influence

Measuring Influence in the Social Media World #MMchat with Joe Fernandez of Klout

It was GREAT to have @JoeFernandez the CEO of @Klout on #MMchat last night so all of you could ask questions about this standard for measuring influence on Social Media.


The level of interaction on the chat was excellent and we learned a number of new things about Klout and where it is going when @JoeFernandez took the stage on #MMchat for a tweetchat with you all about Measuring Influence in the Social Media World. Who better to talk about measuring influence than the man leading Klout the standard indicator for measuring online influence?

Please take some time to review and the transcript from last night’s #MMchat with @JoeFernandez.

Thanks to all of you #MMchat tweeps and others for joining us last night and sharing your thoughts and questions on such an important topic, for it truly is all of you who make #MarketerMonday Chat matter!

Remember #MMchat makes Mondays MARVELOUS!!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

4 Keys to Increasing Your Klout Score

Now that the Wall Street Journal is writing about them, you probably already know about Klout. If you’re using Hootsuite, your Klout score, and the Klout score of your followers, is front-and-center. Here are four ways you can increase your Klout score.

  1. Get important people to talk about you. Klout measures the visible vestiges of influence. Getting people who already have Klout scores to retweet your tweets or in some other way mention you enables you to ride the draft of their influence. You can find these people by using Klout’s business service. You might check out HubSpot’s listing of Twitter Elite, too. Follow them on Twitter, retweet them, and if they don’t notice you, you can use a Twitter mention to ask them to retweet you. If you’ll get important people to talk about you, you can increase your Klout score.

    2. Read more

Everything you wanted to know about influence but were afraid to ask

Flickr: bighugelabs
Influence.

One word that seems to be getting more attention with every new Twitter and Facebook account that’s added.

What does it mean, is it important, how do you measure it and which tools and methods best reflect this ephemeral new elixir? The Social CMO Crew has now been hard at it for just over a year generating more than 300 posts and I thought this would be a great opportunity to take a retrospective look through these focusing on this theme of influence.

In looking at all the blogs we’ve created, there are four words that resonate and help us to better frame this discussion, and these are Trust, Relationships, Social Capital and of course… Influence.

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How to do Twitter in 15 minutes a day

“Twitter users are the most influential consumers online,” concludes Exact Target in the research report Subscribers, Fans, and Followers. When I was with Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo, recently in Indianapolis, he told me there were over 160 million registered Twitter accounts. It’s safe to say, Twitter is growing in importance as a part of one’s marketing mix. The challenge is, how to find the time to “do” Twitter. Here’s how you can do Twitter in 15 minutes a day or less.

Growing your network

  • Use search.twitter.com or Google to find 5 leaders in your industry and follow them on Twitter
  • Follow back every real person who follows you
  • Follow 5 people who participated in a tweet chat discussing your topic. Here’s a mega list of Twitter tweet chats.

Growing your relationships

  • Scan your @mentions and reply to every human who addresses a tweet to you
  • Scan your direct messages and reply to any that don’t look like auto-generated messages. Nearly 99% of all my incoming direct messages are auto-generated. Many people call them “junk mail,” and nearly everyone calls them spam. No doubt you’ll come up with your own vocabulary to describe them.

Growing your influence

  • Scan your “home” stream of tweets posted by people you follow to find relevant content for your followers and retweet it.
  • Share 4-5 links to other relevant content around the web (blog posts, news articles, research, polls, surveys, etc.). You can use your RSS aggregator (I’m using Google Reader at the moment) to “harvest” relevant content to share via Twitter.
  • If you write a blog, share a link to a recent post. Twitter readers may give you grief if all you do is share your own content, but if they know you’re also sharing other valuable, relevant content with them, they’ll be glad to see your content, too.

While’s there’s much, much more to leveraging the power of Twitter, if you’ll follow the outline above, you can get started in Twitter right away without it consuming too much time. Over the next few days, I’ll share more ideas to help you use Twitter to expand your online presence, and yes, to add Twitter as a meaningful part of your sales system.

Trey Pennington

@ChrisBrogan to ROCK #MMchat November 22nd!


We’re very pleased to relate to all of you #MMchat tweeps out there that @ChrisBrogan will be our SPECIAL guest on #MMchat on Monday November 22nd at 8:00pm eastern!!


The topic for our chat with Chris is one that continues to grow in both importance and impact and that is The Role of Major Influencers in Cause Marketing. We look forward to Chris’s insights and examples in this regard based on his previous experiences in cause marketing programs.

Hope you’re all as excited as I am to have @ChrisBrogan join us and will all make the time to be with us on November 22nd, for it truly is all of you who make #MarketerMonday Chat matter!

Remember #MMchat makes Mondays MARVELOUS!!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

What type of social network influences behaviour?

Yesterday we looked at the motivations for why people engage in different social venues; this morning I came across an interesting new study looking at what type of social network best influences behaviour.

Because it’s all very well if a network spreads information like wildfire, but if that information doesn’t prompt users to do something – buy the product, sign up for the event, stop smoking, change the way they talk about the brand – it’s all so much worthless WOM.

