Influence marketing is at a crossroads. As we know it today, influence marketing is primarily defined by social scoring platforms like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

However, while these platforms are decent starting points for brands looking to identify influencers, they don’t really go deep enough into contextual and situational human relationships to offer a true metric of influence.

What’s needed is a bigger understanding of how the human psyche works; what makes us tick as people; what impacts our decision process; and where we can predict paths of influence based on transactional relationships, where historic interactions can be merged with current knowledge and the likelihood of a future action based on that knowledge.

To get to that level, though, we need to move to the Third Wave of Influence Marketing.

The First Wave of Influence: Celebrity Endorsements

While Dale Carnegie can arguably be called the Grandfather of Influence as we knew it before social scoring entered the fray, it was the late Dan Edelman and his championing of celebrity endorsements that ushered in the First Wave of Influence.

Edelman saw the value in connecting celebrities with brands to share that brand’s message. The middle of the last century saw Edelman employ people like movie star Vincent Price to be the voice of the California wine industry, and people like baseball legend Nolan Ryan and activist Gloria Steinem.

This type of brand recommendation resulted in several successful campaigns, and turned Edelman’s fledgling self-named company into a global public relations powerhouse.

However, in recent years, the sheen has started to dull with celebrity endorsements. In 2008, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published an excellent article on the dangers of celebrity endorsement, which included (lack of) relevance of the celebrity to the brand.

On her agency blog, Margie Clayman took it one step further and highlighted the worst case scenario for brands when using celebrity endorsements – that of the celebrity “going rogue”.

Tiger Woods and his infidelity; Lance Armstrong and his doping scandal; Oscar Pistorius and the killing of his girlfriend (drawing comparisons to the OJ Simpson murder trial).

The combination of dangers associated to celebrity endorsement, as well as consumers becoming smarter when connecting the dots between endorsement and context, paved the way for the next wave of influence.

The Second Wave of Influence: Social Scoring

The social web has opened up a veritable treasure trove of opportunities for individuals to become the “new celebrity”, or influencer. By having access to social networks, blogging and more, everyday web users can grow a sizable audience and loyal following.

Brands began to take notice of this and naturally wanted to connect. There was just one problem – old school broadcast messaging didn’t quite work on the new web. Instead of connecting with influencers, brands came across as spammy. They needed a conduit.

Enter social scoring.

Early movers in the social influence space like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex saw the opportunity to create a platform that could connect these social influencers to brands looking to use them to promote their goods.

Soon, public scores were attached to individuals, with the higher scoring ones being invited to accept free products from brands, in the hope of exposure to that influencer’s audience.

This was all well and good, until the cracks started to appear.

Questions arose over the validity of the data being used, since it was just based on publicly available information versus more in-depth conversations happening behind closed networks and privacy settings.

People also questioned the right of these platforms to create a public profile and attach a score to you, without your specific content.

Privacy violation was also a hot topic, as well as the creation of profiles of minors – a big no-no for the social networks where the scoring platforms were scraping information from.

Perhaps the biggest crack was the resulting shift in how influence was perceived. Instead of context and micro relationships, influence was now judged by a score and how well a user played into the algorithm of the scoring platforms.

Even today, after improvements to the data, people with social scoring profiles can see their scores drop if they stay away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook for a few days. This “you’re only influential if you’re online” approach has left people questioning the validity of scoring as a method of influence.

Much like celebrity endorsements before them, social scoring platforms are being questioned over the context of how their influence is measured, and where the true transactional influence – that where trust, relationship and more comes into play – sits in their algorithm.

Which leads us to the next wave.

The Third Wave of Influence: The Business of Influence

The biggest problem facing brands today when it comes to influence marketing is the actions and end result that come from their campaigns, and did they result in leads and customers.

While there are various aspects to an influence campaign – short term buzz, new product awareness, donation run for non-profits, etc – the long tail aspect is often forgotten: customer acquisition and loyalty.

The reason for this can be attributed to many things, but the biggest overriding factor is clear – brands are still using influence marketing campaigns as one-offs, and with a campaign mindset.

This means they find their influencers, agree on the promotion, let the influencer do his or her thing, and then analyze how successful that campaign was.

However, this misses a huge opportunity – to turn influence into true advocacy, and build a loyal and engaged army of fans that are also customers. To do this, brands need to start looking beyond the short-term (potential) viral effect of an influencer, and instead address the needs of the customer via the influencer.

A CRM platform like Nimble can help in this process, and taking influence beyond buzz and into true actionable business return is the natural next step.

Otherwise, the current direction of influence may erode brand trust. The recent indifference to the Kred and LinkedIn Top 1% emails showed early signs that perhaps consumers are getting tired of where we are today.

Instead of generic, we need to address complexity.

• We need to decipher opinions of those that matter and how they impact us;
• We need to adapt to fluid influence and how it continuously changes;
• We need to move beyond public personas and into micro influencers;
• And we need to stop confusing popularity and amplification for influence.

But most of all, we need to place the customer at the heart of the influence circle, and understand their needs; where they are in the purchase life cycle; and who immediately impacts their decisions based on their current situation (financial, emotional, etc).

The stage is set for The Third Wave of Influence Marketing – all it needs now is you.

In my role as Chief Technologist over at ArCompany, and from a general love of technology in general, I test, play with, compare and recommend all sorts of different platforms, software technologies and solutions.

There’s just something about the promise and potential of data and technology – when used properly and for the benefit of customers as well as the business – that gets my motor running (sorry, Steppenwolf fans!).

An interesting side effect of this is you get to see firsthand why certain social software technologies succeed while others fail, even though on paper they may look the same.

The ironic thing is, the ones that fail could easily avoid their fate – or at least have a better chance of avoiding it – by simply being better prepared.

They Don’t Understand the Space

One of the biggest mistakes where I see companies tripping over is building a platform for a space they have no experience in. Being a great coder or developer is one thing; being a great developer of coder for a space you don’t understand is another.

With social media offering a real-time and often pervasive invitation to look at how people converse with each other, and what opportunities this offers for brands and organizations, the potential for true customer understanding is huge.

But this level of understanding comes at a price – you need to understand text analytics, ontology, and how these two interconnect when it comes to identifying emotional triggers in a conversation.

Because each social platform has its own little nuances, this task becomes even more convoluted. If you, as a software company, don”t have the personnel that understands these nuances and what that means for data analysis and filtering, your platform will be rendered ineffective.

Too many companies would rather place this important part of the puzzle in the hands of developers only, instead of partnering developers with the kind of data analysts and human language scientists that can turn a so-and-so platform into something so much better at connecting the human dots.

This immediately limits the usefulness of the platform. After all, you wouldn’t ask a learner driver to get behind the wheel of an F1 race car, would you?

They’re In It Just for the Money

Businesses need to make money. That’s a given. As I’ve said several times before when talking about influence marketing and how companies should be using it, I challenge any business to stay afloat on goodwill and social proof alone.

But here’s the thing – when you create something purely with the intent of making a lot of money, and not really caring about the quality of the product or the customers that will be using it, it will more often than not bite you in the ass.

While he receives a lot of criticism about his platform, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg always struck me as having the right mentality when it came to this issue.

We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

Fourteen words. A simple mission statement in fourteen words. Yet it’s one that has seen Facebook become – arguably – the biggest social software platform in the world.

It’s a mantra the likes of Apple and Google follow. By putting the needs of the user first, and building solutions that will actually benefit them and solve their problems, success is the organic end result.

The way Apple products seamlessly connect to each other via the iCloud platform; the way Google+ drives every Google product touch-point when it comes to interacting with Google’s customers.

It wasn’t luck or chance that saw these three companies, and others like them, make this focus on the end user the core product feature. Each company knew that by offering something that just works, and isn’t complicated or trying to be something it’s not, money would follow.

Too many social software platforms enter the space thinking that social media is the golden goose for profit. It can be; but not if the sole intent is to make money and to heck with the user experience.

They Don’t Understand Community and Content

For many startups, marketing dollars are a luxury. While some companies are fortunate to have generous investors from day one, the majority of startups, especially in the social space, don’t enjoy that umbrella.

For these companies, content and community are two of the core methodologies for getting people to know about you and/or your product, and why they should use you over your competitors who have been established for a while.

Not only that, but you’re walking the talk as well as just sharing cool soundbites. This is just as true for established companies – the social space is a hive of conversations, groups, communities, chats and more. Get the right people for that part of your company’s growth and you’re giving yourself a fighting chance of success.

Look at companies like Marketwired, with Sheldon Levine; or Salesforce MarketingCloud, with Trish Forant; or InNetwork Inc., with Daniel Hebert and Kelly Jennex. The first two companies are well-established, while InNetwork Inc. has just come onto the scene in the last few months.

All three, though, share the mindset that content and community will help them not only grow awareness of their products and what their company does, but also create a loyal user-base as well as drive innovation through the feedback from their communities, and the content that community leaves points of view on.

Too many social software platforms, unfortunately, see content and community as a burden rather than an opportunity.

So instead of hiring the right people that can truly drive this part of the strategy, they instead do nothing or, perhaps worse, hand over the reins to engineers or developers that – through no fault of their own – are clearly out of their depth.

The three companies mentioned above show what happens when your social footprint strategy is as key as the social software you’re developing.

Wake Up or Break Up

In the last 12-18 months, there’s been a lot of consolidation in the social space. Some of this is through choice; some, through financial needs.

Either way, these companies have continued to evolve and, for the most part, improve. Because they’ve continued to keep the right people; stay on the right path; and concentrating on the user experience as much as the cool development experience.

Newer platforms coming into play continue this mindset. Guys like oneQube, TrendSpottr and SqueezeCMM, for instance, place utility and solutions over features and vapourware.

They understand the marketplace: what works, what doesn’t, and – more importantly – why. It’s not rocket science, yet so many social platforms make it look that way.

Then again, they only have themselves to blame. A CEO of a company that’s struggling in the space right now once said to me,

It doesn’t matter what we build. Good marketers can market shit.

While that might be true, it’s also a damning statement on your goals and vision, or lack thereof. While you might be able to sell shit, customers and users that can’t use that shit will soon move elsewhere, where there needs are actually met.

Leaving you to wonder why it’s your company that’s now in the shit…

UX image: headspace

In their excellent book Humanize, authors Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter share their insights into why a truly successful business needs to take the reasons social media has enjoyed exponential growth as a business imprint, and implement it across the organization.

It takes more than simply activating staff on social media and being more “approachable” as a business on the social web – it’s a complete mindset and culture change, for which many organizations today are still not ready for.

It’s probably one of the best business books on this topic today, and is highly recommended.

But as well as offering a roadmap into why organizations need to adapt the social mindset to succeed in today’s business landscape, Humanize – and the underlying concepts within it – raises another, much more important factor: that of empathy as a social currency.

There’s More to Being Human Than Simply Being a People Business

Leading website Ragan.com, a destination for communications and PR professionals globally, published an article detailing the case of a waitress that worked at pub restaurant chain Hooters.

In the article, Sandra Lupo shares how she had to undergo surgery to remove a brain tumour. As a result of the surgery, she was left bald and sporting a scar from where the surgery left its mark.

Upon returning to Hooters, she was advised by her boss – via the Regional Manager for that particular locale – that she would have to wear a wig to hide her baldness.

Lupo couldn’t afford to pay for the wig; the manager of the restaurant wouldn’t cover the cost. Lupo wore a borrowed one which caused scalp irritation so she stopped wearing it, her hours were cut as a result, and because of this chain of events Lupo quit.

She’s now suing the restaurant from a disability angle, which the restaurant is contesting.

Lupo’s case, and the article at Ragan.com, raises a key point that many organizations are failing to address today, when looking to turn their business into not only a social business, but one where the culture throughout is pervasive with the right mindset to begin with, from the top down.

We’ve spoken with, and helped, several organizations that have implemented cultural shifts. Shifts that:

• Have enabled employees to become social ambassadors;
• Have identified weak processes and pivoted where needed;
• Have empowered people of all levels to help drive decisions because they’re the most suitable to do so, even if – by rank and seniority at the organization – they’re more junior.

And while this shift is important and offers validation of where we believe business needs to be moving, there are still many organizations that employ this approach and yet forget the core tenet of being human, or a social business, or a people-led organization.

And that tenet is empathy.

Empathy is a Social Currency

The greatest customer service assistant – whether in a retail environment or on the other end of a phone line in a call centre environment – knows that when a customer complains, it’s almost universally never directed at them in person.

Rather, it’s the brand that’s coming under fire. With that knowledge, the CSA can adopt two approaches:

• Tow the company line no matter what claims the customer may have that could be counter to the organization’s edict;
• Apply empathy to the situation, placing themselves in the customer’s shoes, and working together to resolve the matter with no need for an escalation process to be invoked.

The former option may be the company’s preferred method, when working to the letter of the law, but it’s the latter that will leave a far more satisfactory outcome and potentially set that customer on the path to becoming a true brand advocate.

This approach has been taken with the more successful companies on social media; accepting that there will always be instances where a message was lost, a promotion was poorly timed, or a response took longer than normal.

As social media opens up multiple channels for the connected consumer to air grievances on, so the need grows for organizations to move away from just being a people business when it comes to customers, and adopt to being a provider in the empathy business as well.

But this should absolutely not be restricted to the customer on an external basis only – it should also be extended to the internal customer as well.

