Influence

If @Klout is Fixed, Why Are They Profiling an 11-Year Old Kid?

Two days ago, social influence tool Klout published a blog post on how they had updated their algorithms to answer critics of their service.

From the post:

Today, we?re introducing some of the most significant product updates in Klout?s history. With these updates, we?ve concentrated on helping everyone to gain a clearer, more accurate understanding of how they influence other people through the ideas they share.

As part of the update, Klout promises “increased accuracy”. Which is great, as this is one of the core complaints about the service. They also promise more transparency, more data, real-world influence. And a shiny new site design…

However, one glaring omission from the post is the question of Klout and privacy.

There have been numerous posts written about Klout’s policy of creating profiles without the explicit permission of users, and the fact you have to opt out of the service if you don’t want profiled.

Worse still, though, was the discovery that minors under the age of 18 were being profiled by Klout, from something as innocuous as being connected to their parent on Facebook.

Due to the backlash against this practice from numerous bloggers, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez came out and stated “Klout has no interest in profiling minors”.

So, why does the Klout website have a profile for an 11 year old kid (click to expand)?

This is the son of a friend of mine, Jennifer, who brought it to my attention that both her kids were being profiled by Klout. Her son is the 11 year old pictured here, and her daughter is 14 later this year.

Both profiles are clearly there for all to see. Not only that, but her daughter’s profile on Klout shows who she influences. One is her brother, the other is her friend – also 14.

Jennifer spoke with both her kids, and neither of them even know what Klout is, never mind that they have a profile on there.

So, despite all the questions about privacy and minors, and despite Klout’s statements that this would be fixed, it’s clear the company is still adding profiles of children that fall under Klout’s own privacy terms.

These terms have actually been updated, since it was previously under-18’s that weren’t “allowed” on Klout. Even so, is it really fair for any company to take a kid’s details and parade them on a site where numbers attract advertisers?

And while Klout advises parents to monitor their kids’ online activities, it’s hard to do this when you have to be logged into Klout to see your kids (if you opt out, you get redirected to a Facebook or Twitter sign-in page).

Now, it could be said that the kid shouldn’t be on Twitter (and thus, Klout) in the first place, since he’s under 13 years old. But as we move towards a more online world, kids are going to go online anyway – the best approach for many parents, and one that they’re taking, is to help guide them on the way.

With that in mind, isn’t it about time Klout quit adding profiles on an opt-out basis, and only has people on there who have voluntarily opted in? Maybe then parents wouldn’t have to worry about their kids being taken advantage of in this way.

Heck, there’s already enough online pitfalls to try and keep our kids safe from without a social score to worry about…

Update: The 11 year old also has a profile on Klout competitor Kred, despite their Terms of Service stating it’s for 13 years and older – more reasons for the opt-in process to be standard.
Update: Following an email from the 11 year old’s mother, Kred has made her kids’ pages on Kred inaccessible.

At Some Stage the Conversation Has to Advance

Over on Facebook, author and marketer Geoff Livingston posed the following question/statement:

Apart from the misplaced punctuation mark in CEO’s (*cough*, sorry Geoff, couldn’t resist!), it’s a great question, and one that solicited some great responses (mostly along the lines of CEOs don’t need to tweet).

Because, simply put, a CEO has one job and one job only – to meet the goals set for the company by the Board of Directors. In that role, he or she becomes responsible for four key tenets:

Communicator – ensuring the outside world and/or media are kept up-to-date with the current business.
Decision maker – responsible for the overall strategy and policy making.
Leader – advising the board of progress, motivating employees and driving change in the organization.
Manager – overseeing the day-to-day challenges and operations within the organization.

See any mandate for tweeting there, or being active on social media? No – because, as Geoff rightly points out, the role of a CEO is far more reaching than the occasional tweet.

So why are we still having this conversation about CEOs and the need for them to tweet? Simple – social media is stuck in a time-warp created by a number of “experts” severely lacking in true business acumen.