Didn’t I hear something about this? via Lab2112@Flickr

The study, from MIT assistant professor of system dynamics and economic sociology Damon Centola, looked at the spread of health-related behaviour in two different types of social networks – one based around ‘long ties’, or many distant connections, and one based on denser clusters of more closely connected people.

Sociologists have traditionally believed that long ties are the key to the rapid and broad spread of word of mouth, an insight reinforced by a Guardian study presented at a WOMMA UK briefing last year. However, Centola found that to change behaviour, you’re much better off focusing on clustered networks.

It makes human common sense. It’s easy for us to quickly pass on a piece of content via a loosely connected contact; but to understand something more complex, or change ingrained behaviour, we’ll need exposure more than once, and from trusted and emotionally impactful sources. There is more work to be done, but as Centola says,

“For about 35 years, wisdom in the social sciences has been that the more long ties there are in a network, the faster a thing will spread. It’s startling to see that this is not always the case.”

The study is intended to help improve the design of effective health networks, but it has obvious implications for marketing. We’ve always emphasised the need for multiple entry points with a word of mouth campaign, in order to foster both deep and broad engagement. This ensures rapid visibility but also concrete behaviour change, leading to sales, subscriptions and changing attitudes.

This kind of insight is invaluable in tailoring engagement, according to both the brand’s priority and the nature of the community. Great stuff.

Molly Flatt

The Great Influence Debate

It seems every so often a major debate arises because someone uses some math to redefine an accepted belief. Not a bad thing to happen as long as it is to improve mankind and not just to make a name for yourself. In fact, challenging current beliefs should be a regular occurrence.

This time it is about influence and I must say I’m concerned.

The Grudge Match

In the blue trunks we have the challenger, Duncan Watts, proclaiming the super influencer dead and raising the common man up on the pedestal as the new super being – power to the people! “Nobodies are the new somebodies” his sycophants scream from their blogs and Twitter accounts. Witness this interesting transcript where @GuyKawasaki (a super influencer under Gladwell’s model) echoes Duncan’s musings to the mesmerized crowd. (Warning! The transcript is long and chaotic, but worth the read just to see comments from everyone)

Quick question, if @GuyKawasaki was a nobody, would anyone have come to #techchat or RTed his comments? Irony? Maybe.

And in the red trunks we have the current champion, Malcom Gladwell, the godfather of the super influencer via The Tipping Point and champion to the elitist perspective of the power of the few. In his corner are the thousands upon thousands of marketers and companies who based their marketing strategies on reaching specific individuals to spread the good word.

Now the problem here is our champ is fighting with one hand behind his back because of his own views on using Social Media, opting instead for more traditional means such as speaking, his books and PR. With Malcolm’s absence from Twitter – does the champ stand a chance while every minute his idea empire is being besieged by Duncan’s minions?

If you believe, like I do, that ideas struggle for existence; rising and falling as they gain strength or weaken to competing ideas then this could be an interesting fight indeed. Natural Selection at work.

But before we get into the color commentary of our title fight, let’s first understand what the fight is about.

Somebodies, Nobodies and the Nature of Influence

So is there room for a third idea here on influence? One that lands squarely in the great gray area in between these two polar opposites. After all, how can a complex human condition such as influence be explained in such a black and white perspective? How can math or even Chaos and Complexity Theory, for all its power, truly understand a highly evolved and mostly subconscious powerful emotional layer such as how we influence each other?

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Extend your influence by extending trust: a social story

A stranger walks into your store and tells you about his problem. After asking him a few questions to help you understand the problem, you hand him a brand new pair of shoes and tell him to try them for couple weeks. “If they work,” you say, “just come back and pay for them. If they don’t, we’ll try a different pair.” Typical? Probably not.

That’s exactly what Jeff Milliman, the 1980 NCAA cross country champion, did in 1998 for Olivier Blanchard. Olivier wrote about his experience with Jeff in a 2005 blog post called That Bond of Trust. I caught up with Jeff today at his new home at Go Run, a part of Go Tri Sports, in downtown Greenville, South Carolina.


Social Story: Tell me about Olivier. A story of trust. from Trey Pennington on Vimeo.

Please note a few really cool things about this social story:

  • Jeff just did what he always does: listens to people and then applies his knowledge to try to help solve their problems.
  • Jeff is willing to take a risk in order to fulfill his passion.
  • Jeff did the unexpected and went the extra mile and SEVEN YEARS LATER the object of his generosity, Olivier Blanchard, wrote about it. (How many shoe salesmen have people writing glowing stories about them seven years after the sale, or seven hours?)
  • Jeff’s act of generosity and Olivier’s act of gratitude enabled an long lost friend to reconnect with Jeff after nearly 20 years apart.

That means you never can tell when the harvest of your generosity will come.

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How do I increase my influence on Twitter?

A business colleague asked me this question and I figured if it was on his mind, it might be on yours too. While it remains to be seen if I have actual influence anywhere, I have undoubtedly created substantial, tangible business benefits through Twitter and the social web. So here’s my strategy. It’s very simple and I think it could probably work for anybody.

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