The Culture of Empathy for the Internal Customer

Smart organizations know that employees are also customers. They may not always buy the company product – that purchase still needs to earned by delivering on the sales promise – but they do help shape the purchase decisions of their family, friends and social connections.

Even away from the immediate connections, your employees – and their passion for the organization – are core to how your bottom line is affected.

When potential customers contact a business with regards a product, they don’t care about the sales team now. They’ve already researched the product online and through trusted peers, with 71% of consumers making a purchase based on social media referrals and 74% of consumers preferring social network peer connections to influence the decision-making process.

With the traditional sales team now being bypassed for their recommendations, customers are looking to talk directly with employees immediately attached to the product or service the inquiry is about.

According to Inc., if that employee isn’t up to speed with the product and the company’s support, future plans, comparisons to competitor products, hands-on support and more, that customer becomes a lost opportunity and will move on to your competitor.

As every organizational development trainer knows, the valued employee not only stays with the organization longer; they want to be an embedded part of the organization across multiple areas, and not just where their current position may limit them to.

And the way to value the employee? Empathy.

In the case of Sandra Lupo and Hooters, it could be argued that Hooters did nothing wrong legally. If part of the Hooters “experience” is the physical make-up of the waitresses, then Hooters could have a case that Lupo’s appearance didn’t match the company prerequisite, no matter how questionable we may feel that stance is (if, indeed, that is the company stance when defending the suit).

But the company line isn’t always the best one; nor does it have to be strictly adhered to.

The greatest leaders know that the ability to divert from a course of action, or a path that’s always been trod, is the biggest differentiator between a good company and a great one.

In the case of Hooters, the cost of providing a custom wig for a waitress would allow them to maintain the outward requirements of front-facing waitresses, while understanding and alleviating the pain of someone whose appearance is temporarily “different” through hugely unfortunate circumstances.

Instead of facing a legal case, they have shown belief and support for the people behind their company’s success – the very cultural approach that turns a people business into a human organization.

The Path to Empathy Starts Here

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is in thinking the only requirement to be successful on social media – or business, in general – is to be human. That is, be your customer’s friend and speak to them as one.

Yet, as Humanize shows, and as many brands have found out, “being human” is not the same as humanizing your organization. Nor is it something your customers truly want.

In a report commissioned by the Corporate Executive Board, one of the key highlights that the report identified is consumers prefer simplicity in the decision-making process, leading to an 86% chance of interest turning into a purchase. Perhaps even more tellingly, only 23% actually cared about a brand relationship (or friendship), which counters the posit you need to be friends with your customers.

Instead, the most successful organizations were the ones that were empathetic, in the word’s truest sense:

…the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; – Merriam Webster dictionary.

By understanding what it means to empathize, an organization can implement the culture needed to serve both internal and external customers to drive increased loyalty, engagement, advocacy and collaboration through involvement across the board.

Understanding the Mindset of Employees and Customers

Tracking software with advanced text analytics algorithms are beginning to identify true nuances of conversations between people. Nouns, verbs and adjectives can be layered upon the bigger conversation, and detect mood swings, emotional states, hidden messages and more.

Externally, being aware of these states of mind can help organizations prepare a message for individual customers (based on group personas as well as individual ones) that help show empathy to a current situation, and how your brand can help.

Internally, with tools like Yammer being widespread across many organizations, organizations can identify an employee who feels unappreciated or who has a great idea that isn’t being promoted. This clearly needs treading carefully with regards privacy and the employer/employee relationship, but is worth the effort to agree on with all parties.

Experiencing the Feelings of Another

There’s a reasonably popular television show called Undercover Boss, that explores what happens when the CEO of an organization is heavily disguised and placed into the workforce for a week, to see how well the company is run and identify the great people doing great things.

While not every organization’s CEO needs to do the same, remembering what it was that made your company such a great place to work in the first place is something that should be revisited often.

Adopt an open office policy where every employee’s views can be heard without bias or fear of recourse; spend a day on the job of various department workers; visit the facilities provided, like cafeteria and the quality of services provided to employees while in your care. Be an employee again to experience where your organization needs to make changes.

From a customer point of view, follow their footsteps at every touch-point of their connection to your organization. How does customer service handle their call; what does tech support look like; how are your resellers treating them; how are your complaints heard online when voiced? Be the customer again and resolve the issues before your competitors do.

Being a people organization is one thing; being an organization where people are human and empathize with the flaws as well as the strengths of other humans connected to the organization, both internally as well as externally, is where the true people part comes into play.

The challenge is yours to accept.

A version of this post originally appeared on the ArCompany blog.

The image in question is the one below.

The messaging behind the campaign is simple – while Liking unicef.se (unicef Sweden) on Facebook is all well and good, and they certainly wouldn’t discourage that, it costs money to actually carry out the work unicef and other non-profits do every day of the week.

That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is potentially alienating the very people you’re pseudo-criticizing in a campaign like this, by implying slacktivism doesn’t do any good.

Slacktivism and What Defines Action

A relatively new term, slacktivism is regarded as follows:

Slacktivist activities include signing Internet petitions, joining a community organization without contributing to the organization’s efforts, copying and pasting of social network statuses or messages or altering one’s personal data or avatar on social network services. – Wikipedia

To use the slacktivism definition with regards the unicef.se ad, the suggestion is all the social activity in the world (in this case, Facebook Likes) isn’t going to save lives because it’s not resulting in hard cash.

That view is echoed in a comment on Gini’s Facebook wall around the ad by marketing professional Lisa Byrne:

People think clicking like means they are now supporting in some way cos they’re spreading a message – it’s all too easy a copout. I love what Unicef did – CALL TO ACTION PEOPLE!

This implies that unless hard cash is being donated, or a more substantial action taken other than Liking a status update or Page, then it’s not really action at all. Which, while that viewpoint is understandable, misses the longer tail picture.

The Benefits of Slacktivism

In their excellent book Social Change Anytime Everywhere, authors and non-profit specialists Allyson Kapin and Amy Sample Ward share case studies, examples and methods on how to support non-profits via social media (as well as through “traditional” methods).

In Chapter 2 of the book, they look at the slacktivism question, and offer a very balanced overview of both pros and cons.

From the book:

Regardless of the era (this isn’t a new phenomena), the emphasis and effort spent on spreading information and raising awareness has always resulted in people doing what organizations ask, even if it’s considered slacktivism.

Liking a Page, liking a post, and all the rest are not the actions and real impact you’re looking for, ultimately, but those actions are important! Why? Because, through them, people are telling you that they will do what you ask to support the cause.

As both Kapin and Ward point out, while the end goal may be financial donations, the path to making those donations happen can come in many forms, and the act of spreading awareness – even through something as simple as a Like – is part of that path.

Taking it further is Steven Edward Streight, a New York-based senior copywriter and trustee for a local non-profit. In Steven’s words:

I am a trustee of a local non-profit. The grant writer told us that Facebook Likes, Comments, and Shares actually do help with getting grants and donors, because social media interactions indicate we are reaching out to the community and the community supports what we do (Peoria Historical Society). So I believe that the non-profit is wrong.

This endorsement is a perfect example of why slacktivism, even though it may not be a financial action, should not be dismissed as not adding anything to the bottom line.

The ROI Equation

Back in 2009, I founded a social media-led charity project called 12for12k. The goal was to find 12 charities, and support a different one throughout the 12 months of 2009, and hopefully raise $12,000 per charity throughout the year. Hence the name 12for12k.

I was fortunate to be surrounded by some very kind and awesome friends – people like Susan Murphy, Jon Aston, Darin Bernston, Rachel Kay, John Haydon and many, many more who believed in the project and donated their time and expertise for free.

Since the aim from day one was to give 100% of donations to the supported charities, this free expertise was a Godsend.

However, as focused and as determined this original small group was, there’s no way in heck we’d raise $12,000 between 6-8 people every month. And this is where a combination of awesome supporters and slacktivism came into play.

We created avatars that people could display on Twitter and Facebook. We connected with blog partners who would feature each new charity every month. We asked people that couldn’t afford to donate to simply share or blog posts and other content across Facebook and Twitter.

And it worked. I can give you at least fifty or so examples of people struggling financially, but who worked their asses off at getting the charities in front of more fortunate friends (from a financial point of view).

Those passive little 12for12k avatars that started popping up across social networks? People saw them standing out from others, and asked about 12for12k and the charities we were supporting.

This led to several mainstream media news stories and features about the project.

The end result? While we didn’t hit the overall goal of $144,000 across 12 charities, we did raise more than $91,000 in 12 months, and a further $9,000 in the first month of 2010.

A Clear Definition of Action?

These examples, and many more like them, highlight a simple fact – while unicef’s ad may be technically correct, it doesn’t start and end there.

No-one is denying that non-profits need donations to carry out the awesome and often-hard and unrecognized work that they do. It’s why between 30,000 and 60,000 non-profits are believed to close each year – and that’s just in the U.S.

The truth of the matter is, we need to support non-profits financially, and ensure the causes most at supported by non-profits can actually be helped. But to suggest that slacktivism isn’t helping is doing a huge disservice to those folks that can’t afford to help financially, but want to help in any other way they can.

This is where social media-led action – or slacktivism, if you like – can raise awareness and put a charity in front of the very people that can not only donate at that time, but become involved more deeply with the charity and support for years to come.

Turn these people away, and the next non-profit to “fail” could be one that doesn’t see value in all forms of support beyond financial.

And one final piece of irony, that made me smile wryly when I saw the unicef ad – UNICEF USA approached 12for12k early in 2009 to partner with them, and that partnership happened in June 2009.

I guess a project that uses slacktivism as a key component can offer benefits…

These early movers in the influence space have carved a niche for themselves and the brands they’re looking to work with, by attempting to provide data on who the most influential online users are.

By connecting brands with these online influencers, the hope is that brand’s message will be amplified to the Nth degree and more awareness around the brand will ensue.

However, a new report based on a global survey of 1,3000 marketers, PR professionals and brand managers/agencies highlights brand awareness as being less of a goal when it comes to influence marketing.

Instead, lead generation and customer acquisition are much more important, and where brands are allocating their budgets in the next 12 months and beyond.

The report also shows that social scoring platforms lack trust and authority when it comes to the very people these platforms are looking to work with.

Brand Awareness Alone Doesn’t Pay the Bills

There are a few key insights that the report provides, from how influence marketing is perceived today to how effective those using influence marketing as part of their overall strategy perceive today’s more popular platforms.

However, it’s the fact that influence marketing is seen as a lead generation and customer acquisition tool that stands out.

It also lends weight to why scoring platforms like Klout, etc, come under fire for the lack of results (perceived or actual) when used as the influence marketing tool of choice.

As shown by the image above, almost 44% of respondents see influence marketing as a lead generation tool, with almost 25% seeing it as a customer acquisition tool. Just over 16% see it as a branding exercise.

With social scoring platforms like Klout (currently) not sharing the kind of measurement that shows what leads and customer acquisition their client promotions have resulted in, it leads to another concern for marketers – how effective are these platforms?

This is reflected in the survey responses, with more than half feeling today’s scoring platforms aren’t effective at identification of the type of influencers that can drive leads and customer acquisition goals.

Additionally, more than one fifth felt the results were too varied, with only 5% of respondents believing today’s scoring approach to influence were effective for their goals when starting a campaign.

While not every influence marketing campaign needs to drive sales all the time, the fact of the matter is brand awareness doesn’t pay the bills nor drive profit.

Blog posts and social shares are nice to have for social proof, but businesses are placing success metrics on the financial and customer return influence marketing campaigns drive, not X amount of social network updates.

Social Scoring May Be Waning But True Influence Marketing is Just Beginning

While the report shows there’s a clear gap between what PR/marketers see as the strategy and the results generated by scoring tools, it also shows that they clearly differentiate between “social scoring influence” and “influence marketing”.

As the above figure shows, almost 2/3 of all respondents identify social scores as simply a starting point in their campaign – they still see the need to filter through the results manually and filter the most relevant influencers.

Additionally, almost 20% use scoring as part of a bigger marketing strategy and not as a standalone tool. Less than 5% use scoring as a key part of their overall strategies and tactics.

This ties in perfectly to further data from the report, when discussing how whether they’ll be using influence marketing, and how much of their marketing budgets are being allocated for the next 12 months and beyond.

According to the report, almost half – 44.1% – will be creating an influence marketing campaign in the next 12 months, with just over 30% indicating the likelihood of using influence marketing as part of an integrated strategy.

When it comes to actual budgets, however, there’s a clear gap between how much will be allocated to “social scoring” and how much will be allocated to actual “influence marketing”.

The figure above represents how many respondents will use social scoring as part of their influencer outreach. Almost two thirds say it’s unlikely, as the methodology is not seen as a valid identification/measurement tool.

Just over one fifth will use scoring, but only as part of a bigger strategy, while less than 9% are sold on scoring as a key part in the influence marketing arsenal.

The Future of Influence Marketing

The full report makes for some pretty interesting reading overall, but it’s the takeaways shared in this post that I find to be particularly illuminating.

While I’ve personally questioned the value of social scoring when it comes to true influence versus online popularity and amplification, it’s been seen from a biased bubble, if you like.

The survey carried out by Sensei Inc. and ArCompany was open to anyone to complete, although they had to be representative of marketing, PR and communications disciplines.

