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!

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

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

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

The post Keeping Giving Tuesday alive all year – #GivingTuesday appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Social Media Marketing seems like an easy button to those that know no better. “Just open a Facebook page!” “Just get on Twitter!” “It’s Free!” and other assurances have driven many of today’s marketers to think Social Media Marketing is an easy button for their success.

But it’s not. However, one facet of social marketing can get close.

When you collect around you a community of enthusiasts, loyalists or fans and can measure both their reach and true impact for your brand, you have a conduit to here, now, fast, cheap and smart, all with little effort. Because when you do, you can see exactly who it is that motivates the most people to act on your brand’s calls to action.

Influencer marketing tools (Klout, Kred and more) are supposed to help you identify who influences the most people around your brand. What they actually do is distract you with silly numbers and show you the alleged reach of your marketing message. In reality, a fraction of what you think is your reach is actually realized.

My tweets, for instance, certainly don’t reach 80,000 eyeballs. Yet the influencer tools will tell you they do, and that I, Jason Falls, am very important. While I’m flattered these tools think of me in that light, what they should tell you is where to find your easy button.

It’s not enough to know who your influencers are. What you need is which ones actually have an impact when carrying your message forward?

Jason Falls may actually reach 2,500 digital marketers with each Tweet and 10% of those may take action on said messaging. But if Arik Hanson actually reaches 750 digital marketers and 95% of them take action, who is your true influencer?

If you’d like to get as close to an easy button to distribute your message in the social space, ask these questions of your influencer toolset vendors:

1. Do you measure what actions are taken by the influencer as a result of our content?
2. Can you rank our influencers by multiple data points?
3. Can you tell me, in addition to how many people are reached by a given influencer, what the quality of his or her following is?

If they can make this data available, you can see a modest blueprint for an easy button. Brand has a message to send. Based on timing and resources, look at your prioritized list of influencers and pick the number you have time to contact. The bigger the impact of those influencers, the easier your button gets.

The post Influencer Marketing Can Be An Easy Button appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Transmedia Storytelling

We’re starting out with a content-focused trend. I felt that 2012 was all about content marketing, and 2013 will be no less so, but it’s gonna get a bit more complicated. It’s not enough anymore to just put out great content in your blog. Brands (and individual bloggers) will need to start ramping it up and telling their stories across multiple platforms, from blog to video to Twitter and back around again.

Currently a hot topic amongst filmmakers and game developers, transmedia storytelling will start to enter the mainstream of marketing in 2013, as brands start to leverage multiple platforms and properties simultaneously in support of the same campaign or goals. In a practical sense, transmedia storytelling for brands will incorporate visual platforms such as Instagram and video into campaigns; more broadly, brands should start to think about gaming and augmented reality (see next trend).

The emergence of transmedia will be a big shift for many digital marketers, most of whom are only recently (and perhaps reluctantly) comfortable with the idea of telling the brand story through the written word of blogs, eBooks, Twitter and Facebook.  Add in photos, videos and possibly games, and the digital marketer’s job scope is going to change dramatically.

Augmented Reality

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard about Google’s entry into the world of Augmented Reality (AR) with their Project Glass effort. Google wants you to be able to wear glasses that annotate or gamify your world, and they’ve already got an app, which does just that.

Yeah, yeah, it all sounds so Star Trekky and futuristic, but is it meaningful for brands? It sure is.  Particularly for brands that need to drive real-world actions: purchase in a store, choose a restaurant, attend a movie, augmented reality (and their attendant mobile apps) may be what the C-suite is buzzing about throughout 2013. So marketers, wise up. If the C-suite already knows what this is, you need to too. They’re interested in it because many luxury brands are already using AR, and where luxury goes, the rest of consumers will typically follow.

For most digital marketers, AR is something to consider when developing mobile apps, creating new ad campaigns, or extending the brand through transmedia offerings.  A cool and clever AR app could be just the right thing to propel your brand ahead in 2013.

Influence (Again)

I wrote about Social Media Influence as a 2012 trend and I think I got that one dead-on. From changing Klout algorithms, to challenges to Klout from PeerIndex and Kred, and with the publication of Mark Schaefer’s Return on Influence, influence was undoubtedly a very hot topic throughout this past year.

