social networking – Page 13

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the importance of influence as an element of brand positioning in the social media sphere.

But this is really nothing new for brands. Having influence — or being perceived as having influence — was important for brands long before social media came of age.

Influence is a key trait for effective leadership — for organizations and individuals alike. Influence is how the best leaders get people to join together for a common cause. So an organization wanting to strengthen its position in the marketplace ought to work on being as influential in its niche as possible.

Brands wanting to be perceived as leaders need to be perceived as influential.

So a number of different services have sprouted up to help organizations and individuals measure their influence. One of the most talked about is Klout, which, despite quite a bit of criticism, seems to be staking its claim as a leader in the contest to be the standard for measuring influence in the social media world.

But as K.D. Paine suggests toward the end of a recent blog post, Klout is more effective at measuring activity (read: Twitter chatter) than influence. “If you are in the B2B space, or in a market that doesn’t care about celebrity, or have influencers that don’t compulsively post their every activity, you aren’t gaining anything but skepticism in the board room,” she writes. “The downside is that while you’re focusing on the popularity contest, your real fans and prospects are growing bored and looking for other places that are really interesting.”

Meanwhile, an upstart called PeerIndex is trying to unseat Klout in the battle for most influential yardstick of influence. The folks at TechCrunch think PeerIndex might have a chance. As TechCrunch reported recently, PeerIndex is gaining on Klout. PeerIndex recently logged its 45 millionth tracked Twitter profile — breathing down the neck of Klout, which tracks 60 million. Moreover, TechCrunch explains, “While Klout gives us an overall score for an individuals’ influence, PeerIndex goes after the actual subjects people are expert in and ranks them accordingly with a proprietary algorithm.”

But like Klout, PeerIndex is also Twitter-centric. (Although Klout can also be used with Facebook pages.) So how effective is it, really, in measuring influence in the broader realm of social media? Twitter may be the hangout of choice for the so-called super socials, but if the tool is measuring only Twitter activity, it is recording only a sliver of the action.

Nevertheless, it appears that these two tools are the main ones slugging it out in the influence measurement game. (I’m talking about free, easily accessible tools. Other propriety tools exist that may provide better measurement than either of these.) So, in the interest of determining which is the more influential, I conducted my own less-than-scientific analysis of these two tools. I used five criteria. Here are my exclusive findings:

1. Domain name. When I went to pull up the PeerIndex website to reference during this blog post, I typed peerindex.com into my browser, only to be directed to a link farm. The real PeerIndex is a dot-net. Klout is a dot-com. A major fail of PeerIndex’s part. Winner: Klout.

2. Google fight. This old-school approach to compare search mentions is a longtime favorite of mine. I pitted the two services against each other in this fight, but the match between Klout and PeerIndex was no contest. Klout scored 128,000 to PeerIndex’s 21,200. Winner: Klout.

3. Klout score. Since we’re talking about these services as tools to measure influence, why not use them to measure the influence of their own Twitter accounts? The Twitter handle @klout has a Klout score of 81, while @PeerIndex’s is 66. While PeerIndex’s Klout score is respectable, the upstart loses again. Winner: Klout.

4. PeerIndex scores. Klout’s composite PeerIndex score is 29. PeerIndex’s is 30. Winner: PeerIndex by a nose. (Interestingly, PeerIndex’s “realness” score — which the company says measures “the likelihood that the profile is of a real person, rather than a spambot or twitter feed” — was a perfect 100, while Klout’s was 0.)

5. Positive Twitter sentiment. Using the Twitter sentiment tool, we see that @Klout has a positive sentiment score of 74 percent compared to only 67 percent for @PeerIndex. Looking at the brand names without the @ yielded higher positive results for both — 90 percent for Klout and 83 percent for PeerIndex — but the result is the same. Winner: Klout.

* * *

If leadership boils down to influence, then it would appear that Klout — the leader in this influence-measurement contest, based on sheer numbers of profiles — is also the more influential of these two. But what will the case be six months from now? I plan to revisit this question on New Year’s Eve and, using the same criteria, see how these players face off. If they’re both still around.

In the meantime, maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about the tools for measuring influence. Maybe we should just think about the four most important elements of influence — the old-fashioned virtues of trust, authority, value and connection — and make sure we are applying them to our social media efforts.