Over 1,300 respondents from across the globe represented a good mix of professions and business functions. In fact, business-to-business (B2B) was serviced just as much as business-to-consumer (B2C) markets – another interesting statistic, given social media’s penchant to be more acceptable in the B2C market.

Because of this mix, the results took me completely by surprise when it came to how scoring was perceived by the very professionals and verticals these platforms are hoping to sell their services too.

Yet perhaps I shouldn’t have been as surprised.

As both Sam Fiorella and I have found, in numerous interviews and research for our imminent Influence Marketing book, we’re moving beyond today’s approach of amplified distribution when it comes to influence, and into true, measurable and actionable data, metrics and identification of true influence.

While scoring may continue to be popular when it comes to consumer awareness and where people stand with their score on these platforms, the business decision-makers are looking for more tangible results.

That bodes well for the future of influence, and for businesses working in this space.

Here’s to the next wave.

You can access the full report here.

If you type the term “social media crisis” into Google, you’ll receive about 1.7 million results. Remove the quotation marks, and you’ll get almost 700 million results.

Social media consultants will point to the likes of Motrin, Chick-Fil-A, Applebee’s, Kenneth Cole, United Airlines and others like them as examples of a social media crisis, where a business has come under heavy fire online on their own social channels, as well as blog posts and social updates elsewhere.

While it’s true that social media amplifies a crisis when it happens, it doesn’t actually create the crisis – the company does.

Social Media Crisis or a Crisis on Social Media?

Over the last few days, two more companies have found themselves the target of online unrest and extremely vocal criticism of their business practices.

The Royal Bank of Canada – RBC – is currently facing a firestorm of vitriol surrounding media reports that they’re laying off full-time employed Canadian workers and replacing them with temporary workers from abroad.

This is counter to a Canadian government Temporary Foreign Worker Program that only allows such workers to be used if there are no suitable Canadians. As someone who kind of went through this process when I moved to Canada, I understand why they have it in place.

According to the media reports, RBC is bypassing this program by using an outsourced company based in the U.S. to hire temporary workers, and then have the current full-time workers train the temporary staff to replace them.

The response on social media has been swift and forceful.

On Facebook, a “Boycott Royal Bank of Canada” page went up and has (at the time of writing) garnered more than 6,000 likes in less than 24 hours.

The page shares links to articles on how this situation arose, other related content in the provincial government’s part, and stories from current customers looking to close their accounts.

RBC, for their part, issued a statement on their Facebook page, but unfortunately that fuelled the flames even more (click to expand).

It’s not just RBC that’s under fire today. Fellow Canadian company Hootsuite, who develop one of the leading social dashboard’s, is facing criticism for using unpaid interns.

In a recent “job listing” on their careers page, Hootsuite offered the following:

Note this position is a three month internship at present with a commitment of Monday to Friday with core hours of 9 a.m. -5 p.m. and that the role is unpaid.

The word “internship” divides a lot of business owners, as well as potential interns. In the past, internships were mostly unpaid – the applicant would normally be a college student looking for work experience, and for that experience they would provide free labour to the business that “employed” them.

However, in recent years, unpaid internships have become a hot topic of debate, with calls for them to be abolished and students paid accordingly.

In Hootsuite’s case, where the main outcry has gained even more steam is that it’s illegal in the Canadian province where Hootsuite are based to not pay for the work the interns would be doing.

The British Columbia Employment Standards Act states:

…employees must be paid at least the minimum wage (currently $10.25 per hour), and an intern performing duties and responsibilities that would normally be assigned to an employee must be paid the same wages and benefits that an employee would collect.

The key point from that statement is “…performing duties and responsibilities that would normally be assigned to an employee…”.

Since the original internship ad was for positions covering “affiliate marketing”, “strategic accounts analyst” and “social media coach”, it’s a pretty safe bet to assume these would normally be handled by full-time employees.

While Hootsuite has since removed the ad, and their CEO responded to the criticism that the process is “under review”, their social channels are pretty quiet, particularly Facebook where questions are being asked.

It’s not that these questions have simply been missed – Hootsuite is still answering questions on Facebook, but they’re just skewed towards non-negative ones.

The two examples above, and the ones from the introduction of this post, are core reasons why it’s not social media that causes a crisis, but the actions of a business.

Business Practices Are What Cause Outrage

While social media is the perfect channel for amplification of criticism and the kind of outcry we’re seeing here, it’s not the instigating channel.

Instead, that lay with the executive decision at RBC and the hiring policy of Hootsuite. Both of these decisions are made offline.

The fact they’ve now made their way online and are evoking such vocal condemnation – more so with RBC – is a perfect example of how social communications may have changed the way we do business, but the underlying business practice is the one that still defines a company’s perception.

My friend, and super smart communications professional, Ann Marie van den Hurk offers some insightful thoughts. Ann Marie is Principal of Mind the Gap Public Relations, as well as author of upcoming book Social Media Crisis Communications: Preparing for, Preventing, and Surviving a Public Relations #FAIL.

Business practices are what cause outrage against companies. Outrage is outrage, regardless of where it starts. It could start online or offline and then move to social media and spread. It doesn’t matter. It is real either way. It is the business practices and then their response to customers’ concerns and anger. Or, in this case, lack of response to the outrage.

As shown by the lack of response (so far) on both RBC and Hootsuite’s Facebook pages, silence from a brand can do more damage than interaction. The ease of social media in enabling people to vent their frustrations – and vent even more if/when these frustrations are unanswered – can make life pretty uncomfortable for brands caught in this kind of crossfire.

Social media is a perfect tool for outrage exasperation. It is a better tool than any other channels for spreading outrage. People are more linked. The cost of access is very low. People who were angry at an organization or a situation before social media had limited options. Instead of shrugging it off and throwing up their hands, the outraged can now use those same hands to take to social media, expressing themselves and organize with like-minded individuals.

This is the new battlefield brands continue to find themselves in today. Some are better prepared for it; others, less so.

While both RBC and Hootsuite have posted official “responses” on either their own Facebook pages or to specific media channels, the bigger bulk of the questions being asked – from individuals – are being left unanswered.

In Hootsuite’s case, answering “positive” questions while bypassing critical ones during the same time phase could be seen as avoiding the issue, despite the communication from Hootsuite elsewhere.

Organizations are slowly getting more sensitive to outrage and are putting a higher priority on dealing with it; however organizations aren’t moving that the same speed as those outraged. The open, interactive attitudes of social media and the traditional business culture aren’t exactly well matched. Most organization’s management teams have not been able to keep pace with the explosion of social media usage and are ill equipped to manage community outrage.

As Ann Marie points out so eloquently in all three quotes above, social media is a challenging space when it comes to crisis communications.

It can be a very fine line to tread – when do we respond, who do we respond to, and should we respond or will be be flaming the fire even more?

In some cases, there really is no victory to be had by the brand, regardless of how well they respond, which doesn’t help matters.

One thing we can learn, though, is social media will continue to be the torch bearer to hold companies to task. Perhaps the lesson is to look internally first and improve the business practice (perceived or real), before the external voices react to the internal actions.

Time will tell.

Note – my sincere thanks to Ann Marie for her time and sharing her expertise.

If there’s one key area that social network giant Facebook has been weak in, its the mobile arena.

Users of the official Facebook app for both major platforms Android and iPhone, as well as other handsets manufacturers, have had to dealt with slow loads, poor user interfaces, bugs and other such quirks.

This is especially true when comparing the Facebook mobile experience to the Google+ one, with the Android app in particular offering a seamless experience.

Facebook, for their part, are clearly aware of this. There are rumours that they’ll be presenting the “Facebook phone” at a special event this week, and Mark Zuckerberg has often been cited as telling his mobile developers they need to up their game.

However, a recent media update would suggest Facebook isn’t just resting its laurels on a new Android-powered Facebook phone – it’s also going much more integrated with mobile leading its strategy for the remainder of 2013 and beyond.

Reanimating “The FaceBook” for the Connected Consumer

Rumoured to have been in production for the last six months, The FaceBook (in a nice tip to the company’s original name) is a tech-laden tablet that’s set to go head-to-head with the MacBook Air and the new, extremely powerful-looking Google Chromebook Pixel.

Built solely for the Facebook user, The FaceBook looks set to be the Palo Alto giant’s final piece of the puzzle when it comes to owning the social web. It’s no secret that the platform is being shaped to ensure users never need to go anywhere else, as brands, e-commerce, graph search and more integrate to offer the complete experience.

Facebook doesn’t want people using Google, and the back-and -forth between the two tech giants has seen the battle often get ugly as users are bombarded with why one network is better than the other.

Google seemed to have taken the lead, with its Google+ network integrating across all Google properties and allowing Plussers to have access to pretty much everything they need in one place.

However, Facebook has a much higher user base, as well as one key factor – the Facebook experience is such a heavy part of web users’ culture now, it’d be hard for many to leave.

The FaceBook tablet aims to ensure there’s no need to.

The FaceBook Integrated Experience

Taking a lesson from Google and how their G+ user can access all of google’s main properties from one key home base (Google+), Facebook has made some interesting decisions when it comes to its new The FaceBook.

• Facebook will launch its own version of the App store, and when you connect you switch on The FaceBook, all your current apps and games will be synced for you.
• Built with a high-density retina display, The FaceBook will take a picture of your face while powering up, and cross-reference the image with your personal photos to ensure you are the official user of the account. This is to prevent future hacking.
• Eye-tracking and sentiment detection software will let Facebook know where on your profile you’re looking the most, and tailor each visit for you. This is Facebook’s attempt to truly serve users ads that they’re interested in, increasing the propensity of a click.
• Voice recognition will allow you to talk and these will be posted as text updates for users without The FaceBook, and voice updates for other tablet users.
• Running its own version of a Google+ Hangout (thanks to Facebook’s partnership with Skype), The FaceBook will detect who you speak with the most and automatically connect with those people when they’re online. Using the eye-tracking and sentiment detection software again will allow Facebook to see when you’re happy to talk with someone and when you want to ignore, and will act accordingly.
• The camera will detect your background and change your profile colour scheme to match your surroundings and mood, using Chameleon™ technology.

These are just some of the early stats and features that have been shared so far. But it’s clear to see from just these alone how seriously Facebook is taking this shifting trend to mobile, smartphone-powered browsing experiences.

With a suggested price point of $999, keeping it under the magic thousand dollar number, it’s also clear Facebook have high hopes of attracting a large number of its existing web-based user base when The FaceBook is launched later this year.

Moving the Old to the New – What Next?

One of the big questions that The FaceBook poses is, what happens now for the web version of Facebook? After all, even though such a technology-enabled tablet is coming in at under a thousand bucks, that’s still out of the reach of many of Facebook’s current users.

The hope for those that can’t initially afford The FaceBook is that they’ll first migrate to the rumoured Facebook phone, and once they’ve had that a year, they will be eligible for a free upgrade to The FaceBook itself.

If Facebook can take the hit on the cost of that – and if any company can, it’s probably Facebook – then we might just be seeing the start of Zuckerberg’s global private social network be taking shape.

Where that leaves Google, Twitter, etc, is anyone’s guess – one thing’s for sure, the next 12 months is going to be one heck of a battlefield.

Full details of The FaceBook announcement can be found here.

Last month, Twitter published an article on their developer blog, about new metadata being added to the Twitter API. There were two additions – one to help identify the language of a tweet, while the other was the ability to allow developers to “rank” tweets.

This second addition is of particular interest when it comes to influence marketing, and how we identify influencers, since it offers the potential to further dilute the ability to truly connect relevant influencers and advocates to the brands that are looking to work with them.

Now, in fairness, Twitter hasn’t divulged exactly how the ranking ability may work, apart from the option to possibly gauge tweets by a “none”, “low”, “medium” and “high” rank. It may be there’s a lot more context to the way the API will identify these tweets.

However, in the meantime, the worry is that true influence, yet again, is being demoted to nothing more than an algorithmic rank with no real context behind it. When this happens, it takes us back to the “influencer elite” I’ve talked about previously on the Influence Marketing blog.

Which begs the question, can the everyday influencer still exist?

The Grading of the Social Web

It’s not just Twitter that’s taking this approach. Take a look at Google and the importance they’re placing on their Authorship Markup algorithm. Or Facebook with its ever-changing algorithm that places more emphasis on paying for a Sponsored Story to have your content seen versus organic appearance in a feed.

There’s no doubt that the social web is becoming an arena of rank and perceived import – yet questions remain as to the validity of the import when it’s based on how well you play with a platform’s rules.

For example, let’s say you don’t have Google Authorship enabled on your blog or website, yet you write a fantastic white paper on the origins of mankind that challenges everything we’ve believed until now.

When someone searches for “the origins of mankind” on Google, your expertise would (should) probably be the one that people should read. Yet because someone with less expertise utilizes the Authorship Markup script, they actually appear more reverential than you for that particular search.

The same goes with Twitter’s new API. Let’s say they base their authority score on the amount of retweets and engagement a tweet receives. While this is a good starting point, it lacks the more important aspects of context, perception and situation at the time.

This is particularly true when large events are happening.

Let’s say someone uses the hashtag for the Oscars to post an asinine comment about the price of popcorn at their local 7-Eleven. It gets 1,000 reweets and 500 favourites. That may appear as a high scoring tweet based on the new API.