But as I predicted last year, influence had to get beyond social, to incorporate offline factors.  While this is not yet perfect, some platforms, including Appinions (disclosure: they’re a client) and, theoretically, Klout, have managed to bring together social media metrics with other factors including whether or not their opinions manifest in major publications or if they have a presence on Wikipedia.

Then there’s the question of personal influence (Kred, PeerIndex, Klout) vs. contextual influence (Appinions and Traackr). The former assign an individual a score which supposedly represents their influence level – but I personally find it impossible to believe in any system which assigns a score to the hair of a fictional character. The latter, which rank influencers within a particular topic (and typically don’t allow influencers to see how they rank) feel more credible, but there’s still room for improvement across the influence marketing spectrum.

Digital marketers who want to work with influencers need to figure out which platform to rely on in order to determine who will be the best fit for their brand or campaign. And as my friend Paull Young has said (quoted here by Allyson Kapin): the most powerful analytics is the human brain.

Big Data

For digital marketers of the analytics and data persuasion, the growing corporate focus on Big Data won’t be much of a shift. SEO people and marketing analysts have been using internal and external data for years to help tell marketing and brand stories, and glean valuable insights out of numbers.  For the rest of us, who are “gut” or creative marketers, Big Data will represent a sea change in how we approach our work.

The ability to take sales, customer, or even Twitter data and turn it into patterns and segments is at the crux of what Big Data is and does. All of this data is no longer locked deep in the bowels of your corporate systems, and so now you need to figure out what you want to get out of it to inform your marketing efforts.

Your way through the thicket of Big Data: a smart data analyst or data scientist. Hire one now. Or become one. Because digital marketing based purely on your super-creative ideas may not get past the boss, once they know that you can back up your gut with cold, hard numbers.

Evolution of the Marketing Team

You may have noticed that I’ve gone away from calling these themes “social media” to “digital marketing” in this installment of my predictions. That shift is very deliberate, and relates to many of the things I’ve been writing about over the course of the past two years:

• Silos are going away – marketers need to individually have broader skillsets than just “PR” or “ads” or “SEO” and need to know a lot about many things – as do social media practitioners.
• Budgets are moving. Advertising no longer holds the big bucks. The convergence of earned, paid and owned media means that marketing budgets must get spread across many efforts.
• If you used to segment offline and online for spokespeople or events, those distinctions are gone. It’s all one big pool of people, events and opportunities, online and off. People who used to be just bloggers are now celebrities, and celebrities are bloggers. What is this world coming to?

A few years ago, at the advent of formalized social media marketing, it made sense to have someone with a title of “social media manager.” I predict that’s a title which won’t be in play much longer.  All marketers will be expected to at least understand social media, though specialists will continue to do the day-to-day heavy lifting of social media execution (as with SEO gurus).

And, as my colleague Nichole Kelly recently wrote, we’re also seeing a huge shift in how people work, how teams are formed and managed, and where and when they work. So your team may soon be distributed across time and space, and you’d better be ready for that shift too.

And that, friends, wraps up my predictions for the coming year. I’ll be checking on these throughout the year to see how they hold up, and I hope you will too. As always, if you feel like I missed the mark, or forgot a key theme, please let me know in the comments.  My best to all of you in 2013!

The post Five Social Media Trends for 2013 appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

For show notes including links to everything discussed in this episode of the SoLoMo Show go here.

SoLoMo Show Links:

• SoLoMoShow.com
• Subscribe: iTunes, Email or YouTube
• Twitter: @SoLoMoShow, @CoryOBrien and @SecretSushi
• Email: SoLoMoShow@gmail.com

The post SoLoMo Show EP 35: The Global Shift Towards Mobile, Twitter Advertising Updates And Klout’s New Social Influence Dashboard appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

As I’ve said before, Klout is one way of looking at influence. I like the product and think it’s useful, but I would caution anyone from using Klout scores alone to determine anything. Klout, in conjunction with other scores, human analysis, website traffic and even off-line metrics, can be used to develop a very nice influence profile of someone you can use in your marketing and public relations efforts. But Klout scores alone mean very little.

