Don’t Bite the Social Hand that Feeds – The @Klout – astrophe

26 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by route53 in Business - Affiliate Marketing

Tags

Affiliate Marketing, analytics, klout, kred, marketing, ratings, scoring, search, social, social analytics, social media

Okay, I confess to being a people watcher. You know that game some couples play when they are bored and just make up stories about the people and things they observe? Yeah the same game that Tina Fey and Steve Carell play in the movie, “Date Night”.

To me I guess that is part of the appeal of Social Media and social analytics. Watching all these normal people and trying to figure out their story and what makes them tick. Then apply that to marketing and competition and I am quite admittedly in statistical heaven. This is how sites like http://hotornot.com got big when people used to rate people looks. It is also how Mark Zuckerberg got started with Facebook only this rating system is based on more than looks. Why is he rated higher than me? Why is she rated higher than her? Why do people find him interesting? You get the picture. Now that people are putting their lives out there selectively on Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and Google +, the question of: “I wonder what [Insert Name Here] is doing now?” is being answered with regularity.

Because of the rise in social interaction and personal content management, the idea of personal branding has become a larger topic on the web. It is the opportunity for people to have the vanity plates and bumper stickers on their lives that they choose to have. Yes I am a fan of the San Francisco Giants! I watch reality TV! I drive a VW Beetle! And then you can hide the things you don’t want people to see such as your age, the embarrassing name of your high school (Lick Wilmerding) and any other guilty pleasures in your life (the fact that you listen to Debbie Gibson and new Kids on the Block when you are depressed).

A few years back I worked for Fair Isaac, creators of the FICO score which tells potential lenders (mostly credit card issuers and auto financiers) if you are credit worthy. People started paying attention to their FICO scores. Your FICO score was a handy thing to have, but it wasn’t something people openly shared. It isn’t as if people go around sharing their salary information.

Klout Score Dashboard

Well enter the age of Social Metrics. The simple math tells you how many people follow you on Twitter, how many people “like” you on Facebook, or how many people you are Linked to on LinkedIn. Since not everyone plays on all of these social channels, we have the introduction of companies like Klout and PeopleBrowsr / Kred. Both companies have admitted that they are in beta and that they are always working to improve the metrics around their scoring so sharp swings in scores are not unexpected. People on Klout for example, have seen their score go up when they add new networks such as Google+ to the network. If that adds a whole new set of friends and interactions to their overall social scene, then their score would likely see an irregular bump. Klout is not perfect and people knew that. Weight was heavily skewed towards Twitter activities, no real reasons were given for sudden shifts, people with lower scores were considered more advanced than others, people were considered influential about topics that they knew nothing about (see @QAQN and Gary Johnson).

Kred Dashboard

The art of scoring people’s social prowess is a tricky one. Once you give people a little candy they can get addicted. People learned that if you wanted to increase your score, you couldn’t just tweet a lot, you had to get people to mention you more. You needed to create more links, retweet others posts (give them credit for good content), and not just use Klout as a channel for clogging the digital airwaves. This gave way to Follow Fridays, Twitter Tuesdays, and such where people saw their scores rise. It also saw that when you were inactive for a couple days for vacation or a holiday that your score took a dive. Imagine! You go on vacation and somehow you aren’t as important or influential to your followers! Take a week off from your podcast or your blog and suddenly less people follow you? Doesn’t the saying go something like “Absence makes the tweets grow fonder?” Well you get the picture. Oh well, nobody is perfect. Your score would dip a couple points and suddenly your score would jump again.

This morning Klout changed their scoring method. It was of Google Pandaesque or Netflixesque proportions. Suddenly it appears that the social behaviors that Klout was encouraging are now discounted. It’s like telling your wife of 15 years that you like that she colors her hair blonde because it makes her look younger and then suddenly the next day you tell her that you think that brunettes have more fun!

The jury is still out but here is what we know:

Klout says they are being more transparent about what affects your score, but people are stil speculating on what actually made their score go up or down. Was there more weight put on Facebook actions? Were certain influence types now given more weight?
Klout gave a bell curve shaped diagram showing a pretty even distribution of scores going up or down. Yet it seems that those who saw their score go down heavily outweighed those who saw a rise.
Even social media celebrities Scott Kleinberg (@Scottkleinberg), Katrina Hill (@actionchick), and Michael Brandvold (@michaelsb) who were once touted in Klout’s blog saw their scores go down by 8 points or more each.
It seems that those people who saw their scores rise were those who had scores in the teens, 20s and 30s. People in the 50s through 70s and even 80s saw their scores decrease
People saw their True Reach score increase (this is a subscore that basically tells you how many people follow you) as it used to be discounted.
Assuming that their other subscore, Amplification, is a product of your Actions/True Reach many large podcasters and online conversationalists saw this score decrease significantly. This score appears to be weighted more heavily than in the past when it comes to your overall Klout score.