But does it have the context of an Empire Magazine journalist in the UK only getting 20-30 retweets as he/she live-tweets about the event from the UK? Doesn’t their expertise in the movie arena make them more authority-driven?

This is the problem with grading importance based on reactions versus instilling a true action – the sign of an influential impact. It also changes the very fabric of influence – no bad thing on its own, but when it comes to trying to clear the muddied waters of the last few years, it can add to the confusion.

Which brings us back to the topic of this post.

The Everyday Influencer and Where They Fit Today

One of the criticisms levied at influence marketing today is the lack of results for brands using the medium. And that’s a fair criticism.

This can be attributed to several things – generic social scores with no real relevance to the brand in question; lack of understanding and education on the brand’s behalf; and the gamification of social media channels to be seen as someone of influence.

Whatever the reason, influence has undergone some drastic changes in the last few years when compared to Carnegie’s principle, and not always for the better. The biggest impact this has had is in nullifying true individual influence, the kind that brands really want – and need – to connect with.

Activity and popularity online has led to people being seen as influencers, while the true influencers – the ones not worried about social scoring and perceived ranking – are the ones that should be identified.

These “everyday influencers” are finding themselves marginalized because they’re not playing to a computational score; nor are their hands being tied by a search engine’s goal of making you use all their products to be seen as relevant.

The problem is, these are exactly the people brands should be connecting with. They’re the advocates; the consumer marketers; the people who truly have the ear of those that make a difference when it comes to the purchase cycle of their friends, colleagues and peers.

As public scoring and authority plays continue to evolve and find bigger footholds across the web, the question becomes:

Can the everyday influencer still exist, when the games being played to “be” one nullify results based on much deeper questions?

My co-author on Influence Marketing Sam Fiorella and I believe so. In the next few weeks, we’ll show you why and, more importantly, how.

A version of this post originally appeared on the official Influence Marketing blog. Subscribe today and stay up-to-date with the latest innovations and future trends in influence marketing.

This morning, I noticed Google Analytics had added a Trackbacks section to their Social Analytics data. This, to me, is very big news.

While bloggers will know all about Trackbacks and why it’s nice to get them, businesses may not be aware of their importance. Yet as the social web in particular continues to be graded, Trackbacks could become even more important, especially in the eyes of Google, as they look to rank the Authority of content and that content’s creators.

So why is this new Trackbacks edition to Google Analytics important and, more importantly, how can you use them to build your content strategy?

The Validation Factor of Trackbacks

For anyone who doesn’t know what a Trackback is, its definition is:

TrackBack is a type of peer-to-peer communication system that was designed to send notification of updates between two Web sites via a Trackback Ping. Ping in reference to TrackBack refers to a small message sent from one Web server to another. TrackBacks are useful for informing a Web site that you have referenced its Web site within your own Web site, and is popular with bloggers. TrackBack was first released as an open specification in August 2002. – Webopedia.

So, if I write a post and reference content elsewhere, that’s me providing a Trackback to the article. The reason bloggers like Trackbacks is simple – it offers validation that your content is seen as informative enough that someone else wants to share with their readers too (click image to expand).

The potential results of that share, or Trackback, are numerous.

• New readers or subscribers;
• New potential customers;
• Growth of influence;
• Identified as a thought leader in your industry;
• Search engine optimization (SEO) benefits.

These are just some of the immediate effects; however, by understanding what Trackbacks are and the potential they offer, you can begin to identify opportunities for your business to use this new feature in your content strategy.

Using Trackbacks in Your Content Strategy

As brands begin to understand the importance of content as part of their marketing strategy, using every tool in your toolbox becomes key when it comes to standing above your competitors and attracting eyeballs to your content.

There are a host of ways to do this currently. For example, being part of Google+ Communities or Linkedin Groups, where you can share your content with regards a topic of discussion (in a non-spammy, relevant way, of course).

You can also encourage social sharing via the likes of Twitter, Facebook, employee accounts, etc, or you could join a blog aggregator service like Triberr to increase your content’s visibility.

However, with the new data on Trackbacks available in your Google Analytics dashboard, you can use this additional information to build a content strategy into the bigger picture.

• Head on over to the blog or article in question, and thank the author, giving you more visibility to their audience, and showing you appreciate these referrals. It gives a good impression of how you do business.
• Identify the most popular content when it comes to Trackbacks, and use that data to build a series (or series of series’) around these topics.
• Identify the type of blogs that are sending readers your way, and determine if there’s any kind of partnership opportunity.
• Identify blogs that send a lot of new traffic via Trackbacks, and begin to link to them as opposed to their competitors, building a relationship that could turn into future business.
• Offer a value-added service to clients by filtering where they could improve their content and what type of information they could start to produce.

Again, these are quick, simple changes you can make now to start improving your own content strategy (and that of your clients). As the new Trackbacks service solidifies, expect more examples to become clear.

And when you tie that into the information available from the Data Activity Hub (click image to expand), that shows where your content is creating conversations elsewhere across the web, you can see the advantages your brand could begin to exert over your competitors.

As I’ve written many times before on this blog, understanding your traffic and how you can utilize that is key, for bloggers and brands equally. Google understands this, and is giving you all the tools you need to make better judgement calls as well as strategic decisions.

Are you taking advantage of these tools enough?

For the last three months, I’ve been trying to resolve a payment issue with Reliance Home Comfort, a water heater service provider in Canada.

When my wife and I moved home last July, we switched from our current provider to Reliance, and took advantage of a special introductory offer that would see us receive nine months free rental.

Unfortunately, the sales guy completed the form incorrectly, and we only received eight months. Additionally, the payment amounts on the paperwork didn’t tally with the payment taken (early) from our bank.

So I contacted Reliance customer service – or attempted to. That’s where the fun began.

Why Would You Make Your Customers Dizzy?

On attempting to call Reliance, I was placed in the phone tree from hell.

• Did I want French or English?
• Did I want customer service, sales, technical support, billing, rental, overdue payments, or arrange an appointment?
• Did I have an account or did I wish to create an account?
• Did I wish to speak to an operator or automated message?

A-ha – the last option meant I was going to finally get somewhere, right? Wrong.

• Do you wish to speak to a sales operator or a service operator?
• Is this for your current bill or are you inquiring about payments?
• Is this your account?

WTF?? Why would I call up to pay someone else’s account? This is getting ridiculous. But then the magic statement:

We are transferring you to an operator, please hold.

And, kudos to Reliance, they actually placed me through to an operator. Who promptly asked me for the account number I had just entered previously using the touchpad buttons on my phone that Reliance had told me to use!

Sense any frustration here? And this was the exact same process I’ve gone through every time I’ve called for the last three months.

Add to that the fact that no-one called back with a resolution, even though that had been agreed between myself and Reliance’s customer service resolution team, and you might wonder about how customer service is defined at Reliance (or any other company that believes phone trees are still the answer).

What’s even more ironic is Reliance’s customer service statement on their website:

Our Vision:

We will change the way people think about our industries by providing vital products and services in innovative ways. Working together, we will lead the market in customer satisfaction.

A worthy mantra – except using a phone tree with about 100 branches isn’t exactly innovative, nor does it encourage “…leading the market in customer satisfaction.”

It doesn’t need to be this way, either.

Becoming Agile With Customer-Centric Service

Back in 2010, I was tasked with a client’s customer satisfaction rating. They were a call centre for a leading smartphone provider, and their rating was awful. Since I’d led customer service teams back in the U.K. with leading mobile telco O2, the client was hoping I could improve their own team’s performance.

After reviewing their set-up, the problem became instantly clear – they were wasting too much time on the little things, and the big issues were being left unresolved because of this.

Add in the fact their phone tree was even more archaic than the Reliance example I used earlier, and it wasn’t too surprising customers were hanging up and going elsewhere.

The solution was simple – become agile and use better tools to provide a truly customer-centric experience.

• The social media solution. My team discovered that around 80% of the problems were simple, relatively minor calls. How to set up voicemail, how to access the app store, etc. We also discovered that many of the customers were on social networks, especially Twitter. So we allocated around 20% of the call centre team to Twitter to answer these questions, and we had direct links to FAQs and graphic guides to direct the customer to. The result – dropped call stats fell by half, and customer satisfaction rating went up by 67%.

• The channel solution. As well as the social media approach, we implemented a survey of our client’s customers, either when they called in, by direct email, or via Twitter (sharing a link to the survey). This was to determine how they would like the resolution team to contact them. This ensured two things – the social team could concentrate on the small stuff while the resolution team not only worked with the customer directly, but on their preferred channel (phone, email, letter, etc.). This was a key moment in the strategy, and saw the client win an award in both customer rating and escalated call resolution.

• The pro-active solution. As well as using Twitter for dealing with simple issues, we also trained the technical service team to use social monitoring platforms. This allowed them to take control of any mentions of the brand negatively, and jump into the conversation to see how they could help, as well as arrange a solution. We also monitored how the customer had been treated at one of the client’s resellers; and we monitored competitor conversations and directed the sales team to potential leads. The result – new activations increased by just over 30%, and better education tools were sent out to resellers. Additionally, tech calls dropped by 14% in the first six months, since the tech support team were handling and solving issues online.

And the client phone tree that had previously been in use? That was restructured to three simple choices – customer service, tech support and sales. Simple, clean, and direct to a relevant company agent.

Since 2010, the client has continued to improve processes and is regularly cited as one of the best in class in the mobile communications market for customer service and best practices using social media.

Your Customers Are Your Brand

The example with the mobile client isn’t a unique one, nor were the solutions anything majorly innovative – it was simply a matter of looking at what was going wrong, and turning the company into a truly customer-centric one.

We can talk all we want about great marketing initiatives, and crisis communications, and how cool our products are – but if none of that rubs off on our customers, we won’t be talking about the cool stuff for very long.

Customer service, and how you treat your customers, is the biggest, most organice method of marketing your brand will ever use. Frustrate them, and you will lose them. Work with them, and you will build advocacy more effective than any marketing or customer acquisition budget could ever hope to offer a return on.

Your customers are your brand – and you wouldn’t let your brand suffer, would you?

If you thought influence marketing was a hot topic at the moment for marketers and brands, it’s only just beginning to really take shape.

While much of the conversation both here on this blog and across various networks has concentrated on where social influence is today, this is a just the prelude to where influence marketing will be tomorrow and beyond.

In the next few weeks, our book will be released and we’re excited to share the concepts and methodologies that we’ve come up with in both our research for the book as well as real-life case studies we’re documenting with our clients, using our framework.

Our goal with the book is simple – while early movers in the social influence space have provided a starting point for brands to understand this tactic, the real business value requires actions and solutions that go deeper than a score and an “influencer” based on amplification and popularity.

Additionally, online influence is just one component of a very large picture, and only paints a small part of that same picture. Let’s talk about that a little more today.

Decisions Based on Limited Information

Social influence data as it stands today is based primarily on one core metric: public social profiles and footprints. So if you have your Twitter account set to public, then companies like Klout and Kred will create you a “profile” and allocate you a score, based on their algorithm.

If you sign up and connect your other accounts, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, the score will change, since these companies now have more information about you. So far, so good.

The problem comes when the accounts aren’t set to public, or you have different privacy settings for different accounts. So, Twitter and Google+ may be public, but Facebook may be primarily for friends, so your sharing method on that network is very different.

But let’s say it’s these private conversations where the decisions on the majority of the choices you make are made, when it comes to making a purchase.

These choices are the ones that are defining the influence factor at that time:

• Is it situational, where your current situation (financial, need for a product or service, etc) comes into play?
• Is it emotional, where the desire for something outweighs the logic of not actually needing it?
• Is it personal, where your partner/wife/husband puts the foot down and says no?

These are three simple factors that can’t be measured directly – and yet they have a direct impact on you as a person, because they influence your decision.

Because this process isn’t measured by public scoring algorithms, it can lead to distortion of data when measuring a brand influencer program.

You may have initially shown positive signs of interest in a new product launch, as featured on an influential blog, and that would go down as a success metric. But the truth is, the real influence was exerted when the situation came into play in your private conversation(s).

It’s this missed data that (currently) limits the reporting metrics on some of today’s platforms.

The Offline Influence Equation

Another part of this equation is the fact that most influence platforms don’t take into account what happens offline – they simply measure online noise and conversations.

While this approach still allows for a lot of data to be collated about someone and their influence, as well as who and what influences them in return, it’s still only half the big picture.

As Pierre-Loic Assayag mentioned when we interviewed him about the approach his Traackr platform takes, imagine trying to decide a large bank loan with only half the financial information about a person available to you – you just wouldn’t make that call.

In fairness, this limitation is being recognized by the influence platform developers. Kred, for example, allows you to upload your offline achievements (although they don’t validate them so you could still upload false information), while Appinions measures reactions and opinions from traditional media as well as online publications.

However, as much as we try and measure how offline decisions impact measurable public conversations online, there’s still the question of what truly impacted the decision to take an action or decide to pass at this moment in time?

To get to that stage, we need to move beyond just public personas when it comes to influence, and begin to look at the macro and micro influencer level, and where they sit in the influence circle around each of us.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be doing just that. We look forward to sharing with you.

A version of this post originally appeared on the official Influence Marketing blog.

Mention “social graph” to social web users, and the two most likely names that you’ll get in return are Google and Facebook.