With its new redesign and focus on revealing more about what goes into a person’s score, however, Klout is showing businesses and individuals the way to improving theirs. A high Klout score isn’t a bad thing to have or aspire to. It means you have some measure of online impact in what you share and produce in terms of content on the social web. Understanding you score and what makes it such can only help you build your own, or understand that of others.

The biggest feature add-on with the new release is the Moments. Recent posts you’ve made that have impacted a number of others are shown with a list of what other individuals (and their respective scores) interacted with or were impacted by that piece of content. In a different view, one that shows your interactions, you see a little green dot array of how impactful that particular interaction was in improving your score.

So now you can test and measure to see what impact your content is having and who it is having and impact upon. Very nice.

For companies using Klout, the new changes mean better understanding through improved metrics and indicators of what triggers Klout’s algorithm. For companies not using Klout, it might actually now be time to look into it. At a minimum you’ll be able to easily see who you are impacting and what influential people your content may be reaching. That information can help you optimize and reach more in the future.

Keep in mind there are several critics of  Klout’s privacy policies. Before you jump in as a brand, you should understand that Klout is opt-in, but the service has, in the past, used friends-of-friends input and data to measure and collect scores on individuals without their knowledge or approval. In some minds, that’s a violation of privacy. Frankly, I just think it’s a third-party measure of your public data, so I’ve never gotten upset about it. But that’s just my perspective. Others can explore that topic more deeply if you’re interested.

For me, Klout is a very useful look at online influence, particularly of individuals who spend a lot of time communicating on social networks. The new redesign and feature set are significant improvements on the practicality of using it.

Klout’s new changes should take effect with your account over the next few days. Enjoy and report back — what do you like or dislike about the new Klout.

P.S. – If you’re going to be in southern California in October, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez will be participating in a “fireside chat” with me at Explore Orange County.  You can find out more here: Explore O.C.

The post Sneak Peek At Klout Shows Transparency appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

For the impact of social media to evolve into social business, three things will need to happen. Decision makers will need to trust and absorb social data. They’ll need to act on the implications of social data. And social data will need to escape the marketing silo. A new report from The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice indicates that these three things may be happening to a much greater extent than some people think.

It seems social data has finally escaped the laboratory, and put the rubber to the road, with CMOs firmly behind the wheel. For those obsessed with demonstrating the ROI of social media, according to these early reports, over three quarters of them believe social efforts are driving sales. That’s a pretty impressive warm-up lap.

Chief Customer Advocate: How Social Data Elevates CMOs surveyed Chief Marketing Officers to find out the extent to which they trust and are using social data. Among CMOs, social data is now considered a trustworthy source of real-time consumer insight.  Even more encouraging, social data is crossing the bounds of marketing and brand management, providing consumer intelligence that can be put to work across the organization.

One of the most encouraging items in the study for me is the level of buy-in that CMOs are claiming in social data. Only a few short years ago, it was a struggle to convince brand managers that the potential business value of social data met or exceeded  that of social content. While many were instantly sold on the idea of “free advertising” that social content represented, years of relying on traditional consumer surveys and measurement methodology seemed to make CMOs a little gun-shy when it came to the validity of social data.

CMOs Trust Social Data… Maybe Too Much?

That period of reticence seems to be over. According to the survey, social data impacts decisions for 89% of CMOs. Any CMOs still ignoring social data as a rich vein of business intelligence are officially behind the bell curve. Specifically, CMOs believe that social data is at least somewhat effective in indicating:

• Consumer sentiment toward products (80%) and companies or brands (72.8%)
• Influence of individuals or groups on purchase decisions (78%)
• Trends that will impact business (83%),

To that last point, I’m most excited to see that rather than using social data reactively, CMOs are increasingly applying social insights with an eye to the future. Almost half (47%) have used social data in forecasting.

I do find it a little concerning that so many CMOs have a level of confidence I don’t share in influence measurement tools like Klout. The C-suite is making decisions based on a belief that social data can estimate influencers’ ability to drive purchases. I worry a bit that in this particular case, the data may not live up to expectations.