Klout Distribution of Score Changes

Let’s take a step back a second. Was Klout right in trying to make their scoring more accurate? Definitely. But we are a society looking for affirmation and the Klout score was the best proxy. Scoring on a scale of 100 had people asking wondering if they are above average or passing the “test”. Incidentally, Klout’s closest competitor, Kred, which is physically located on the other side of the block in an adjacent building scores people on a scale of 1000. People following their Klout scores most heavily are bloggers and other social media early adopters. The “Twitterati” if you will. These were people are also the largest advocates of Klout and encouraging their friends to check out their scores. At a recent social media conference I overheard someone tell their friend kiddingly that they would let the other person follow them only if they had an acceptable Klout score.

The backlash has been predictable. People woke up to find their scores dropped by 10% or more. I received a tweet from @ActionChick (the ex-Klout star) saying “Those @Klout numbers are so wrong”. People are claiming they will boycott. Others are claiming they’ll not get social media jobs when their interviewers ask and they tell them their score is below 50 (that’s a little dramatic). Mostly, you’ll find people with scores in the 80s (that’s a B in school) with scores in the 60s now (that’s a D in school). Nobody wants to get a low grade in the area they call themselves an expert. Even moreso…nobody wants to be called a social failure, but that is what Klout is doing. They created a monster and today that monster is growling back at them heavily.

So you are asking if they are so screwed up, why do I care? I want this model to succeed. Social analytics are important as Social search takes over Portal search. It is more important to know if Suzie Smith is an important influencer of a certain product than Jack Martin. Klout has some great tools and they were heading in the right direction. Every company makes mistakes, but you don’t want to slap the hand that feeds you. Coke survived the whole New Coke debacle. Some people tried it, didn’t like it and went back to the old coke. We shall see how this plays out.

Author’s note: Personally my score dropped from 61 to 53. To me this means I’m barely in the 50th percentile. Maybe that is right, I don’t know. What bothers me more is that Klout has their version of a Myers-Briggs grid. They group people in from Celebrities to Thought Leaders to Conversationalists to Listeners, etc. That analysis has me listed as a “Dabbler”, someone who just isn’t that into social media and should try using it more. What? If I tweet or Facebook any more, my own mother might disown me. Hey did I mention that my 80 year old mother now has a Klout score not far behind me and she has only tweeted twice?

HELPFUL LINKS

If you’ve never heard of Klout, sign up here: http://www.klout.com

If you’d like to get a Kred score, sign up here: http://www.kred.ly

To read the post about the change announced by Klout: http://corp.klout.com/blog/

If you’d like to follow me and boost my Klout score (shameless plug), you can go here: http://www.twitter.com/Route53

Internet Marketing from the Real Experts

03 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by route53 in Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Business - Affiliate Marketing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

book, Book Review, breast cancer, email, internet, intgernet, marketing, review, social media

Internet Marketing My Shawn Collins and Missy Ward

At our recent Affiliate Summit, the organizers, Shawn Collins and Missy Ward unveiled their new book Internet Marketing From the Real Experts, a compilation of lessons from many of our colleagues in the internet marketing world.

The book has quickly risen into the top 1200 list on Amazon with very little marketing….or should I say traditional marketing. The beauty of a book written about internet marketing is that it will likely be marketed well by those who wrote it. In fact, the Gang of 88, as the contributing writers are called, are all marketing the book in their own way in blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter, etc. Shawn and Missy also gave an incentive by giving all people who wrote a review online a silver pass to their next Affiliate Summit in New York in August.

The book is a quick read and for those of us in the business many of the “3 minute anecdotes” might seem trivial but for someone just entering the game and wanting some quick reference points will find this book to be a good useful starting point. While I found myself shaking my head at some passages I also found myself nodding my head at others. There are probably sections I might never read, but that is why the book was written this way.

The book is written so that you can skip around and find the parts relevant to you. Want thoughts on Twitter and Social Media? There is a chapter. Want to know about SEO and SEM? Video? There are sections dedicated to those topics as well. The articles are based upon the writings from the first 7 issues of the of their magazine Feed Front. Some might look at the title and say, “experts”? Well maybe the writers aren’t experts, but they are real people in the industry who do the dayd to day work. Thay aren’t professors or pontificators, but really the people on the affiliate line on a daily basis.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to reveal too much about the book because I think those interested should purchase the book themselves. Still not sure if this book is for you and perhaps would like a reason to purchase a marketing book? At $14.93 on Amazon the book is a bargain, but not just for the knowledge gained, but because all proceeds from the sale of the book go to benefit and help the Fight Against Breast Cancer, a cause near and dear to the hearts of the authors and those in the industry.

What Should I write?

While at the Summit I kiddingly asked Shawn to sign the copy included in my bag. He laughed and I told him I wasn’t kidding. Admittedly he was more distracted by the football game on the screen in front of him as his beloved Jets were playing in the playoffs.

I didn’t read what he wrote until returned home. Hmmmmm, looks like I might have to write something for Feed Front to be included in the next edition. Perhaps the ongoing struggle of running affiliate programs within larger corporations.