Popularized by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2007, the accepted definition of social graph is as follows:

The global mapping of everybody and how they’re related… users [can] benefit from the social graph by taking advantage of the relationships between individuals… to offer a richer online experience.

While Zuckerberg was talking about Facebook directly, this social graph mapping isn’t just restricted to the world’s largest social network. The other main proponent of this is Google, specifically with what they’re doing with their Google+ platform.

Understanding how connections online relate to each other, and at what level, allows Google and Facebook to provide a myriad of services and targeted solutions, both for end users and advertisers.

Sponsored stories on Facebook; recommendations of people you might like based on current connections; user specific Google Ads no matter what site you visit; web usage and click action determining product features and smartphone integration. All this and more can be defined by your social graph, the people in it, and the actions taken.

For end users, it’s meant to offer a better experience – you only see the things you want to see, and you only connect with and recommend the people and brands you want to be involved with.

For advertisers and marketers, it makes it a richer playground, since now you have the kind of information at your fingertips that allows you to laser focus your ad spend – demographic, web usage, likes, dislikes, friends, peer recommendations, etc.

It’s the ideal mix of user generated content with an advertorial twist.

But there’s another twist to this social graph power game – and it comes in perhaps the least likeliest of forms in the shape of Microsoft.

Microsoft Gets Real About Social

When thinking cutting edge social media technology, you probably don’t immediately think of Microsoft. Instead, computers, software and smartphones might come to mind, along with the Xbox360.

However, in the last 24 months or so, Microsoft has been steadily adding to its social toolset, with each addition making an interesting statement about where Microsoft might sit in the social graph race.

• In 2010, Microsoft added more social search functionality to its Bing search engine, allowing you to see what friends on Facebook liked and have that appear in your related search results. This was in addition to tweets appearing in search results;
• In 2012, Microsoft bought internal social chat platform Yammer, to strengthen its enterprise social solutions;
• Also in 2012, Microsoft and Klout announced a partnership that would show someone’s Klout score in Bing search results;
• And at the end of 2012, Microsoft officially launched their own social network, Socl, for anyone with a Microsoft or Facebook account.

These alone would offer interesting combination possibilities.

For example, an organization looking to launch a new product with a large amount of fanfare could identify the employees with the highest Klout scores, and use them as ambassadors online to promote the product within the most effective conversations.

Yammer could be used while tracking social search clicks based on friend recommendations, to alert Microsoft sales or service employees or partners to follow up for add-on sales, or enhance the loyalty factor by making sure everything is running as it should be.

These are the simple options that could be used now, to start to build a better understanding of how the social web interconnects users and what it means for business.

Yet it’s the announcement of Microsoft ViralSearch that really ups the ante and places Microsoft right up there with Google and Facebook in the social graph equation.

The Ripple Effect of the HyperConnected Web

Currently in product demo stage, ViralSearch could be Microsoft’s big play when it comes to understanding how the social web works, and what motivates people to do something. By understanding this, brands can begin to understand what makes a topic go viral, and (the thinking is) be more effective at creating their own viral content.

ViralSearch does this by analyzing millions of conversations on Twitter (the only platform supported at the minute), and monitoring the different actions, reactions and – ultimately – results of shared content.

By doing this, ViralSearch can then identify the tipping point of a viral sensation. This shows who propagated the most distribution and resharing – which can help brands identify true influencers.

Not only this, but ViralSearch can dig into multiple levels of connections, or generations of sharing.

Over time, this would allow brands to truly understand what makes a connection so connected; what content do these connections share and talk about; and if historical sharing and discussion can help predict what that person (or persons) may share in the future.

Once brands can identify that information, marketing tactics are completely turned on their head and targeting ad campaigns becomes far more scientific.

The Micro-Level Social Graph

Currently, today’s “social graph” is helping network developers, end users and brands identify what they’re truly interested in, both from a consumer point of view and brands looking to connect with these consumers.

But this is just the start.

As Facebook rolls out its Graph Search solution, and Google continues to place growing importance on its Google+ platform, understanding how people operate and how they connect online is becoming less of a mystery.

Today’s social graph is tomorrow’s micro-level social graph, where interests, purchase intent, archival behaviour and the minutest detail can be identified and reacted to – perfectly identified by the levels of generational actions that ViralSearch displays.

While Google and Facebook may be leading this race at the minute, Microsoft’s activity in the last two years suggest they’re putting all the pieces in place to grab their own slice of the social graph pie.

Who knows – it may even end up being the biggest…

Last week, I posted the following update across a couple of networks:

Please don’t use “Reach” as a viable metric. It’s a BS number to get clients to pay more for data: don’t go down that road

The update resulted in some great discussion on both sides, with agreement and counterpoints on how viable reach is as a metric.

These included:

Lets not be so quick to disregard Reach. After all, big companies buy Superbowl spots exactly for the Reach it gives them. – Dino Dogan.

Reach has 2 parts. How many people saw something (actual reach) and how many potentially could see something (fictitious reach). If I have a reach of 2 million but at the time I post every day only 3 people see the post what is the real reach? 3. – Howie Goldfarb.

Reach is definitely ephemeral because reach doesn’t really matter. Action does. Click throughs, downloads, sticky site traffic, purchases, that kind of thing is what really matters. – Shelly Kramer.

But what about quantifiable reach? Meaning, reach is tracked against response & metrics? – Mitch Arno.

All good points – yet (for me personally, anyhoo), I’d disagree on Dino and Mitch’s points on when reach could be used as a viable metric. Here’s why.

The Attraction of Reach

By definition, reach is simply a potential number. It can be broken down a few ways:

• On social networks, reach can be the amount of people that may interact with your content, through either seeing it directly, or through one of their connections, or even a social ad;
• On blogs, reach can be the amount of people that interacted with your post, through direct readership, a shared link, or a forwarded email;
• On media, reach can be the amount of people that could see a TV show, a print ad, billboards, etc, through direct contact or shared discussion later.

Marketers like to use reach as a client metric because it sounds impressive. Instead of having to be restricted by real actionable data, reach can be used instead.

• “Twitter User X has 1,000 followers, but a reach of 100,000. That’s 100,000 new customers just waiting for us.”
• “Blogger Y has 10,000 subscribers as well as 1,000 followers. Even more new customers just waiting for us.”
• Free Local Newspaper Z has a reach of 50,000 homes delivered to. That’s 50,000 new customers waiting for us.”

And so on, and so on. Which would all be great and dandy if reach was a viable metric, but it’s not.

The Problem With Reach

The reason reach isn’t truly viable as a metric is simple – it’s based on the hope that eyeballs are available.

On Twitter, for example, reach is defined by the potential audience of a user you’re connecting with. So, someone may have 1,000 followers, but the followers of these connections combined may equal 100,000 (at least).

When User X with the 1,000 followers tweets something, the hope is that person’s followers will see the tweet and reshare with their audience. If a follower has 100 followers themselves, that’s now another 100 eyeballs to potentially see the share. Potentially being the key word.

Because no-one is online all the time, just waiting for a tweet. And that’s just the live, organic stuff – when you add bots and fake followers into the equation, things become even less impressive, as we can see by the following example of the same Twitter power user.

In the image above (click to expand), I used TweetReach to gauge the potential reach and visibility a certain power user could offer. The user in question has over 217,000 followers.

As you can see from the image, the estimated reach is just short of 200,000, with potential exposure (followers of followers) at just over 2.6 million. Impressive, right?

But this is where reach as a metric falls down, as we can see in the next image.

Using the Fake Follower Check software from Status People, I entered the same user’s details, to see how many of his 217,000+ followers were real. The definition of “real” here is simple – active and not bots or fake accounts.

As you can see by the image above, there’s a huge disconnect between how many of this user’s 217,000 followers are classed as real, active followers.

Suddenly, instead of having access to a potential 2.6 million impressions (which is what the potential reach of the followers pre-fake check would give), you’re now down to 182,000. Still impressive, but a hell of a lot less than 2.6 million.

And that’s assuming that each of the 182,000 “real” numbers are around when this power user sends out a tweet.

This is why reach is such a crappy metric to be using – and yet many marketers use it to increase their rates when charging clients for audience size.

The Real “Reach” Metrics

To Dino and Mitch’s earlier points at the start of this post – I agree, to a small degree, that reach us used by the likes of the Super Bowl ad buy agencies, as well as quantifying the reach. But there’s still the overarching problem that’s it’s a hit-and-hope metric.

In the Super Bowl example, companies use data from Nielsen, one of the world’s leading audience measurement companies – but it’s aggregated data based on average audience behaviour, versus specific targeted individual behaviour. This means it doesn’t take into account people getting up during ads to grab more beer, food, etc.

With Mitch’s example of quantifying reach, this gets closer to viable metrics, but it’s still relying on the bigger number that can’t be quantified. If we move the conversation over to quantifiable metrics based on more in-depth filtering, then we can get more actionable insights.

• Ignore the big number and target the demographic instead – male/female, locale, language, age;
• Use search history to identify common keywords and themes relevant to your brand;
• Use software like oneQube to identify when users are on Twitter, for instance, and who they’re talking to. Do the same with software relevant to the platform you’re interested in;
• Collate this information with Google Analytics or similar to understand what content is attractive and what content was physically shared and acted upon;
• Set goals based on real action (as Shelly mentioned in her examples) – click throughs, recommendations, downloads/purchases, referrals, etc;
• Compare these actions to the target audience size to determine reach vs. actual ratio.

By doing this, you’re now beginning to bypass reach alone and get to the real nitty gritty – your true audience size, as well as the real numbers to filter and use as a proper business metric.

Reach itself can be a starting point when it comes to social proof and how many eyeballs could be reached – but only as a starting point. You need to then do the legwork to define your captive audience.

Otherwise you’re constantly just reaching for what could be – and few businesses, if any, can live on that alone.

Six years ago, I began a love affair with the potential that social media could offer.

While I’d been online for much longer, meandering from blogging to forums and gaming, it was only when I started really getting into what MySpace, Facebook and Twitter offered that I saw something bigger than just talking about random stuff.

I saw the opportunity for everyone to truly have a platform to share from. I saw the opportunity for business to both understand and connect better with their audience.

But most of all, I saw a medium that would finally negate the crappy jobs that people and businesses were doing when it came to being honest and transparent, because now there was a viable way to cross-check the shit and converge on the real.

Yet for all that potential, here we are, six years later, and that potential seems to be fighting a losing battle in the war of attrition for eyeballs and attention.

Social Media Used to Be More Than This

Recently, I posted two articles that looked at the BS metric of standalone reach, as well as (the lack of) transparency in social media. These posts had been brewing on my mind for a little while, as more and more examples of crappy methods and the people behind them come to the fore.

I thought they may have been isolated examples, but as comments on the posts as well as discussions elsewhere proved, there’s a growing malaise forming in social media circles. People are getting tired of BS, and finding more instances of this numbing state of affairs now that the rose-coloured blinkers have come off.

• Margie Clayman wrote about her new awareness of questionable practices by some of social media’s early adopters;
• Pam Moore talked of well-known “community leaders” being as fake as Hollywood boobs (that last part may have been my takeaway);
• My friend Hessie Jones sent me a link to an article on Social Media Today that talks about “socializing your business” but instead is simply another article on creating, managing and measuring a social media marketing campaign (big difference in the two terminologies);
• Jamie Notter shared his frustration about bandwagon jumping on humanizing your business.

These are just some of the examples in recent weeks – if you go back a few months, there are more to be found where the wheels seem to be coming off the potential of social media, and are being replaced by retreaded tires masquerading as profound content and authenticity.

Why? Why are we throwing away such an opportunity for true change and growth? Is it really in exchange for easy eyeballs and links to our content? Does “success in social media” truly equate to numbers of followers, fans, subscribers and having a higher social score than others in your niche?

Social Media Doesn’t Need to Be This Way

As we see more examples of questionable practices coming to the fore, the net effect is that they’re essentially saying it’s okay to be false. If you want to be someone, or a successful business, be either an ass or a fake.

Which is sad, since social media can be so much more.

• It can be the focal point to raise almost $140 million for charitable causes;
• It can be responsible for inspiring case studies;
• It can help complement the biggest sales day in a company’s history;
• It can be the fastest way to head off a potential brand reputation crisis;
• It can simply be a way to tell a wonderful story.

As these examples above and many more like them show, success can come without faking it. Success can come by being real. Success can come by building small armies to do great things.

Simply put, success can come without the need to link bait for traffic, buffer numbers, bandwagon jump and similar.

If you’re still not sure about the dilution process that social media is going through at the moment, ask yourself this question:

When someone asks you what you do, or you’re attempting to convince a new client or business the value of social media. do you get a questioning stare and a smile that says, “Yeah, right”?

My guess is you do. Many times.

Until we counter this crap that seems to be pervading social at the minute with real work; real results; real numbers; and real honest-to-goodness quality, that look and smile will continue.

And no-one likes to be questioned and laughed at for too long. Do they?

Spend any amount of time around social media conversations, and one word usually pops up more than any other – transparency.

People talk about social media empowering consumers, because now brands have to be “transparent” in every communication.

People talk about social media sorting the wheat from the chaff, because Google is their friend and ideas can be challenged.

People talk about snake oil salesmen losing their grip because transparency (or lack of) will eventually show the frauds from the real deal.

All good ideals. All good hopes. If it were really true.