Social Data Escapes the Marketing Silo

On a more encouraging note, social data is filtering across the entire enterprise. CMOs report that sales (36%), product development (35%), and customer service (25%) teams are accessing social data. That’s fantastic news, because it signals increased consumer focus in the areas of business best poised to reap rewards from it. Businesses may begin anticipating consumer desires, as much as reacting to them. I’d love to hear more stories of product innovation and improved customer retention rates inspired by social data.

I’m a little discouraged when it comes to executive management, since less than 10% of the responses indicated the executive suite was checking out social data.  One would hope that the departments most removed from the consumer (IT, the executive management team) would take greater advantage of having this clearer view of the consumer. Unfortunately, the data is being utilized heavily by those areas of business already closest to the consumer, and rarely by those who could probably use the additional insight. Bummer.

That relative disinterest is apparently not for lack of trying on the part of CMOs. According to the study, 97% of them share insights from social data with other C-level executives at least annually, 67% monthly, and 25% at least weekly. When CMOs can show performance gains in key business metrics like sales, loyalty and awareness tied to social data, hopefully even the cynics in the  C-suite will sit up and take notice.

For years, social media professionals have complained that CMOs were sitting on an embarrassment of untapped riches in social data. Now that they recognize it’s a valuable resource, our job is to help them extract the most valuable consumer insights to fuel their business.

Related articles

• Want To Know What Social Media Users Are Thinking? Now You Can! (socialmediaexp.wpengine.com)
• Why Big Data Will Deliver ROI For Social Business (informationweek.com)
• Social Data. The New Driver for Marketing Strategy. | Lanoba Blog on Social Login, Sharing and Analytics (huguesrey.wordpress.com)

The post Has Social Data Finally Escaped the Lab? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

But for all its potential, social profiling scares me. It harkens back a day when people were treated differently because of their race or gender. The various Civil Rights Acts in the United States were essentially an effort to force people to not consider how someone looks when deciding whether or not they could be treated like everyone else. Yet with the social profiling future Owyang portrays — facial recognition on iPhones allowing us to see someone’s Klout score just by aiming our phone at them — I think we’re in for a universe of hurt.

There are several reasons I worry about social profiling. The tale of Sam Fiorella being overlooked for a job because of a perceived low Klout score which appeared in Wired last week (and is also an early case study in Mark Schaefer’s book Return on Influence) is just one example. Sam Fiorella is brilliant, experienced and few people in the digital space can hold a candle to his qualifications to help brands kick ass. Yet some bozo somewhere eliminated him from contention for a digital strategist position because of his Klout score?

Whomever that person or agency is, be glad Sam is a professional and wouldn’t think of disclosing who you are. You might be laughed out of the industry for that one.

My problems with their improper use of Klout?

• Klout is just one way of looking at the data of influence
• Klout is limited to reach and resonance on social networks online, and further limited to only a handful of them.
• Klout doesn’t measure offline influence, email influence, word-of-mouth influence, publishing influence (blogs, news sites, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting), job titles, name recognition, whether you’re connected to the mafia and so on.
• Klout, to date, is very, very, very, very, very, very (is that enough veries?) immature. It doesn’t link what a person does offline or away from social profiles to their impact. For example, as of April 29, Walt Mossberg, arguably one of the most influential people in tech, has a Klout score of 68. Mine is 69. That’s bullshit. Better example: P.J. O’Rourke, perhaps one of the most influential political commentators of our day? Klout score of zero. But there’s an “I want to be P.J. O’Rourke” account on Twitter. It has a Klout score of 20.
• Then there’s my argument that not everyone is online with the intent and purpose of growing fans/friends/followers. Most people are online to stalk their ex’s and see pictures of their grandkids. Klout doesn’t mean anything to them and never will. I content that is true of most (greater than 75 percent) all all people online anywhere. Some research points in that direction, but no one has really asked those direct questions yet.

So the future Owyang tells of is one based on metrics that are incomplete and, on the whole, less than compelling.

