At the recent New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Sam caught up with Mark Miller from NBSP. Mark’s a great example of building communities through storytelling, and runs a Soundcloud podcast called 30 in 30, a daily online interview series.
Mark graciously (crazily, some would say!) invited Sam onto the show, and they chatted about influence, social scoring and a little bit about Klout too…
The full chat is below, and make sure you check out the rest of Mark’s 30 in 30 series.
Lofty blog post title? Perhaps – but we thought it an apt one to both herald the launch of the official site for our book, as well as talk a little about the future of influence both as Sam and myself see it, and the companies that are looking at influence beyond social scoring.
So, first things first – the site.
As well as being the repository for all things new about the book, including launch info, where you can buy it, book tours, etc, we also want to make the book an interactive experience with you.
To that end, we’ll be hosting both live and recorded webinars, as well as interviews with the leading people and companies in the influence space today. We’ll also be live-streaming Google+ Hangouts, where you can take part and ask the questions on influence you need the answers for.
Once the book launches, we’ll be adding an exclusive forum for book buyers, where you can meet peers in your industry, get one-to-one’s with leading players, promote your platform and more.
In short, this site will become an all-encompassing depository for all good things about influence – and nary a social scoring badge in sight! Feel free to look around and check out what’s here.
So make sure you subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest updates, and you can pre-order the book now by clicking either of the banners below.
Social scoring is dead – or at least, the current iteration of social scoring is dead. While the platforms leading the scoring market report impressive numbers, the varying results and effectiveness of using scores to determine influence highlight their underlying problem – influence is too dynamic and fluid to be determined by a score.
The thought process of people changes frequently, based on situation; emotion; peers; external factors and more. This is something a score can’t adapt to efficiently enough, and is one of the key areas we dissect in our book as we present a new model for moving forward with influence marketing.
Scoring can certainly help in the initial stages of finding the right influencer for you – but then it gets way more complicated, and that’s why you need more than just a score to help your brand succeed with the right influencers for your audience.
We’re excited about the future of influence. We know the path we’re taking with the book, and the companies we’ve spoken to have been just as excited to talk about the ideas within and how that adds to what they’re currently doing.
It’s a great time to be in this space – and we’re only just getting started.
Here’s to the future.
Note – special thanks to Diane Court for taking the creatives from our publisher and turning them into the logo and other creatives seen on here, you rock!
As we enter 2013, social scoring continues to drive the perception of influence – currently. As the market matures, scores will become less prevalent and the models used to define influence will be much more user-centric based on actual needs, situations and other relevant actors.
Our book offers one such new model for defining influence and making it a key part of your business, and below you’ll find some of the brands that are moving in this direction too.
In no particular order, here are 5 influence platforms to keep an eye on in 2013.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just 20 short years ago, marketing was pretty easy. You got your budget, you allocated it to the media buy (TV, print, radio, direct), and away you went.
If you were conscientious, you’d collect results and give them to your clients. If you weren’t, you’d correlate any increased foot traffic to a store or business to your awesome marketing efforts.
Everyone was (kind of) happy, and marketers went about their merry way of sitting in a lofty seat, controlling the message and how that message was disseminated.
Then everything changed.
With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, consumers now had a legitimate way to take a little bit of control back from the marketers.
While it was still in its infancy, and search wasn’t as advanced as it is today, private forums and message boards soon sprung up and consumers could connect with peers and fellow customers, and offer true feedback and advice versus the limited face-to-face conversations taking place in the home, workplaces and bars.
Jump forward 15 years, and the growth of Facebook, Twitter, enhanced forums and real-time review sites, and now the marketer’s game – or at least, the bad marketer’s game – was pretty much truly up.
Messaging was no longer the domain of the few – now it had to live up to its claims or be shot down in public, in the full gaze of a paying client. Not only that, but now the power of the budget was being taken away by the introduction of social influence – and the marketer’s dilemma began.
Before social media, if brands were looking to truly get their message in front of a certain group of people, they’d buy celebrity endorsements.
From Paris Hilton in a bathing suit washing cars to Madonna being paid $5 million for an advert that was pulled by its sponsor, celebrities have been big draws when going after a certain demographic.
The problem with this approach is when a celebrity takes a fall and the brand takes a hit because of it (or would do, if action wasn’t taken on their behalf).
Think about Tiger Woods and his extra-marital problems; or Lance Armstrong and his recent doping scandal. When heroes fall, they taint a brand too – if you don’t take action, you’re seen as endorsing wrong-doing or questionable behaviour.
Additionally, consumers are much more savvy now and aware of how advertising works – do we really believe that Celebrity X drives Automobile Brand Y? No.
Instead, we move back to where we’ve always been prior to the golden age of advertising and marketing – peer recommendations and trusted resources. In social media, these trusted resources are the new influencers, and brands are now looking to connect with them versus celebrity endorsements.