I Have a Klout Score of Eleventy Billion, Therefore I Am

Don’t worry, I’m not going to start one of my anti-Klout rants here. But the influencer model and social scoring metric has led to an epidemic of businesses looking to the wrong people to help them with their goals in social media.

Whereas previously consultants and agencies had to work their asses off to get to a level of expertise and trust before they began advising corporations and organizations, now you just have to appear to know what you’re on about and have that validated for you by your impressive social score.

It’s not really the fault of these platforms either – although they have exacerbated the problem with their “You’re no-one unless you’re a social someone” approach.

Social media in general has allowed people to rise from nowhere and become “the voice” that people should listen to when they speak.

Never mind the fact that their LinkedIn profile has no experience of actually running a multi-million dollar company; or shows any kind of success metrics or return except a high score on the latest influencer platform and a speaking slot at some non-descript conference.

And yet these are the folks that are advising CEOs should be stepping away from their daily duties and responsibilities to their employees, shareholders and customers, so they can impart 140 characters of wisdom that may have been vetted and scripted anyway.

It’s advice that seems to have been pumped for the last 5 years or so – as Doug Haslam put it on Geoff’s Facebook wall, “We’re still talking about this? <kicks time machine to make sure it hasn’t malfunctioned and sent me back 5 years>.”

It also shows the maturity this space still has to go through, and the nonsensical talk that “experts” need to advance from.

Customers Don’t Necessarily Care About the Tweet Owner

One of the main arguments put forward by these social media wonks (using Geoff’s description) is that by having the CEO tweet, the brand becomes more human and awesome.

Sorry, but you can’t pay the bills with awesome.

Can CEOs tweet and improve the brand perception with customers? For sure, and there are many examples of this – Zappos and Virgin are two that spring to mind.

But they also had an incredible culture within the company too, that the CEO mandated as part of his Leader role. The true success of these brands, and others in the social space, is not that the CEO is tweeting – it’s that the CEO empowered others to be truly human in their interactions with customers.

The majority of customers don’t care if the CEO tweets or not – what they do care about is an excellent product, a fair price, and a superb experience both during and after the sale.

That kind of return is what the CEO is employed to achieve – and he or she employs the right people to do that, whether it’s in sales, HR, or social media. Getting that part right is the role of a CEO – not hovering about on Twitter in the hope of “being awesome”.

Something those that are advising a CEO what to do had they ever had the actual experience of what that incurs behind them.

Otherwise, continuing the same kumbaya conversation will only hurt in the long run, and then everybody loses. Especially business.

Note: My friend Jeff Esposito has a great post today on the same topic.

Influential Mentions Aren’t the Same as Word Of Mouth Returns

Earlier this week, I took a look at why the social influencer – as identified by the likes of Klout, Kred, etc – isn’t anywhere near as valuable as an Instigator.

The post created a great discussion (which is still ongoing) around both sides of the coin, and whether it was just a case of semantics or if an Instigator was the true “influencer”.

I just wanted to expand on that a bit more, especially on why the influencer marketing model (as it currently stands) may be even more worthless (at least as far as real results go).

The Reach Effect

Looking at how Klout sells the “benefits” of its service, it attracts brands by selling them the golden ticket of putting their product or service in front of Klout’s army of influencers.

After all, the social web is built on who’s the most influential, right? The more followers, the more reach – the more reach, the more action. Eh – maybe not.

Reach is one of the most overrated metrics around. While saying “Reach 200,000 consumers” might sound great to a brand, it’s a bullshit metric. It’s assuming all 200,000 followers of a Twitter influencer, for example, are online at a given time, waiting to see that one awesome tweet about a product.

The other issue with reach is that it’s just a calculated number. Twitter user A only has 1,000 followers, but the combined number of all the followers that follow Twitter user A and their followers make up the “200,000 consumers” reach. And half of them might be bots.

So, reach is out of the question.

The Return on Perks

Once Klout (and others) have sold an ad campaign to brands, they turn that into Perks (or Rewards). This allows people with a certain score or above to apply to get free stuff – shower gel, cookies, or even a test drive in a new car.