Regardless of the accuracy and significance of the data used to measure influence, the whole notion of profiling is morally reprehensible to me. Perhaps idyllic and utopian in my opinion, and certainly based on the fact I grew up in a struggling, middle class family in a small town where what clothes you wore and where you lived was more important than whether or not you could speak coherently, I believe human beings to all be of equal value to the world. Ashton Kutcher doesn’t deserve to be treated better at a restaurant than Ashton Johnson, a resident director at Lyon College in Jonesboro, Arkansas. (Whom I picked randomly from a search of people named Ashton on LinkedIn.)

Yes, the reality of our world is that the restaurant in question thinks that treating Ashton Kutcher well might mean he’ll recommend them to millions of people on Twitter or that he’ll let them take his picture to hang on their wall of fame. Yes, marketers are going to do the same with online influencers because they’re dying to find some measurable outcome from social media. Maybe that 25,000-followers Twitter guy will drop a “loved shopping there” Tweet that will mean a few more “Likes” on Facebook!

But this doesn’t make it right. And one day, we may find, it won’t make it Constitutional.

What social profiling does is allows us to play favorites. Every time that’s been done in this country it has created one, or both, of two things:

• Animosity between groups of people, typically the haves and the have-nots
• Laws to abridge a person or organization’s ability to do so

Yes, there’s a difference between racism, sexism, religious prejudice and letting someone with more Twitter followers get First Class seat upgrades before everyone else. Or is there? We have loyalty clubs and rewards programs. They play favorites. But those programs are opt-in and fueled by purchase. I can buy enough airline tickets or miles to jump in front of you in line and have access to the private club.

Everyone else can’t buy online influence. It’s not a true opt-in, opt-out system. It’s prejudiced against people who don’t want or need to be well endowed, virtually. It is not a level playing field and can’t be leveled by money or time, necessarily.

What social profiling does is creates a system of being able to judge a person by their looks, even if those looks are augmented by technology, and say, “You’re not worthy.” I see nothing good coming from that.

Sadly, it’s going to take an Act of Congress — literally — to stop it from happening.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

Note: Amazon links here are affiliate ones.

The post The Problems With Social Profiling appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Now, this just so happens to coincide with Explore Nashville on April 13 which will feature, among other all-star speakers, Mark Schaefer. So I caught up with Mark this week to talk about the book, social influence’s long-term prospects, why Klout is the big focus right now and then what Mark will talk about in Nashville.

Wanna learn more from Mark? You can buy his book (affiliate link). Or you can take advantage of two in-person chances. First, Explore Nashville is April 13. Until Friday of this week you can get the first-100 pricing of $250. Sign up at GoToExplore.co now.

But on April 27, Mark hosts his own event, conveniently right down the road in Knoxville, Tenn., his hometown, called Social Slam. Learn more about his event over at the Social Slam website. Frankly, I’d sign up for both if I were you.

You won’t want to miss the business insights Mark has to give at Explore Nashville. He’ll be speaking there, along with an all-star lineup that includes H&R Block’s Scott Gulbransen, The Now Revolution co-author Amber Naslund, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Edelman Digital’s Zena Weist, Nichole Kelly of Full Frontal ROI, Tim Hayden from 44 Doors, Sam Ford from Peppercom and more. The event will also feature a number of excellent software providers and companies to help you navigate the waters of digital marketing. They’ll bring their knowledge to share as well as their products. This is a must-attend event, so register now!

The full day’s content, breakfast, lunch and a cocktail reception is $400, but THIS WEEK ONLY, the price is just $250! Can’t beat that! Go reserve your spot!

Explore is a five-city conference event series from Social Media Explorer and presented by Expion and Raven Internet Marketing Tools. Learn more and sign up for email updates for the city nearest you at GoToExplore.co.

The post Understanding Klout, Influence Marketing And Mark Schaefer appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Here’s the rub: Klout started with one data point – Twitter followers and reach. As it added more data points, some people’s scores went down and other’s went up. As more and more data points were added to the algorithm, almost everyone’s score went down (at least at some point) because we don’t all have awesome influence across every network (mine sucks on Friendster).