Transparent Only If We’re Allowed to Be

The thing is, this whole “transparency thing” in social media isn’t actually happening, because we’re essentially not allowing it to happen.

There’s this unwritten rule in social media that it’s best to focus on what you can achieve versus calling out fakes and bad practices. It’s the way the social web works best, folks say.

And that may be true – but then that approach also dilutes the whole transparency argument too.

For example, there’s a very well-known blogger-turned-author in the U.S. that talks a lot about community and how humble he is to have one of the best. Yet the same blogger is quick to send nasty emails to people who don’t gush over his book(s).

Then there’s the Canadian social media guy who talks a lot about how to be active online, but – much like his American counterpart – sends rather nasty emails and direct messages on Twitter to folks who dare to question his approach.

You’ll notice I didn’t refer to these two people by names (and there are many more like them). Because, as I mentioned earlier, it’s just not done in social media. People call you a hater, and you’re seen as unprofessional.

Transparency, indeed.

Rewarding Silence

Yet should we really care? After all, as so many people say, we should concentrate on what we do, right, not what others do?

The thing is, if we do that when the behaviour of some people verges on bullying, by staying silent we’re encouraging this behaviour. We’re essentially saying, “You know what, you continue to show one face in public and a completely different one in private, because it doesn’t affect us.”

But it does affect us.

It’s our friends that are being picked on. It’s our colleagues that are being affected. And, most importantly, it’s our morals that are being compromised by staying silent.

So what do we do? Do we do anything? Do we contact these people directly and say we know what’s happening and try stop it? Do we publicly question them? Or do we continue with this idea that social media has made everything transparent, so leave the status quo as it is?

The decision is yours.

One of the things I’ve always been a huge proponent of is fostering true brand loyalty for the long tail – strategic and continuous and growth – versus getting quick buzz hits then using the rinse and repeat formula.

This stems from various reasons but the core overall one is simple – create a loyal army of consumers-turned-customers-turned-advocates, by providing solutions that meet their needs, and much of your marketing will be done organically.

This creates three benefits:

• You have a true two-way relationship with your customer;
• You have word-of-mouth from trusted resources that no amount of money could buy;
• Your brand has an immediate advantage for new innovations, feedback and growth through shared ideas.

Loyalty also has another added benefit – more often than not, the cost of new customer acquisition versus existing customers satisfaction is much higher. Not always, but mostly.

If you can reduce the spend on acquisition, you can re-allocate that to reducing churn of existing customers, enhancing the loyalty and appreciation factor immensely.

Two brands that understand the implementation of long tail loyalty are BlogOnCloud9 and Livefyre.

Brand Loyalty: BlogOnCloud9

When I switched over to WordPress hosting experts BlogOnCloud9 back in 2010, I wrote a post then on how happy I was with the move and service. Almost three years later, nothing’s changed – except the service and approach of Dana and Karen, the founders of and partners in the service, is even better.

Last weekend, on a Saturday evening, I was tinkering with my blog to add some CSS code in order to change the email sign-up box I have at the end of every post.

Because I’m not a CSS guy, I messed up the copy/paste and completely borked my blog. Since I’d changed some code in the functions.php file, it messed up the rest of the site and all I had was a scary blank white screen of death.

I resigned myself to the fact I did something stupid on a Saturday night, and pinged Dana and Karen an email saying what had happened, and if they could help resolve. This was done not expecting anything until Monday at the earliest.

Not one hour later, Dana emailed to say he had found the bad code, fixed it, and that the site was now fully operational again. This was at 8.00pm on a Saturday night!

I was floored. BlogOnCloud9 isn’t a massive hosting company employee-wise, but that service and response at the weekend outdid competitors far “larger” than Dana and Karen’s baby.

Brand Loyalty: Livefyre

Ah, Livefyre. Regular readers and subscribers here will know I’m a huge fan of the Livefyre comments system. There’s just something about the platform that behaves like a true comment system should.Social integration; real-time chat functionality; community fostering, and more. It’s just an awesome platform.

Recently, I moved away from Livefyre and reactivated Disqus following a crowdsource survey of my subscribers, who preferred Disqus over Livefyre (although Livefyre had a huge amount of fans in the responses too).

But I began to have issues with Disqus. Mobile load time could be slow; Reactions (how your post has been shared on Twitter) were unreliable; and valid comments were getting caught in the spam filter.

I knew Livefyre were working on a major update to their platform, Livefyre 3. The beta version is on this blog, with the public release due imminently. And I knew that I still loved the platform, even though I’d made the move away from them recently.

So I emailed Livefyre support, and the awesome Dhara Mhistry was immediately on the case. No reprimanding (even in jest) for being “disloyal”, simply happy to help get Livefyre back on the blog.

Not only did Dhara and the Livefyre technical team ensure none of my Disqus comments were lost, she also answered all my questions regarding styling the comments to be more in line with the colour scheme here.

And, just like BlogOnCloud9, Livefyre was there testing the comments on the weekend to make sure the change back over had been a smooth one.

The really impressive thing? I’m not even a paying customer – Livefyre Comments is free, although it does offer premium features for businesses and media properties.

Building Loyalty Really Isn’t That Hard

What’s key in both these examples are two things that both BlogOnCloud9 and Livefyre clearly understand:

• Customers (and/or users) mess up, and being able to clear a way through that mess together fosters trust and loyalty;
• Losing patronage for a while doesn’t mean the brand has lost an advocate or loyal user – you have to find out for yourself why you loved that brand in the first place when compared to someone else.

A lot of brand struggle to understand loyalty – true loyalty. Offering discount vouchers and early usage of a new product may win you favours – but what you do after that to build on that quick-hit loyalty is what will define your long tail success.

BlogOnCloud9 and Livefyre already know this. Now it’s up to your brand.

If you compare the services springing up around social media compared to any other technological advance in the last 20 years or so, you might come to the conclusion that this phase in our digital evolution has turned into one of the biggest land grabs since high level web domains were opened up.

And you know what? You’d be right.

From social dashboards to URL shorteners, social monitoring platforms, business intelligence data, social scoring platforms and much, much more, social media has opened a veritable Pandora’s Box of businesses looking to be the next Radian6 or Buddy Media.

The problem is, it’s not just enough to see the financial successes in the space and think, “We could build that.” No, to be a successful social business, you can’t just be a social business – you need to truly BE one.

The Social Gold Rush Mentality

The main problem lies in the success – real or perceived – that businesses in the social space have achieved. While people were still getting used to the idea of Twitter and Facebook back in 2006 / 2007 from a personal angle, savvy early adopters in the technology space saw an opportunity.

Businesses had been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars offline for focus groups and expensive data analysis, in order to better understand their customers as well as their competitors.

This data would enable brands to – arguably – target ad campaigns and media buys more effectively. It’s why you’d see certain ads on the side of buses and bus stops geared towards a specific demographic on that route, while different ads would run on different routes.

Of course, the issue was being able to track the effectiveness of these ads. Step up social media.

When it became clear that public data could be trawled by technology using keyword searches in the same way search engines worked, the scene was set for the first companies to monetize social media.

Additionally, data could be provided that dissected these conversations and helped brands see the potential decision-making moment an interested consumer turned into an intent-to-buy customer.

This led to not only social monitoring software, but also social scoring software as the conversations being trawled began to show spikes and popularity curves for certain individuals.

Once that realization kicked in, and businesses saw the amount of money being charged for these services – as well as the amount of funding being given to them – the social media gold rush began.

The problem was, not every company understood social media – it was simply a money grab.

We Tweet Therefore We’re Social

There’s nothing wrong with making money in business, of course. Heck, if we don’t, then we’re not in business for very long.

The problem with just wanting to be in social to make money, though, is that it can lead to anything but success.

I’ve seen countless “social business platforms” that are anything but. There’s a big difference between building something to offer a solution, and actually understanding the solution the platform is being built for.

Social media is a strange beast. It’s constantly fluid with frequent changes in how we use it, and what can be done with the tools available to us. It has weird platform-specific nuances and user behaviour.

Because of this, it’s not a medium for everyone – and nor should it be. However, it’s most certainly not a medium for any business that doesn’t understand social and, more importantly, what it means to be a social business.

IBM, who’ve received widespread praise for their adoption of social media internally and externally, define their idea of what it means to be a social business:

When you inspire your workforce to innovate and collaborate more productively, you create tangible business value. When you anticipate needs and deliver exceptional experiences, you delight your customers and create advocates. When you integrate your business processes with the right social tools, you secure a competitive advantage and pioneer new ways of doing business.

This is why it’s so key to truly understand this space we play and work in; how it affects businesses and their customers; and how it defines the technology that will be built to provide true solutions versus Band-Aid quick buck platforms and services.

Having a Twitter account doesn’t make you social, just as having an Instant Messaging app on your phone doesn’t make you an expert communicator.

You want to succeed and make money in social media? Treat it like you would any other business strategy:

• Understand the medium;
• Believe in the medium;
• Carry out due diligence in the medium;
• Set your goals, and trust and empower the people employed to meet them;
• Integrate, and be inclusive of the various teams across the business or organization.

The simple truth of the matter is clear enough if you want to succeed and be profitable in social media, and be a true social business: create for the needs of others, with people who understand these needs, instead of just creating for your personal pocket.

So, the question is – which side of the social business line do you want to fall on?

When you look at a lot of the talk on the social web around brands, much of it centers on a few core mindsets:

Be your customer; listen to your customer; be there for your customer; be where your customer is.

Wise words, and definitely core for any business to succeed, not just on social. Yet as important as customers are to the longevity of a business, there’s another very core component – the employee.

The Internal Customer

I’ve written before about the value of your employees, and the very smart Leon Noone has shared his thoughts on the value of looking after your employees by creating the right culture and expectations from the start, as well as continuing to live by them.

Yet so many businesses miss this, and instead talk a good talk about customers while missing the walk when it comes to internal customers – your employees.

They’re the folks that represent your brand in public; they’re the folks that determine the customer experience; they’re the folks that keep the wheels turning. The importance of having the right culture and making sure there’s a good fit on both sides – brand/employee and employee/brand – is evident, as highlighted in this article from Forbes:

• Companies that acknowledge employee value can see see three times as much return on brand equity than those that don’t;
• Aluminum producer Alcoa saw income growth of 500% over 10 years when employee safety was made the #1 priority;
• A study by Bright Horizons showed 89% of employees who felt appreciated were more productive.

This should be common sense, but unfortunately it’s not, as seen by the high amount of employee churn at many businesses and corporations. Which is why the video at the end of this post from German beer manufacturer Heineken made me smile.

The Right People for the Right Culture

The video follows the hiring process for a new intern position at Heineken. It opens with something we’ll all recognize – the canned answers to interview questions that candidates hope will be what the hiring company wants to hear.

For Heineken, though, getting the right person for their culture is much more important than being spoon-fed answers that may be complimentary, but don’t really show the personality of the potential employee, and whether they’d be a good fit or not.

While the video itself may be part of a marketing campaign on showing what Heineken is all about, the actual company culture speaks for itself – Heineken’s core brand values are Respect, Quality and Enjoyment.

These have seen Heineken receive numerous employee-centric awards and features, including Britain’s Top Employers 2012, features in People Management, shortlisting for the Employee Benefits Awards 2012 and much more.

As I mentioned at the start of the post, it’s key to appreciate your customers, especially in this fast marketing world we live in today where the smallest dissatisfaction can become the biggest online buzz.

Just remember the equally important internal employees, too – get that part right and your customers will automatically benefit.

Since Sam and I announced our book at the end of last year, many people have asked us one primary question about it:

Is it for people looking to increase their social score, or is it something different?

The one sentence answer to that is fairly simple:

This isn’t a book about improving your social score; instead, as you’ll see below, this is a business book around the topic of influence and how it shapes marketing as well as other business verticals.

While today’s influence market is (arguably) led by social scoring platforms, we see things very differently.

We’ve already shared where we see the future of influence marketing and which platforms will be leading the way.

With regards the audience best-suited to the book and what it offers, below is the full overview.

Influence Marketing: Why You Should Buy This Book

The practice of influence marketing, popularized by Daniel Edelman in the late 1960′s with celebrity endorsements, is enjoying a renaissance in the social media era.

As more and more consumers migrate to online communications, the concept of branding and advertising has been democratized.

Increasingly, consumers are making decisions based on the attitudes and recommendations expressed by the masses and their peers, with whom they now have immediate and around-the-clock access to.

Businesses are now competing with – and often losing to – “the wisdom of crowds” in the branding battle.

Therein lays the opportunity that has spurred on the growth of modern influence marketing: identifying individuals who sway consumer opinion and solicit them to advocate on your behalf.

Yet the early adopters attempting to capitalize on this opportunity by offering influence scoring platforms have been marred with criticisms of faulty algorithms, unethical behavior and lack of measurable impact on the bottom-line.

Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing analyzes the renewal of this marketing practice, the factors that impact how consumers are influenced to take action and the challenges faced with current software solutions and strategies.

With that analysis, it builds a new methodology for how businesses can evolve this practice from a promotional and branding exercise to a measurable lead generation and sales conversion effort.

Key lessons in this book include:

• How to identify at what stage in the purchase life cycle target customers are at;
• How to identify the micro-influencers who directly impact purchase decisions at each stage;
• The situational factors that contribute to derailing brand recommendations in social media.