A recent example is car manufacturer Chevrolet, who offered a loan of the newly-launched Sonic to 130 “influencers” with a Klout score of 45 and above. Looking at the results, you’d say it was a success:

16,000 positive mentions online
Three discount requests
One car sold

As a case in raising awareness, 16,000 mentions isn’t chump change. Or is it?

The cost of a Klout Perk starts at $25,000. Considering Perks can be shampoo giveaways, let’s assume the Chevrolet campaign cost more than $25k. You’ve then got to add gas costs for the loans. And insurance. And sales people’s time for both the test drives and then the follow-up calls. And the discounts offered.

And these are just the basic costs. So, for that one sale that brought around $14k into the Chevrolet coffers, there’s a major negative return sales-wise. And I don’t care what business you’re in, you can’t survive on goodwill mentions alone.

Now, it’s true that a car purchase isn’t an impulse buy – there’s a longer process involved, to compare models, showrooms, offers, and more. So it may be that we’ll see more returns on the Chevrolet campaign. Let’s just hope the 130 people involved actually like the Chevy brand and weren’t just along for the free ride.

The Return on Silence Versus Word of Mouth

Of course, this is all conjecture, since Klout are very quiet when it comes to reporting the financial successes of their Perks programs. Sure, they’ll bleat about having 700,000 Perks across 350 campaigns since launching two years ago, but how many of these resulted in real sales to the brands involved?

If I had 350 campaigns, and even if just 10% of them resulted in positive ROI for the companies involved, I’d be shouting that from the rooftops, to both attract more brands and silence the critics.

Klout’s own silence in this regard is deafening, and can be taken however you wish to view it.

Compare that to true word of mouth campaigns and researched demographics – where the idea of Instigators versus Influencers comes up – and it’s a different story.

Paramount and Super 8

When Paramount was getting ready to launch their big Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams collaboration, Super 8, they created a hashtag on Twitter for the event, #Super8Secret. This was to build buzz and awareness for the movie with secret early showings across the U.S.

The result?

9 million impressions in 24 hours (impressive, even for a flawed metric)
150 tweets per minute
Over $1 million sales for sneak preview tickets
Exceeded Paramount’s expectations for opening weekend sales by more than 50%

Unfortunately, I don’t have the cost of the campaign – but creating a hashtag on Twitter and then letting it run amok is probably less than the instant million dollars it created, never mind the opening weekend sales.

The reason the Paramount effort worked – and offered a profitable financial return as opposed to just mentions and a negative sale – is the audience was eager, targeted, and actual fans of the product (in this case, the joining of Spielberg and Abrams).

They took action from Paramount’s instigation instead of just tweeting about the deal. Compare that to the Klout Chevy Perk, and how that (so far) offered more reactions (loans for free) over actions (one purchase, negative return).

Look Beyond the Numbers

The comparisons and results between Chevy and Paramount shouldn’t come as? surprise, though. Klout puts its partners in front of eyeballs based on their in-house metric, which has shown to be flawed time and time again.

Additionally, Klout creates the profiles on its site – you, as a number, don’t have a say in that unless you opt out. So the numbers they promote to their ad partners is skewed from the start.

A proper marketing campaign, on the other hand – media buy, ad buy, email campaign, social media – integrated and targeted will trump the influencer buzz every time (or pretty much every time).

Because smart marketers look beyond the numbers and look to how their effort contributes to the numbers that matter instead.

Which, at the end of the day, is what really matters, no?

Social Influencers Are Dead – Long Live the Instigators

Social influence. The need to prove how wonderful you must be to get such a high Klout score. The golden nugget for brands looking to tell their story to the masses.

Yep, social influence – and, by association, social influencers – is a hot potato and continue to divide opinion.

On the one hand, you have the likes of Klout, Kred, PeerIndex and others allocating scores to you based on your perceived influence, according to their algorithms.