Even if their engineers did tinker with the algorithm, Klout was never meant to be the know-all, end-all to influence, no matter what Joe Fernandez (or Klout’s PR firm) tells you. (Though he probably wouldn’t claim that, anyway.) It was a consumer facing bell and whistle to get public buzz about the company that does its actual business behind the scenes working with brands to incorporate social data into their customer databases so they can make more informed decisions about customers including their social influence as a piece of relevant data. They’re focused on revenue and business. You’re focused on a big white number on a red square.

In short, your Klout score has never been more than an ego trip for you. If you counted on it, invested time in it, tried to understand it (or game it), that’s not a bad thing, but please recognize that it was all about your ego and your precious standing in your little world of believing you’re more important than you probably are.

Klout is one data point in measuring influence. There are hundreds of others that actually incorporate more important data, not just the amount of social networking followers. It’s probably the most overrated piece of social data in the history of social data. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, only that it’s not as important as anyone makes it out to be.

And canceling your Klout account means nothing other than you were upset your score went down. The algorithm changes attacked your sense of self-worth and you can’t face another day being a 37 rather than a 42.

Guess what? 99.9 percent of the people you really care about in the world don’t measure you with a number. Neither do most people who have half a brain. So why be a 0.1 per center? Ignore the score.

But removing your account means that other people who are sensibly using Klout for influencer prioritization and qualification will be left with less data, making their work potentially less effective.

But you wouldn’t understand that, would you? It’s not about them … Klout is all about you.

The post Please Don’t Quit Klout. Or At Least Don’t Announce It. appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Clout is the ability to influence, and get things done. Klout purports to be a measure of your online influence.

Presumably, the more Clout you have in real life, the more Klout you’ll have online. And just like in real life, it turns out that we’re all influential in different things.

What Klout is trying to do is admirable, in a way. But at times the execution will be off.

Because of my online connections, Klout seems to think I have sway in the areas of communications and social media. As such, I qualify for the occasional “Perk,” a freebie that I can try out with no strings attached, with the hopes that I might write about it or review it favorably.

Klout is very careful to communicate the complete lack of a quid pro quo, so this isn’t a complaint about that. They are also very responsive. I got a defective Weather Channel umbrella in the mail, and within a week they sent a working one.

No, this is a cautionary tale about using Klout to promote.

Gadget Geek

If you know me at all, you know I love gadgets. And I have been particularly intrigued with what Microsoft has been up to with its new Windows Phone platform. It is stunning in its beauty, simplicity, and functionality. As far as I am concerned, you can keep your iPhones and Androids. I’ve even talked friends into trying Windows Phone out — one bought a unit off eBay and probably would still be using it, but his company IT department wanted everyone on iPhones.

I am a Windows Phone enthusiast.

That’s why I was excited when my friend Joe told me about what was on his Facebook wall:

Apparently, my influence in the realm of Technology and Gadgets was high enough to warrant a nice Perk. I was looking forward to checking out a new device, and either getting my wife onto a Windows Phone, or using it as a loaner to friends who want to try one out. I was excited to log into Klout, and after accepting the perk and entering in my home address, I saw this:

Then, the details for claiming it:

Notice that it says that my phone is on the way, and then to be sure to RSVP for the party.

(I blacked out the URL and the code, as I don’t want to cause problems.)

Wires Crossed

Well, a few days later I received this:

Hi Ike,

Thanks for being part of Klout Perks! We see that you had signed up for the Windows Phone Perk, but upon further review we found that you are not in the New York City area.The Windows Phone Perk is meant for influencers in the NYC area as the event is New York City. However, the Windows Phone event will be hitting other cities soon, so please stay tuned for something in your area.

-The Klout Perks Team

I can understand that.

But boy, the whole process seemed rather poorly-worded. They took all of my information, only to then determine that I was not eligible?

I can forgive that.

Dropped Connection

I do have a problem, though, with the way it was pitched to Joe. My friend Joe got a notice on his wall that said I had earned the Perk — they used my name and my reputation to make a pitch to a friend of mine. They never did their homework about residency requirements, either. (I mean, I know I live in Alabama and everything, but I have many hip and trendy friends in New York City who actually turn to me for advice about technology, communications and social media. Or at least I thought I influenced them…)

I certainly hope Klout learns its lessons — the notion of Online Influence is an important one as traditional advertising models assumptions continue their implosion. If Klout doesn’t get it right, someone else will. Klout’s first-mover advantage in the space can be spoiled if people get the idea that they aren’t people anymore, but instead are just an arbitrary computation of tweets, retweets and engagements.