Photo: Influence, by nashworld.

I’m a day too late to post the customary Friday Five, but I did want to share some key takeaways I gleaned from my recent trip to Minneapolis for The Art and Science of Social Media Marketing for Higher Education, a one-day workshop put on by The Lawlor Group.

Since I’m a day late, I’m going to make it up to you by providing an extra takeaway — a Saturday Six of bullet points. Also, if you hurry, you’ll find more about the conference via the Twitter hashtag for that event, #tlgsm. But hurry, because hashtags, like fruit flies, tend to have short life spans.

1. Brands can learn a lot from evolutionary biology. I’ve been thinking a bit about the evolution of brands and branding at least since the mid-2000s, when I read Al and Laura Ries’s book The Origin of Brands. Dan Zarrella has been thinking about this, too, and during his kickoff session at the workshop — titled “The Science of Social Media Marketing” — offered several great points to ponder about evolution, branding and marketing. Just as species evolve and thrive by their ability to adapt to the forces of nature, so brands most able to adapt to ever-changing cultural, social and economic pressures will do well. This is an important point for those of us in higher ed to keep in mind, especially these days.

You can hear much more from Dan about these and other issues by viewing his one-hour presentation on this topic. Yes, an hour is a long time to spend watching a video about social media, but you won’t be disappointed. You’ll also find that his conclusions about what works in social media is backed by research. (Thanks to Karine Joly, who first directed me to that presentation in this post a couple of months ago.)

2. Facebook: The Jersey Shore of social media. Facebook has become the most mainstream of social media. Brands wanting to connect with Facebook users should learn to “write for Snooki,” as Dan put it. But maybe without all the F-bombs. Just keep it simple and to the point.

3. It’s OK to tell (or ask) people what to do. In their presentation about listening and strategic planning, Jennifer Kane and Kary Delaria, both of Kane Consulting, made the point that people don’t mind being told what to do. It’s OK to tell (or ask) people to “like” an article on Facebook, for example. This correlates to what Dan Z. mentioned about retweeting. His research found that the phrase “please retweet” or “please RT” in a Twitter post were among the most retweetable words.

4. Size, frequency and timing matter. In the debate about quality vs. quantity, quantity wins. According to Dan Zarrella’s research, the larger the number of followers a brand has on Twitter, the more fans on Facebook, etc., the greater the chances are that the brand’s messages will be shared more broadly. Likewise, the more frequently a post is shared on Twitter, the greater the odds that it will be retweeted. But beware of over-sharing. Link fatigue could set in among your fans or followers.

In terms of timing, Dan’s research suggests that click-through rates for information posted on social media increases during the weekend, even though social media activity tends to slow down on the weekends.

5. Stay positive. Nobody likes a Debbie Downer. Not in real life. Not in social media. So if you want to build your brand in the social media sphere, avoid getting negative. Stay upbeat. Related: Don’t talk about yourself all the time, either. Just as no one likes to talk to the person at a cocktail party who only talks about himself, no one will pay much attention to your brand if you’re only talking about yourself. Dan Z. suggests finding “combined relevance” that connects your brand to the interests of others.

Here’s a real-world example of combined relevance in action: Earlier this week, a minor earthquake struck east of Rolla. I tweeted about the event and asked our followers if anyone felt it. The tweet had nothing to do with our brand, so to speak, but it was relevant on a few levels: geography, a shared experience, and the fact that we offer majors in geology, geophysics and geological engineering — disciplines that attract students interested in quakes. The result: half a dozen retweets and interactions with five followers.

6. Lougan Bishop rocked Twitter. I had the good fortune of co-presenting on a panel with Lougan and Dan Z. I talked about blogging, while Dan talked about Facebook and Lougan opined about Twitter. Lougan did a terrific job talking about Twitter and reinforcing what others had said earlier in the day. Check out his presentation (on Slideshare or below).

Twitter Channel Presentation

View more presentations from lougan

In all, I had a great time presenting, meeting new people, reconnecting with a few earlier acquaintances, and learning from my peers. I really appreciate the opportunity and thank John Lawlor of The Lawlor Group for putting on an exceptional workshop.

P.S. – I’ve also posted my presentation for your viewing pleasure.