Included in this camp are the evangelists for these services – the score bleaters, pimping themselves looking to score freebies from brands that have bought into the unscientific scoring systems, as well as those that genuinely wish to be seen as more influential through a high score or number.

On the other hand, you have the naysayers and doubters, who believe it’s impossible to allocate a score to an individual, because no individual can truly be measured. There are way too many variables involved – I may be excited by something tweeted to me online, but if my wife says no, my wife says no.

And not one of the influence ranking platforms knows a single thing about my wife and her “influence”.

However, it’s clear we’re looking at the wrong people.

There will always be tools like Klout to offer those needing validation for the stuff they do online, just as much as there will always be people whose validation comes from the results they get for themselves or their clients, both online and offline.

And it doesn’t matter – because the term Social Influencer is pretty much dead. The real power online lies with the Instigators.

Influence Comes And Goes, But The Instigator Thrives Indefinitely

Before the term “social influencer” bastardized the origins of influence, it was a mark of respect to be known as an influencer. Now, though, the term has lost a lot of its marquee, because it’s tied directly to who can be the noisiest online to try and improve influence scores and grab some freebies.

It’s why many people are pushing back on influence scores, by dropping out of the system altogether, or simply refusing to care.

And while some brands are still willing to take a risk on signing up to offer free perks to those that play the game in the hope of getting more return for their money, many others are bypassing the score takers and going direct to the source.

This is where the Instigator is the new power, and the one that should be followed and courted.

Because the Instigator has always been around, long before any social influence “metric” was thought of. The Instigator has been the real influencer, and caused actions and reactions far larger, and in greater numbers, than the perceived influencer.

And they continue to do so, long after the last Klout Perk has shriveled up and become the butt of online jokes at the irrelevance.

So who are the Instigators, and why should you (as a brand or business) care?

The Trust of the Instigator Community

Instigators are the drivers of actions and conversations, and it’s down to one simple fact – they have the innate ability to create conversations and actions based on those conversations, as opposed to being a shill for a brand.

And their community knows this.

Instead of slapping the latest affiliate ad on their site for a product they’ll never use, Instigators always show both sides of the coin. They offer the good and the bad of a brand, product or service.

They treat their audience as equals – because their audience are equals. And, by being treated as equals and partners in the conversation, the audience of an Instigator takes the message further than any brand could (arguably) hope to see from an influencer campaign.

Because many brands are focusing on the wrong platforms. They’re looking to Twitter and Facebook, and throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into Sponsored Tweets and Stories.

In the meantime, the real action is happening on blogs and inside forums – and only the smartest brands have cottoned onto this. And it’s (more often than not) not just the “accepted influencers”, or usual suspects, that are driving this action.

Take a look at Ken Mueller, who drives lively conversations across his blog comments and Twitter around his ideas. Or Jack B., who also gets smart people, that would be classed as influencers, discussing the merits of his thoughts on his blog and across the social web.

Because here’s the simple fact any marketer worth their salt will tell you – word of mouth and getting people talking about you is the real relationship to the sale.

Ad spend may get you awareness; great customer service will keep customers with you. But getting the buy? That’s the final step between desire (ads) and decision and – again, more often than not – this is where the conversations, pros and cons around your brand influence that decision.

The Social Influencer Is Dead – Long Live the Instigators

You can still chase the influencer model if you wish. After all, there’s some merit to knowing how someone is perceived online, and if they can drive interest in your perk, giveaway or new promotion.

But if you want real results and real long-term buy-in, you’ll be chasing the wrong crowd. The term influence has already been tainted to the effect that people are now wary and gun-shy when they hear it.

That’s an issue that won’t go away until the algorithms are more solid and locked down.

But that’s okay – because influencers are short hit affairs. The Instigators – the people that instigate immense conversations and let them run free, and then see them propagate even further around the web – are the real influencers.

They’re the folks that are making people think. And when you think, you look for a solution. And if you’re a brand with that solution, you’ll be instantly on that person’s radar – as long as you know where that person has come from. And, chances are, it’s not going to be a social influencer.

Time to rethink who you’re looking to connect with.