With this methodology in place, we provide a blueprint for predicting and managing influence paths that generate measurable action and impact on the business’ bottom line for both B2B and B2C organizations.

This book heralds in the next phase of this evolving industry and provides actionable strategies that will define how influence marketing is executed for the next 10 years.

The Next Wave of Influence

As you can see by the overview, this is a business book in the truest sense. Much of the criticism around influence marketing at the moment is that there are no real measurable metrics being shared.

It’s all well and good raising buzz and awareness but if there is no real action happening behind that buzz, where’s the return? Likes and retweets will only keep you in business so long.

Influence can be used for so much more than just initial buzz and awareness.

The book provides a defined framework of how to identify the end result; where that brand message tipped from awareness to intent to action; and how to build true long-term advocacy across multiple verticals, including marketing, service, HR, non-profits and much more. Exclusive online components offer webinars, one-on-ones and lesson plans for executing and measuring your own influencer program(s).

We look forward to sharing our vision soon.

Pre-order your copy of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing from either Amazon or Barnes & Noble today.

This is a cross post with the Influence Marketing blog.

You might be aware of a certain email that’s doing the rounds at the minute from LinkedIn that’s generating some online buzz.

In the email, LinkedIn shares its milestone of reaching 200 million users. Then they go one step further and add in (for certain users) where you personally fit into LinkedIn.

Some users received emails saying they were in the Top 1%. Some received saying they were in the Top 5%, and so on.

It’s a smart but lazy move on behalf of LinkedIn when it comes to some viral buzz around the platform.

Smart, because it plays to peoples’ egos (as Bilal Jaffery points out in a Facebook discussion around the email), and lazy, because this kind of short-term hit and ego-massaging offers little in the way of context and long-term value.

Top 1% of What, Exactly?

The email itself is pretty generic, as you can see from the screen grab below from the email received by my friend, Karim Kanji:

In Karim’s own words:

Thanks LinkedIn, but I’m calling bullshit on this.

It’s not only Karim who views this as no more than a numbers play by LinkedIn to create buzz, possibly due to their slip down the pecking order of social network user numbers when it comes to active users.

Over at MarketingTechBlog, Douglas Karr shares his view on the email:

This is the kind of campaign that drives me nuts. The percent is a ridiculous number that means nothing… truly nothing. If you’re a superstar in your field that is picky about who you connect with on LinkedIn, you didn’t get one of these emails. But if you’re in an industry with heavy recruitment with a big network… and you’re crappy at your job… you still received one of these emails.

At Soshable, J.D. Rucker, while congratulating LinkedIn on savvy marketing for stroking egos, muses:

When you really think about it, it’s not as much of an accomplishment as a great marketing ploy by LinkedIn to get their name out there and into conversations on Twitter. Top of mind… The math makes it seem less impressive. Even those who received the top 1% email might not have been as quick to brag about it had they realized they were one of over 2 million users to receive the honor.

And this is what it boils down to – there’s a complete lack of context as to what the “award” really means.

Without Context, It’s An Empty Metric

If LinkedIn truly wanted to share who had the most viewed profiles on their network – and, by definition, who people should connect with from a business point of view – they should have included at least some modicum of context with the statement.

For LinkedIn’s message to offer value to me, I’d want to understand the following:

• What does the 1% mean?
• Who’s viewing these profiles – recruiters, headhunters, or just old colleagues and friends from high school?
• What are the industry specifics of those viewing?
• What’s the likelihood of all these views resulting in a job offer or consultancy hire?

These are just four basic but immediate questions that spring to mind. There’s much more value to be had in knowing it’s people that want to do business with you viewing your profile, rather than the majority of views coming from ex-colleagues and college buddies.

The email has been compared to a recent campaign by social scoring platform Kred, who sent out Top 1%, 5% and 10% emails to their users.

This email generated a great discussion over at Geoff Livingston’s Google+ account.

Andrew Grill, Kred CEO, stepped into the discussion to answer questions and criticism, much of which centred around the same mindset as that of the recent LinkedIn email – is it truly recognizing top users, or simply a mass market email to generate buzz?

One of the areas that Andrew accepted could have been better was the area of context within the email. Again, Kred – like LinkedIn – simply sent a generic message with the percentage of where a user fell inside the Kred database.

Had the message been more specific – say, “Congratulations, you’re in the Top 1% Marketers / Bloggers / Social Good Advocates”, etc, then that shows the algorithm was used to determine your niche listing and they’re sharing that with you.

The smallest amount of context can make the biggest amount of difference when it comes to perception of a campaign, as highlighted by some of the reaction around both LinkedIn and Kred’s emails.

Stroking Egos and Long Term Benefits

One of the things that both sides of the coin mostly agree on is that stroking the egos of users is a smart move from LinkedIn.

By advising users of their mythical status within the ecosystem, and encouraging recipients of the email to share on Twitter and other networks, it ensures a healthy amount of buzz around the platform.

The problem is, ego-stroking this way generally doesn’t work long-term. Now that LinkedIn has placed these “1% leaders” on a pedestal, will they continue to make them feel special with regular outreach? Will they answer their email questions to support quicker than the rest of LinkedIn’s non-1% userbase?

Because that’s the funny thing when egos become involved – once it feels like it’s no longer being massaged, the owner of the ego can be quick to move elsewhere where they’re treated in a manner worthy of such lofty percentile.

If you truly want to sustain long-term benefits and buzz around your brand, it takes more than a warm, fuzzy email as a one-off viral push.

Then again, truly smart brands already known this.

Just over 20 years ago, when I first got into marketing, professional reviews were the lead driver of foot traffic to storefronts.

Magazines like Consumer Review and reviews from other print publications, as well as television review shows, would often dictate how well a product would be received once in the open.

It led to a booming industry of professional reviewers, some of whom made a very nice living being known as The Review Person.

But things change.

Jump forward 20 years, and the swan song for the professional reviewer could be about to play out, at least in the tech sector.

It’s All About the Peer

In a recently published joint survey carried out by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research, and involving more than 2,000 U.S. consumers, it’s clear to see that peer reviews have grown beyond just friends advising each other on a new purchase. Now, social connections and search play a far greater role in the purchase cycle, often ignoring professional reviews altogether.

Some of the key findings include:

• 65% of consumers have bought a product they weren’t intending to buy after reading a positive review;
• 74% of consumers search for reviews online before making a decision;
• Consumers read an average 11 reviews before making a decision;
• Peer reviews are trusted by more consumers (77%) than professional ones (23%);
• A well-written, fair and reasonable review, with statistics and facts and where the reviewer is named, are the top four factors that will influence a consumer to move from intent to buy;
• Amazon leads the way in consumer trust, with 39% of the surveyed audience trusting the site completely.

These figures, and some of the other ones in the fuller report, should act as a wake-up call to brands that are still investing in the traditional method of product review – buy advertorial or pitch the mass media – and ignoring search and social graph impact.

Why the Landscape Shifted

It’s easy to blame social media and the advent of easy sharing and research for the trending rise in peer reviews overtaking professional ones. Many brands have cited the lack of accountability when it comes to peer reviews, and as such these reviews should be taken with a pinch of salt.

The thing is, it’s actually the accountability factor that’s helped increase the authority of peer reviews and decreased the need for professional reviews. With nothing being invisible thanks to Google Search and other visibility tools, what goes online is there for millions to see.

If a review on Yelp is seen as false and made with bad intentions to the recipient, it’s removed and the user can’t post other reviews of that business. If a blogger makes false claims about a company, not only are they liable for prosecution, but the commenters will leave links with the real story for other visitors to access.

And with the likes of the Federal Trade Commission (U.S.) and the Advertising Standard’s Authority (U.K.) addressing the murky waters of false advertising on social media outlets, it’s no longer okay to be a paid shill to promote garbage (if it ever truly was).

There’s also the inherent trust that we build in each other, the more we interact online. Through natural conversations and everyday back and forths, we get to see who’s similar to us in both beliefs and interests.

That manifests itself in our willingness to take their recommendation of something they’ve tried and take a look ourselves, versus some stranger being paid to write about something

And perhaps therein lies the biggest reason for the growth in peer reviews.

The Strength of the Advocate

Whether someone is paid to review a product neutrally, positively or negatively, we know money has exchanged hands. Depending on how long a contract with a publisher is, the author of a professional review may word it in such a way that it’s encouraging the brand to rehire the author.

It’s similar to the failings of focus groups, where the feedback can be biased because of the desire to be invited back and be paid again.

Because of this, people are naturally wary of a professional review and how unbiased (or factual) it truly is.

Switch that around with our social connections who don’t have a play in the game except to help you make your decision. “Yeah, the iPhone is excellent but the speed of the Windows 8 phone was crazy fast compared to my iPhone.”

Peer reviewers (or opinion sharers) aren’t in it for money; there’s no bias; there’s no hidden agenda. It’s simply an honest opinion of theirs to help you make the right choice in yours.

That difference is becoming more evident as we start to filter our connections into groups based on relevance and context to our needs at that time. As these groups and authority within them grow, the professional review will struggle to keep up.

Fir any brand not making inroads to the peer review marketplace, they might struggle to keep up too…

For a copy of the Executive Report on the survey, click here.

images: Weber Shandwick and KRC Research

When is a private thought not a private thought? When online curation tool Storify decides to bypass privacy wishes and share that thought publicly.

Over at AGBeat, there’s an interesting (and alarming) story about how Storify can be used to post private updates on Facebook publicly. By using their curation tool, someone in a private or secret Facebook group (where only members can view content) can share something meant for a limited audience for the whole web to view.

Storify co-founder Burt Herman seems to think this is okay, and the perfect example of why you should be careful in who you trust online.

But he’s missing a very key point.

People Can Make Mistakes – Technology Should Be Smarter

In a post on the Storify site addressing the AGBeat article, Herman suggests that curating private posts into a public stream is no different from taking a screenshot of a private update and posting that too.

While technically that may be true, in reality there’s a big difference between the two methods. Founder of business network pioneer Adholes, Marc Lefton, succinctly sums up the issue:

Screenshots are malicious. This [a Storify share] can happen by accident. That’s the difference.

Because Storify makes it simple for people to be browsing a site or network and share something that catches their eye, users (rightly or wrongly) will not always consider the limited audience the original update was meant for.

That’s the equal beauty and fallacy of human nature – excitement about content that grabs attention can result in the emotion of finding that content override the logic of respecting the audience limitation.

Technology like Storify, however, isn’t built on an emotional reaction – it’s bits and bytes taking a logical approach to enabling you to share emotionally-rich content.

Or at least it should be – but as the AGBeat article and Storify co-founder Herman’s shifting of blame to the user proves, the technology only works logically if the developers build it to do so.

Herman’s logic – that you should trust who you share content with not to reshare it if it’s meant to be private – would carry more weight if his platform was consistent in that mindset across all networks. But it isn’t.

If you try and share content via Storify from a protected Twitter account, the privacy settings from the micro-blogging platform prevent Storify from being able to quote the tweet. So it’s clear that Storify’s technology can be stopped by a network’s API.

Which suggests both Facebook and Storify are at fault here – Facebook for not preventing sharing the way Twitter does, and Storify for not recognizing a private group or community’s restricted access settings. Unfortunately, Storify doesn’t really see it this way.

It’s Your Fault

In the comments section of the AGBeat article, I questioned Herman’s stance on user blame after he stated it wasn’t a technology issue, but one of etiquette.

Herman’s answer, ironically, highlights Storify’s failing – the “power” effected by being able to share easily needs to be countered by the ability to identify whether that content should be shared.

Herman’s logic suggests if a private update is shared, it’s your fault for trusting the wrong friends to begin with. But that’s simply absolving responsibility from the platform that offers the public sharing of a private update. Former journalist, and General Manager of Social Media at New York-based technology startup Internet Media Labs, Amy Vernon identifies the flaw in this logic perfectly:

This is the difference:

You protect your tweets, Storify won’t allow people who are allowed to see your tweets to Storify them. You protect your Facebook posts, Storify will allow people who are allowed to see those posts to Storify them.

Plain and simple.

Is it, at its root, a human problem? Sure. But all this is changing faster than the average person can keep up. That doesn’t absolve tools and platforms from trying to abide by privacy levels.

Instead of blaming the user, why doesn’t Storify take the higher road and have a filter/blocker in place (similar to the Twitter scenario) where a message pops up prior to the sharing that asks the simple question: “This content is from a restricted source – are you sure you wish to share?” Or, better still, simply change the way Storify scrapes network API’s and only allow sharing of clearly publicly available content.

Of course, to do this would mean admitting Storify (and, by association, Facebook) have a problem. And no-one likes to admit they have a weakness…

image: AGBeat

A little while back, I wrote about the difference between analytics and insights. My key point was while we may have awesome data at our fingertips, not knowing what to do with that data renders it obsolete and ineffective.

A new survey, with responses from attendees of the recent DMA2012 conference, as well as the recent Forrester Research conference Seizing Opportunity From Digital Disruption, seems to back up that insights versus analytics post.

Filtering The Noise Chamber

Today’s connected consumer has access to an insane amount of information, all at their fingertips thanks to the ubiquity of smartphone access to the web.

From checking restaurant reviews and stock prices, to taking pictures of a new pair of jeans and asking the opinion of friends on Facebook, today’s consumer is no longer restricted to choosing a brand through a push marketing approach.