Clout means being able to influence, to inspire.
Clout means having the assurance you can gather others to get the job done.
Clout means never having to say you’re sorry, but doing it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

Disclosure: I have received the following from Klout:

• Weather Channel umbrella
• 6 bags of Pop Chips, with coupons
• A DVD of “Men of a Certain Age”
• A $10 card for Subway

(This post first appeared at Occam’s Razr)

The post The Best Laid Deals Oft Go Astray appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The challenge is that most businesses are stuck in traditional thinking and marketing that doesn’t translate well to a social atmosphere, on- or off-line. While many people are advocating the evolution of businesses to becoming, “social businesses,” few people are outlining specific changes that will help them.

Here are some ways traditional business need to evolve to become social:

1. The concept of an audience is outdated.

People are not out there with their hands in their laps listening intently as your company gives a speech, issues a press release or announces the new service you are excited about. They won’t wait for the 15-minute question and answer period at the end of that speech. They are commenting on your Facebook post on Saturday and looking for your answer to their tweet on Monday night. You may be able to start a conversation, but like real life conversations, you can’t be sure where it will end up.  Your only hope is to develop a community and then behave in a way that respects the members.  You’re going to live or die by that community.

2. Size (alone) does not matter.

Touting audience numbers is a holdover from the days when all businesses had to evaluate their advertising expenditures were magazine readership and Neilson T.V. viewership. The number of visitors, subscribers, likes and followers is not the most important fact.  Anyone can get 15,000 Twitter followers.  That’s why you see a Twitter handle with 300 followers that has a higher Klout score than one with twenty times that number.  Your hundred thousand Facebook “likes” is irrelevant if no one comments or clicks on your links because your posts won’t be shown in anyone’s feeds.  Even a million visitors isn’t really a big number if your bounce rate is 95%. Engagement is measurable and it’s far more important than the top line number.  The difference between the top line number and engagement is the essence of what it means to be social.

3. Empathy and caring trump strategy.

Strategy conjures up images of battle — you against the consumer. In the evolved, human form of marketing that is social media, empathy should inform the decisions you make. If you can empathize with the people you want to reach; if you can sense what they need, because you care about them, you’ll be better off than if you set out with the idea of making moves to force them into a position. How can you do that? They are talking to you and you are talking to them every day. You measure the results of the content you offer.  You listen. The studied, carefully crafted approach may have worked 15 years ago but it is devoid the feeling that is part of social interactions.

4. You can’t get people’s attention with marketing messages.

Marketing messages fall on deaf ears. There’s just too much noise out there.  No matter how nicely the message is wrapped up in a bow and placed on a blog or Facebook page, a marketing message is still a pitch, and people have become immune to the pitch.  We earn the right to market in the context of a relationship that has been built over time.  The most effective marketing doesn’t come from your business anyway.  The most effective marketing happens when influential people choose to share your story. This concept may be well known but judging by the actual behavior of brands, it may be the last of the dinosaur ideas to become extinct.

5. Writing is more important than copywriting.

The goal of copywriting is to convince someone to take an action. Copywriting is a holdover from the days of broadcast style marketing. It aims to manipulate and drive people to act. Writing brings people into your world, tells your story, and engages them. Then they decide to act. Copywriters, please don’t take offense. Good copywriters are good writers. Even if you only have six words at your disposal, you should be writing. Hemingway famously told a story in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That’s not copywriting.

6. It’s personal.

Some individuals at your organization will need to come out from behind the corporate curtain and speak from the heart. People connect with people.  People buy from people.  Who at your company is going to get comfortable with that?

7. Speed matters. A lot.

Big corporations tend to move slowly.  There are committees and meetings and chains of command. The legal department may want to get involved.  This process only offers the illusion of control and is the kiss of death in social media.  Solve this by creating social media guidelines and policies and carefully hiring and training customer facing employees.  There is no time for bureacracy in social media.