Social Media in Marketing is Just That…Social

07 Monday Dec 2009

Posted by route53 in Business - Affiliate Marketing, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

affiliate, marketing, music, social media

Last month I spoke on a panel at a Marketing conference at Electronic Arts in Redwood City with several marketing professionals speaking about innovations in marketing. The panel was set up a bit around brand marketing as well as social media so those on the panel spread across a large group of marketing functions as well as types of companies. After all, marketing for a consumer packaged goods company is not the same as marketing for an online gaming company. We have a much better educated consumer these days.

The questions were pretty basic about our own particular experiences. I always think that each industry, product and company has its own challenges/barriers to overcome. In the entertainment business where I have run affiliate marketing partnerships for the last 10 years, the challenges are very unique whether an established brand such as Ticketmaster or a hot new start up like Reel.com was back in 1997. It is hard to give advice when such antedotes do not apply to other situations. In the end the basic principles of managing your brand are still the same though and times have changed in brand marketing, product, promotion, placement, and pricing (the 4 P’s) are still very important and fundamental to the marketing of a product or service.

There did come a point during Q&A though when the panel was asked about what is the new hot thing or what is innovative in Marketing today. Many on the panel hesitated and I started to agree with some of the responses that there is nothing really new and innovative. Maybe there were new channels such as the internet and social networks where placement was just more timely and pricing is more discounted and services and browser based products seemed to succeed better than physical products.

Just as the conversation stopped I asked everyone if they knew who the CEO of Electronic Arts is (this panel was taking place in their building after all) and a few hands were raised. I asked the same about Proctor & Gamble. Again hardly anyone raised their hands. I then followed and asked if anyone felt either of those brands knew who they were. Silence. When I asked the same of Amazon, Microsoft and Zappos, the names Bezos, Ballmer and Hsieh were blurted out and hands were raised and people agreed those companies sure knew a whole hell of a lot about who their comsumers are. For years, companies have been wanting to “own” the customer so that they could market to them as efficiently as possible on a 1 to 1 basis. Well the big deal and innovative piece is that these companies are now able to do this. Faces now represent the brand more than ever. Sure we all knew Lee Iacocca, but he never had a dialogue like new companies do today. The opportunity to get to know your customer is there so that the dialogue is no longer about nameless faces and people talking to you from a call center in some 3rd world country asking you about the weather.

Sending an email or letter to a company CEO used to be hard enough as nobody gave you their information. Now people like CEO Tony Hsieh of Zappos have their own public Twitter accounts where you can have a public or private dialogue with him about how much like his company or your favorite pair of shoes that you want him to carry. Now while that may not be quite that personal and while Tony might not respond to everyone, it is quite empowering to the customer that at least their voice will be heard. In this day and age our society always wants to air their grievances and praises publicly. Things just aren’t that personal anymore.

That said, in the world of music, there is a lot of impersonalization going on when it comes to music discovery. It always used to be that you had one or two good friends who you could rely on to recommend a hot new song. You would also rely on your favorite DJ to introduce you to something cool. Nowadays, radio stations are being condensed, Djs are now replaced online by music sites where you self select and program your own radio station and or get recommendations from perfect strangers. I personally find the recommendations on iTunes to be very off-putting. Artists such as Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) and Matt Morris (@Mattmorris) are getting personal on Twitter, interacting with their fans. Backstage passes mean a whole new thing with artists granting you the opportunity to meet them before a show and take photos for just a little more money. Gone are the days when the artists were held on a pedastal like gods and you swayed in a mosh pit of 50,000 people barely able to see the band. People want to touch and feel the merchandise. My 7-year old daughter now believes that every concert starts with getting together with the band for a photo shoot. She doesn’t root for people on the awards shows because of the music they play but rather on how nice they were to her when we went to see them play. She wants me to text them during the concert to win an after concert meeting as well. Of course my job affords me these luxuries occasionally, but as this example points out, people have a tendency to have an affinity for those things which have a little more touch in their lives. People don’t want to just have a photo or a poster of Lady Gaga, but they want to be in a photo with Lady Gaga and they want to put it on their Myspace page.

So here’s the point. Social media now allows us to do what we used to do on a more realtime basis. We used to get advice from the 3-4 resources in our lives that shaped our tastes. Now we still can, but we are able to share more information and on a more timely basis. We’re also able to get more information in your hands so you can make a better decision. Sometimes the brand, or serice or product is presented to you in a way that is more personal as well. Your friends who told you about the next great thing, now can just send you a quick note via Twitter to your cell phone. Why is this important? Because you’d rather hear that advice from a face and name you know rather than a person you’ve never met. We learn more about each other and sometimes we get to give feedback that someone will really use.

In the end its all a personal sale, a personal purchase that means more to you than it probably would have 10 years ago. Its a real change in marketing evolution. It’s about at least three things that help social media to change the way we make our buying decisions today: 1) More product information 2) More Personalization/customization and 3) more timely interaction. But remember, it’s not that new. It’s just that the social media world just makes us more social. It’s just not a good social in my mind. Playing games online through a virtual network rather than in the same room, sharing music through file sharing rather than having listening parties around a turntable, and sending someone a virtual rose for Valentines as opposed to handing a real rose is social, but just not the same. We run the risk of building very loose relationships. In the world of customer acquisition, the cost of those relationships should not be as high as those we have paid for in the past.