This change of direction in the purchase cycle has resulted in brands playing catch up in trying to make sense of this new paradigm.

Instead of buying a media spend and determining results based on increased foot traffic to a storefront, marketers and analysts now have to understand what tipped a consumer from intent to buy to an actual purchase, and what external factors can impact that decision in the first place.

To enable this, technologies and companies have sprung up to allow marketers all the data they need, and more. However, this now presents a new and far more dangerous problem, from they perspective of the marketer:

How can the right data be filtered when there is so much of it? Failure to extrapolate the right data will only make the job tougher for any brand looking to truly understand their customer’s mindset.

Failure to understand your customer equals failure to grow and remain afloat. The scary thing is, though, it’s clear that many marketers just aren’t getting to grips with this new analytical methodology, as the report shows.

The Problem with Data – Lack of Insight

Some of the key findings from the attendees include:

• 45% said the analysis and application of data is the biggest challenge;
• 39% are not using demographic information or customer behaviour patterns when creating marketing strategies;
• 44% don’t envision hiring new employees to oversee this data;
• 83% plan to start considering using real-time data.

There are other worrying statistics from the results, but I picked out these four because they highlight perfectly the challenges to today’s marketer, as well as the failings of many businesses looking to operate in the space.

If more than a third don’t take something as basic and yet hugely important like demographics and customer behaviour into the equation, and almost half think they’re qualified to oversee this core business component themselves, that’s a problem.

Even more disconcerting is the percentage that don’t use real-time data – 83%.

Eighty three percent.

That’s more than three quarters of the businesses asked not utilizing something as simple as Twitter Search to get the lowdown on what’s being said about their brand or product at any given time, and being able to react to it.

It’s almost like we’re trapped in 2006. If businesses today aren’t utilizing the technology out there to make their business smarter and more effective, then it’s no wonder so many fail when it comes to using social as a complementary component to their other marketing efforts.

It’s not data that’s the problem – it’s the lack of insight into how that data can be mined, analyzed and acted upon. And there’s no need for this to be the case.

Smarter Thinking, Better Execution

Just looking at some of the key points I pulled from the report, there are simple solutions to every one of them.

If analysis and application are the biggest challenges, identify the people who understand this new research opportunity (this also addresses the 44% of businesses who don’t foresee employing people to oversee the data).

Additionally, identify the analysis that’s most important to you – lead generation results, customer service satisfaction, brand perception, competitor activity, etc. If you have no-one internally that can address this need, look to the kind of people your competitors have in this key role and act accordingly to, at the very least, match that investment.

Use technology like Quantcast to identify the demographics and behaviour of your web traffic. Cross measure this with tools like Traackr and Nimble, that can identify the key people talking about your brand and then filter them into groups and level of relevance and/or importance when it comes to contact.

Change the mindset of considering real-time intelligence and start making it a key part of your brand’s customer experience reporting. Hell, you don’t even have to be on a platform to set up alerts on the information that matters, and then allocating the right person to deal with that opportunity/situation.

Unless, of course, you’re the type of business that would have the chance to speak with your customer in your shop about how their visit was, and instead advise them you’d rather be in the office drinking coffee and playing Angry Birds.

Data doesn’t have to be scary – you don’t need to be mining every single piece of information out there about your brand. You do, however, need to be mining for the right data that’s important to you at that given time, and act on that.

Reduce the data. Increase the insights. Be a smarter business. You owe it to yourself, and your customers deserve better.

You can get a free copy of the full report here.

When social media first began gaining popularity with brands, the first thing they wanted to know was, “What are people saying about us?”

It’s understandable – whereas before brands would only get to find out what the public’s perception of them was when the cash registers slowed down, now they could get insights on what was being said before it became a problem, and the perception of their response to that conversation (positive or negative).

This led to a booming market in social monitoring platforms. Companies sprung up with technologies that could monitor millions of conversations, send alerts to brand managers, and define the changing sentiment around a brand and the subsequent buzz that went with it.

All for a very nice premium, too, with licenses running into thousands of dollars per month for just a single license.

But the truth of the matter is social monitoring is flawed, and will continue to be flawed, while we still think in bits and bytes when it comes to human behaviour.

We Are Not Machines

The basic premise of a social monitoring platform is simple:

• Choose your industry;
• Choose keywords to monitor (brand, product, person);
• Set up your alerts;
• Define your goals (buzz, sentiment, volume, leads);
• Gather data, report, refine, rinse and repeat.

Sure, there are other areas of data that brands may set up, depending on their goals – competitor intelligence, for example. But even this basic set-up of goals and tactics highlights the flaw in social monitoring – we’re hoping humans behave like machines to tell us what we want to know.

For most social monitoring platforms, the technology is still fairly basic in that all it does is monitor online conversations for certain keywords (much like Google scans the web for your search terms and then gives you a series of results).

The problem with this approach is it requires linear thinking on behalf of the target. Instead of true natural conversations like the ones you have with friends on Facebook, monitoring tools are often looking for non-connected scripts. Take the following example.

I’m in my house, freezing my butt off in a typical Canadian winter. I go online to moan, and say something as simple as “Being cold sucks.” There’s nothing really there for monitoring software to pick up. Or is there?

If the software was advanced enough, there are multiple reasons for me being cold. Is there a hole in my window? Is my roof insulation not working properly? Is my furnace broken? Am I struggling to pay heating bills?

Immediately, there are now four opportunities for four vendors to take an interest in me – glazier, roof insulators, HVAC companies and maybe even my bank, to see if they can help financially.

All from three little words, instead of a monitoring solution looking for me going online and asking “Know any good HVAC companies in Southern Ontario?”

You can see why we still have a way to go when it comes to monitoring. But that’s just a part of it.

Social Monitoring and the Influence Effect

Let’s take monitoring one step further, when it’s being used as part of an influencer outreach campaign.

When brands use influencers, they need to know who’s making the buzz happen and who’s creating action from intent. Otherwise, they’re just shooting in the dark while paying thousands of dollars to social scoring sites for putting them in touch with the influencers in the first place.

So, as a campaign unfolds, brands use monitoring platforms to see where the conversation is stemming from (influence solution partners can offer this information but you should be monitoring for your own needs as well). They track the times an influencer speaks, and whether this causes a trickle or ripple effect.

And this sets up another problem with monitoring at that high level – it doesn’t take into effect all the disruptive factors that help a decision be made, positive or negative.

For example, I see an influencer talk about the new Ford F-150. I trust the influencer (he or she’s a car geek, just like me), and I like the mix of fuel economy and torque that the F-150 offers. I’m sold, and I mention as such to the influencer on their blog, so that goes down as a positive net.

But I’m not the decision maker when it comes to finances – my wife is.

So, as much as I love the truck and as much as I give off the vibe that I’m moving beyond intent to buy to actually buying, based on an influencer’s write-up, I don’t buy, because my wife has rightly said we need to go on vacation this year to unwind, and the money needs to go to that.

The effect of that decision isn’t felt, because the monitoring only stayed with me until I was a positive result for the brand and influencer. Had the monitoring or influencer program stuck with me for a week or two, they would have seen me jump online to say, “Vacation this year, truck next year.”

Instead, the brand wonders why there was a positive effect that didn’t correlate into a sale; the influence program is questioned for effectiveness; and the monitoring solution fails to follow up on my secondary conversation.

Take it one step further – let’s say the software really digs into who I’m talking with and can filter them into relevancy, as well as alerts if there’s a follow-up to our original conversation online. They would have picked up my wife speaking with her friends online and saying, “Danny wanted a truck, but we really need a vacation this year, so we’re doing that instead.”

The result would be immediate – the influencer program clearly worked, it’s just priorities that take precedence and, in this case, a vacation was a higher priority. But the message about the F-150 came through loud and clear and, had the vacation not been the disruptor in this case, the sale would have been completed.

We Need to Be Smarter with the Long Tail

Now, these are hypothetical examples, and there are companies that are trying to identify not just the main conversations, but the secondary and tertiary ones too. In our book, we highlight the ones we feel are making great inroads, and dedicate a chapter into using these platforms for your influence campaigns.

But as hypothetical as they are, they also clearly illustrate where we need to go, and that’s into the Long Tail of monitoring and/or influence. We can’t just stop at the result – we need to understand what made that result happen:

• What diverted an action (my wife being the logic to my emotional decision);
• Where the follow-up should be (in this case, reminders that I’m in the market for a truck in 12 months time);
• What language tipped the emotional purchase (prior to the vacation becoming a disruptor);
• Where the true result came from (in this case, a few weeks after the perceived success).

We’re not there yet, and while social scoring continues to be the lead when it comes to measuring influence online, we won’t get there anytime soon. The good news is, companies are moving away from scoring and really digging into all the data that’s available to us.

When monitoring catches up and combines its resources with the knowledge we get from identifying true influence, business will never be the same again.

Ready to start the next wave?

As we enter a new year, I traditionally start by highlighting people and news to keep an eye on in the year to come.

This year is no different, (yeah, I’m predictable that way). Previously, I shared 5 bloggers for you to watch in 2013 as well as 5 blogs to subscribe to in 2013. In today’s final look ahead, and in no particular order, here are 5 influence platforms to keep an eye on in 2013.

1. Appinions

Recently I was asked what was one of my goals in 2013, and my response was to see social scoring as a means for measuring influence disappear. A number does not reflect a person’s influence – context, relevance, action and integrity do, which is why I like the approach Appinions is taking to social influence.

Working directly with brands – they’re not interested in a consumer interface – Appinions uses over a decade of research and academia from Cornell University to connect brands to influencers through a mix of earned, paid and owned media. They also offer strategic partnerships between these brands and their clients, with nary a social score in sight.

2. TrendSpottr

I’ve already featured these guys here earlier this year, but the reason I think TrendSpottr warrants a closer look in 2013 when it comes to influence is simple – they truly have the potential to change the way content is used as a business strategy for companies of all sizes, and how that content influences your marketing strategies.

When you think of trends today, you probably think of something like what’s currently trending on Twitter. Yet that’s not a true barometer of trending – that’s simply showing what’s currently popular. For true predictive trend analysis – highlight what has the propensity to become popular based on organic and social conversations – TrendSpottr is the platform to check out.

If you as a publisher or brand can tap into what content is going to go viral – including YouTube videos – and then prepare your own content around that optimized for search, your equity as a thought leader and, by correlation, an influencer has just grown.

3. Traackr

I’ll admit, I confused Traackr with the similarly-named service Trackur, and haven’t looked at them in too much depth before because of this. My bad, since Traackr offers much promise when it comes to highlighting the kind of influencers that really matter to your brand.

Instead of pure numbers and how they might amplify a message, Traackr looks to identify influencers based on three core concepts – Reach, Resonance and Relevance. While the Reach part of the equation does take audience size into equation, it’s complemented by the Resonance (the ability to effectively engage that influencer’s community) and Relevance (how contextual that influencer is to your brand) factors, making the overall process much more targeted.

Having just written the chapter in our upcoming book on social influence marketing that looks at these factors as well as others that truly impact your company’s bottom line, I’ll be taking a much closer look at Traackr in the coming weeks for sure.

4. Wahooly

Apart from having a name that reminds me of something a drunken Scot would say in celebration, Wahooly has caught my eye for the approach they’re taking, which is more skewed towards crowdsourced influence.

Kind of like a KickStarter for influence, Wahooly tracks the conversations about startup companies in their database. The more influence your conversation effects around a chosen company, the more points you earn with that company. You can then redeem these points to enjoy “rewards” with that company, from free samples to a chat with the founders and even equity in the company.

It’s an interesting concept, although one that could easily be gamed due to the nature of online chatter and adapting conversations to suit a need. However, the ability to potentially have a say in which startups succeed is one to admire – here’s hoping they can keep the gamification aspect honest.

5. Tellagence

I’ve loved what the Tellagence guys are doing from the first moment I heard about them, mainly because these guys are doing everything right when it comes to online behaviours and understanding how influence truly works on the social web.

Geared solely for Twitter at the moment, but with more networks to follow, Tellagence looks at evolving variables in online behaviour, and how that translates into identifying an influencer at any given time. Instead of saying “Joe is influential in sports”, Tellagence can say “Joe is influential in sports this month, but Sarah will be more influential next month”.

This advanced analysis truly reflects the fluid nature of influence based on a person’s changing interests and makes Tellagence a strong player in the new wave of influence tools about to take off in 2013 and beyond.

Social Scoring is Over

Currently, when you ask someone about influence online, most people will say, “Oh, you mean companies like Klout and Kred and other social scoring platforms”, mainly because that’s all the mainstream really knows about at the minute.

The problem is, social scoring isn’t anywhere near a true measure of someone’s online influence and the impact that can create. Instead, context, situations, relevance, audience behaviour and more are the new currencies of influence.

Or, perhaps they’ve always been the currency, and the platforms such as the ones mentioned above are helping to shape how influence can truly be measured and used in a business setting where lead generation and sales are the end result.

Which, for any business, is what matters the most at the end of the day. Here’s to the future.

Note: As we gear up to the launch of our book in the near future, we’ll be hosting a series of exclusive webinars with the platforms and founders we feel are shaping the influence industry for the next 12-18 months and beyond. You can get access to these webinars, and choose which one you’d like to attend, when you pre-order our book and forward a copy of your receipt to info@influencemarketingbook.com – look forward to seeing you there.