8. Results require patience.

So, they may ask, where’s the bottom line here? If your company is used to measuring the results of a campaign, they may have to shift their thinking.  Campaign thinking is antithetical to social media.  You may have a campaign to bring more people to your Facebook page but it’s what happens with them over time that matters.  Campaign thinking is short sighted. Social media is about creating relationships.  Relationships and trust take time. You may have to act quickly on social media, but look to the longer timline to measure results.

9. Influence is the new power.

The old media had centralized power.  They had the power to say, “No,” to your company’s article or press release. They had the power that came from being “it” for information. The new media has influence.  A  single mom blogger may only have 1,000 readers a month, but those readers check in every day, and they care deeply about the person blogging and what she thinks.  When that little blogger expresses love for your product or concern about your product’s ingredients, she might be able to change the behavior of a large portion of her readers. Multiply that times thousands of mom bloggers –some with scores of thousands of readers.  Of all the opportunities for brands to engage in social media, connecting with bloggers and building content-rich blogs to be the least universally adopted.

In this scene from Mad Men, replace the word “television” with “social media.”  When Harry, a media buyer at the agency, tentatively proposes that there should be a department devoted to this up-and-coming new media form called television, Roger Cooper anoints him head of this new department of one. That seems to be where some companies are right now with social media. It’s hard to blame them. Who really wants to step whole-heartedly into something that will require them to change the entire way they do business?

Related Articles:

The Twenty One Rules of Engagement (Brian Solis)

Social Media Can Change The Corporate Culture (Mitch Joel, Six Pixels)

The 3 Teams You Need To Organize and Scale Social Media  (Brass Tack Thinking)

The post 9 Ways Your Business Needs To Change To Become Social appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

To-Do lists are great for keeping us organized and helping us get through our busy days, but do they really help us accomplish creating the image, person, and character needed to run our business or live our lives more successfully?

What would happen if we turned that TO DO List into a TO BE list? What if at the end of that busy week, we could look back at all the things we accomplished that helped us discover our strengths, foster important relationships, and live a more balanced and joyful life?

‘Being’ and ‘doing’ are inseparable aspects of the human condition and attention must be paid to both, so I’m giving this a shot in 2011. I have started my TO BE list detailing the kind of person, business, and organization that I am willing to work hard on becoming and developing in the next weeks and months.

It is not complete by any means, but here’s my start:

To Be List -January 2-January9, 2011:

• TO BE more open and willing to share content that will empower and engage my customers in new and innovative ways. Tools like Shareaholic and Friendfeed make this easy and simple.
• TO BE more engaging on line. Comment more, share tweets of value, and extend the conversations beyond the chit chat. TwitLonger , Tweetalot, and Plurk are great ways to take your connections to the next level.
• TO BE more aware of my impact. Monitoring the velocity and reach of my contributions can help me be more targeted in my efforts. I love TweetReach and Klout as they give me insight into how I can be better impacting and influencing the conversation.
• TO BE more intentional; acknowledging publicly the contributions I see others making. Add members of Your Dream Team to a Twitter List or let your Top Followers know why they matter. I use the #WF-Why Follow to add to my #FF Follow Friday picks

At the end of this week, I hope to look back and see how much I have accomplished in these specific areas. (I have a sneaking suspicion, that if I can accomplish this; my “To Do” lists will be impacted as well.)
If you value being number one, increasing your market share, creating a more loyal following, or developing more powerful relationships, then you need a TO BE list and action strategies to ensure success.

What will  your TO BE  be in 2011?

Written By AngelaMaiers

Related articles

• Best of 2010, the Year Social went Operational (conversationagent.com)
• In Defense of Klout (newcommbiz.com)
• Trackur Gets More Klout, Adds Twitter Influence Metrics (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Klout is a Good Start But We Need More Ingredients for an Influencer Recipe (lifestreamblog.com)
• My 2011 Social Media Wish List (markevanstech.com)
• Brand Review, Anyone?… (Before Ringing in the New Year?) (personalbrandingblog.com)

The post My Social Media 2011 TO BE List – What’s Yours? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.