That in itself leads to the next problem – when social media can empower anyone to become an influencer, who do brands connect with?
Thanks to some social scoring sites, anyone can appear influential. Increased activity on Twitter and Facebook can see your score on the likes of Klout skyrocket.
For brands that can’t afford to put the legwork in that truly identifies the real influencer for their audience, social scoring sites offer a quick overview of who may be the right person, and let you filter out only those that meet a certain score and above.
While this can give you a quick introduction to the kind of people you’re after, it can also see you miss these very people as context and relevance can often be missed by a simple score.
Additionally, whether social scoring helps you identify people or not, to truly get your message out there you still need the Four A’s:
These four tenets are core to the marketer’s success – but without knowing how to identify true influencers, how can you get all four aligned and working together?
The conversation is just starting on that one…
I recently had the good fortune to sit down and chat with Mark Zohar, founder of Toronto-based viral search and predictive analytics service TrendSpottr. And I was literally blown away by what they’re doing and how they’re looking to change social business.
Taken from their website, the core solutions TrendSpottr provides is from a future trend model:
TrendSpottr analyzes real-time data streams and spots emerging trends at their earliest acceleration point — hours or days before they have become “popular” and reached mainstream awareness.
In a nutshell, TrendSpottr helps businesses and organizations of all shapes, sizes and industries to get a jump on the competition by identifying what’s about to go from average visibility to viral buzz, before it happens, which makes he potential for multi-channel use huge.
One of the examples Mark shared when we chatted was TrendSpottr’s ability to predict the virality of a YouTube video.
For example, let’s say a new video about kittens and babies playing only has 500 views. With TrendSpottr monitoring the real-time activity around that particular video, it can spot when it will explode into hundreds of thousands (or millions) of views, and when.
Armed with that data, an advertiser or brand can then buy ad space on the video at a much lower cost, yet still be in front of the extra eyeballs that the viral version of the video offers. The cost saving is tremendous and the potential return on that ad spend huge.
TrendSpottr plans on launching this predictive ad optimization product in early 2013, specifically targeted at advertisers and brands.
Other ways for brands to benefit from TrendSpottr include content optimization and engineering to take early mover advantage of a breaking story that’s about to go very big.
Let’s say your brand is in the business of car tires, and you provide tires to many well-known car manufacturers. While analyzing various conversations around tires, TrendSpottr picks up on an impending safety concern around a particular kind of rubber molding used in a competing manufacturer’s tire.
Using that data, your content team can take a series of actions to get you front and centre when the proverbial hits the fan:
These are just some of the ways brands can be pro-active at tackling a problem head-on and before any negativity hits, whether it involves them directly or not. By doing that, you’re now offering solutions in the consciousness of the public you’re trying to attract, while your competitors are in damage control mode.
For any brand, that’s a pretty powerful tool-set.
One of the biggest criticisms social influence receives is that the gamification of the model hurts true influence and knowledge. From gaming the +K system on Klout when it was first announced, to the recent LinkedIn Endorsements and how they can be played, influence and authority has never been harder to gauge properly.
Whereas before, marketers would actually analyze raw data and build personas of influential people that were right for their brands, now they have to wade through scores, endorsements, social stock prices and more that may or may not be true and relevant.
This is where TrendSpottr can help filter these people.
Let’s say your passion is global warming. You blog about the environment and your company provides green products – but you can’t compete with the guys that have thousands of subscribers and whose company has millions in ad spend.
With TrendSpottr, you can set up an alert for the industry and selective terms that are relevant to you, and see which ones are on the cusp of exploding into life, both virally and from a market standpoint.
By being able to continuously put out content that’s ahead of the game, your authority rises. People now start to look to you for answers versus the more established players. A perfect example of this reversal in authority is Nate Silver and how he first turned baseball and then political punditry on their heads.
Brands can use TrendSpottr along with other blogger outreach platforms and really connect with those that have the eyes and ears of the industry via the TrendSpottr dashboard.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpZppQyQ33g[/youtube]
Now, you could argue that non-experts could game this solution too, to appear authoritative – but if you don’t know what you’re talking about and are just copy-pasting soundbites, trust me, that becomes obvious pretty damn quick.
Up until now, the majority of social influence has been determined by a score and perceived authority. Additionally, many early players in the space have sold benefits based on amplification, not context and purchase decisions.
This has, for better or worse, led to an industry that many use but just as many question the validity of. It makes brands nervous to play in, because they need to know the message is reaching the kind of people that can make things happen, versus the amount of people that make things noisy.
The good news is, the next generation of platforms and technology are here. Companies like TrendSpottr, Appinions, Tellagence and others like them are leading the charge to recognize true influence and relevance.
We’re on the cusp of something very cool, and it’s something that has the potential to truly change business intelligence forever.
