Social Media Snakes & Ladders

Social Media Summer School Day 2 - Involve Stakeholders //Callan Green
How to use Klout to identify & reward influencers

If you are involved in social media marketing, you are used to the deluge of new “must-try” tools on a daily basis. For me, Klout was just another one of these tools. Neat. You check your score and then move on. However, recently I decided to delve a little deeper, and I discovered that it’s actually an incredibly useful tool. And apparently, I’m not the only one.

So first off- What is Klout?

Simply put, Klout measures your level of influence on Twitter. The scores range from 0-100 and a higher Klout score represents a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout takes into account 25 variables (the details of which are kept a secret) in assessing a Twitter handle’s ability to drive people to action (e.g. reply, retweet or click-through). It aims to show how effective a person or company is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have.

But Klout does more than just give you a score. It also tells you who you are influenced by and who is influenced by you, the topics you are most influential on, and what percentile you are in compared to other Twitter users. For those using the tool to report Twitter success for clients, it charts your growth and shows your top RT’s and links.

Best of all, Klout is pretty darn reliable. To test the tool’s accuracy I ran our teams’ and clients’ handles through the program to see if my perception of people’s/companies’ influence would roughly align with Klout’s. For the most part, it did. I was impressed

And so, Klout became a part of my life. And as I’ve used it more and more, I’ve discovered there are three distinct ways to use Klout.
How to use Klout

1. Personal brand strategy – Sometimes we spend so much time working on our company’s Twitter handles or our clients’ handles that we let our own personal handles take a major backseat. However, we are missing a big opportunity here. How helpful is a RT of your company’s handle if no one is paying attention to you? Look at each section of the Klout report and make changes accordingly. Hint: If your score hasn’t changed in a while, scroll down to the bottom of the page to refresh your score every once in a while.

2. Social media metrics – Include Klout into your social media metrics reporting for your company or your clients. Personally, I’d feel comfortable allowing it to take the place of counting the numbers of RT’s, @ replies, bit.ly click-throughs, lists etc. All of those aim to show growth in Twitter influence and all of those are included in Klout’s calculations. Using this tool could save you bundles of reporting time. Note: even if you aren’t ready to use it as a replacement, it is an easy addition.

3. Identifying and rewarding influencers - a couple of early companies have already figured this out and created programs based off incentivizing influencers with high Klout scores. Virgin Air was one of the first to launch a program like this when they gave away free flights to select people with high Klout scores. I expect we’ll be seeing more of this as the tool continues to evolve.

Callan Green works in public relations and social media at Bailey Gardiner in San Diego. You can read her posts on the company’s marketing blog or follow her on Twitter

Social Media Summer School Day 0 - Introducing Social Media
By Jerry Daykin

A lot of people seem to think social media is a fad, or a way of young people sharing mundane updates with their friends, but it’s not. It is a powerful set of new tools which will never be taken away and which will cause a long term, fundamental shift in how we live & work.

Facebook is already connection almost 500 million friends, helping them share ideas, make recommendations and laying the groundwork for a semantic web. Twitter is equipping tens of millions of people to have new conversations and to engage directly with brands and individuals they love. YouTube has demonstrated the impact and power of video content in as great a way as the invention of TV first did.

Beyond all this lie blogs, social bookmarking, photo sharing sites, podcasts, location based services, brands’ own social networks - there is a lot out there, so much so in fact that the term ‘social media’ will most likely soon be redundant, all online & digital media will be social in some way.

Whilst these are just new communication tools, ways of sharing words, sounds, video & more like e-mail, the internet or the telephone before, it is also a fundamental shift in how we communicate. No longer must we discuss our interests with our neighbours or friends at the school gates, now the whole world is a forum for us to engage with.

This fundamentally is the power of social media: it allows us to build new communities in an era when traditional ideas of community and friendship had been eroded and worn down.

New communities are evolving with shared interests but without geographical confinement, communities which form and share their own opinions of brands and products. No one appreciates a company wading into their community and trying to sell them something, whether it be online or off-line, so firms must tread carefully when approaching these groups and look for genuine ways to use these new social media tools to engage them.

Social media has given back power to the people and helped form, a generation which considers itself immune to traditional marketing messages. Businesses must find new ways to communicate and to ensure their customers in turn are communicating their messages onwards. The mark of success in the digital age then is not just whether customers have heard and digested your message but whether they have responded to it, developed & evolved it and then passed it themselves. Doing so will help build lasting relationships and strong customer retention, as well as spreading your message to new and varied customers.

“Social media peeled back the layers of infrastructure, data, numbers, demographics, politics, procedures, and all of the corporate red tape that dug trenches between our brand and our customers.” - Brian Solis

The Fast Company: You are more influential than you think.

We started with a simple question: Who are the most influential people online right now?

That’s what The Influence Project is designed to answer. By participating, you will have your picture appear in the November issue of Fast Company magazine as part of an amazing photo spread. The more influence you demonstrate, the bigger your picture will be.

You may discover that you’re more influential than you think.

Influence is not only about having the most friends or followers. Real influence is about being able to affect the behavior of those you interact with, to get others in your social network to act on a suggestion or recommendation. When you post a link or recommend a site, how many people actually bother to check it out? And what’s the likelihood of those people then forwarding it on? How far does your influence spread?

This is the type of influence we’re looking for. We want to find the most influential person online. Who knows? It might even be you.

We’re fairly safe in the knowledge that we’re NOT the most influential people online, but it is an interesting project and one we wouldn’t have found out about without Vincent Haywood’s influence. As he points out it’s an interesting grass roots campaign and a sharp contrast to the heavily hyped Old Spice campaign this week - though both have a strong incentive for users to be sharing their branded content.

Well, what are you waiting for? Click the link and start finding out how influential you are.

A new way to measure your social level.

If our article on Klout and Vitrue earlier in the week has given you a taste for all things measurement-related here’s another two social projects that might be worth dipping your toe in.

TweetLevel (pictured above) does a pretty similar job to Klout but without requiring you to login and with more of a focus on comparing your influence to other people (rather than delving deeply into the reasoning behind your influence score). You may be interested to know that PerezHilton just edges out Justin Bieber as the most influential (94.3 vs 94.2) but that neither of them make the top 20 in terms of engagement.

Pownum (which we first heard about through our Want&Quiz) takes a rather different approach - it’s all about individuals scoring brands and organisations to create a score, rather than something more naturally calculated. Unless you happen to be a multinational organisation then you’re probably not on there, but it’s fun scoring a few of the organisations you love or hate.

The site owners state “pownum enables the public to rate organisations and by so doing generate an overall number - the pownum rating - based on everyone’s opinion. When organisations see their pownum rating in public they will be forced to act.”

It’s an interesting idea and they’ve got pretty impressive branding and an iOS app to boot so they’re clearly taking this quite seriously - of course consumer review sites (such as Ciao.com) have been around for years so it remains to be seen if this one can really offer anything better.