becoming a programmer, the computer (and Internet) have been integral parts of my existence for 20 years now. Sadly, I have no idea where Hank is these days, but I still think of the hours we spent on the phone, him coaching me through Basic programming and motherboard circuitry.
4. My mom – Sara Falls George found herself at age 25 with a three-year-old son, a husband who abandoned her and a world that wasn’t always fair to women, particularly of the single mom kind. She sacrificed more than I probably know just to keep me fed. She always made sure I went to church and stayed motivated to do well in school. How she did it, I’ll never know. Every day I look at my son and realize how much work it takes to be a parent, I think about my mother and how she had to do it all by herself. It blows my mind.
5. Her mom – Anna Lee O’Briant was my Geike (a word I made up for her when little and pronounced GIKE-ee) and probably the person I miss most on Thanksgiving. A predecessor of my mother’s amazing fortitude, Geike was too abandoned by her husband at an early age, only with two kids, not just one. She became a business leader, a church elder and even ran for mayor of her little town of Logan, W.Va., in the 1960s when women just didn’t do that. She taught me to be kind to others, regardless of their shortcomings, racism was ignorant and that no one on the planet makes crescent rolls like her.Perhaps the greatest lesson she taught me was that no one owes you anything. Despite years of medical problems with rheumatory arthritis, a near-death experience with pneumonia, breast cancer and various other ailments, she penned a book called “Rx: Tea But No Sympathy,” which my mother’s print shop published in small circulation in the late 1980s. While I’m bastardizing the eloquence of her prose, the point of it was, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I will be fine.” I took it to mean that life may kick your ass from time to time. So you get up, dust yourself off and get back in the ring. When I’m frustrated or depressed, I just think of her and my spirits lift. I only wish she were still around because tomorrow, I’d be able to give her a hug. And eat her crescent rolls.

Thankfulness extends beyond those described. Joe Dean Jr., Shelby Whitfield, Mike Dawahare, my Uncle Bo, Bill Cronin, Dr. Dallas Branch and any number of co-workers throughout my professional life have influenced me. My current boss, Dan Burgess, and boss’s bosses, Todd Spencer and the now retired Dave Wilkins, as well as the wily old codger of Doe Anderson, Ray Radford, deserve a lot of credit. They’ve taken a guy who watched ballgames for a living and taught me a lot about advertising, public relations and marketing. To them, I’m indebted. For them, I’m grateful.

And I’m also thankful for the influence of my online influencers. Todd Defren, Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, Jeremy Pepper, Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Brogan, Valeria Maltoni, Ike, Kami … (I recently promised not to be a link whore. I should stop.) I’ve been gobbling up every ounce of knowledge you’ve been willing to share over the last couple of years. Suffice to say, you share a lot … meaning I’m really freakin’ smart now. And not a bit humble.

Thanks for tagging me, Ike. It’s good to stop and thank folks now and then.

So, whose influence are you thankful for? Valeria Maltoni, Todd Earwood, Derek Edmond, Chris Brogan and Nick Huhn? (You should check out Nick’s blog everyone. It’s new and he’s brilliant.)

IMAGE: Water Ripple by Oranje on Flickr.

[tags]Thanksgiving, thankful, influence, meme, Jason Falls, Ike Pigott, Kami Hyuse[/tags]

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