As many have already quipped, there are few businesses or social media-related subjects that generate the amount of hate and public debate that Klout seems to inspire. However, this post isn’t about loving or hating Klout. It poses a question to those brands who have or who are considering paying Klout for access to their top ranked “influencers”.

Can an individual influence others while they’re “under the influence” of Klout?

Community: a term that has been given new life in our vocabulary of late. The common connotation today is a collective of enthusiastic people organized around the lifestyle, activities and/or ethos of a brand in an online channel(s).

The term “community” has been anointed with a multitude of mystical powers thanks to Web 2.0 and Social Networking

Ok, so your business is no longer the industry leader. You’ve lost your market dominance. You’ve lost the support of your core audience and supporters. Your sales have plummeted beyond even the worst predictions. Your product has become a laughing stock.

What do you do? Well, I can tell you what you don’t do. You DON’T Wake Up Bold!

Research In Motion (RIM) recently staged a mock protest outside of an Apple Store in Sydney, Australia with the chant: Walk Up Bold!

Social Media has emphasised the importance of the customer’s voice to  businesses of all sizes. The study of the sales & marketing impact of customer comments and ratings has advanced to a more involved debate concerning the presence of the customer within the business’ entire operation.

Much has been written on this topic recently by social strategists, but for the vast majority of businesses it has been nothing more than lip service.Sure there is the well-worn example of the Starbuck’s My Idea initiative but how many others can you reference that have embraced the customer at the corporation’s boardroom table?

#BizForum was created in response to the growing popularity of weekly Twitter Chats that encouraged featured guests or the general public to Tweet responses to a series of questions within a specific topic of interest. I saw a need to go beyond the broadcasting that these formats either encouraged or resulted in. #BizForum was an experiment at first. A debate format that would ask the audience to delve further into both sides of trending business topics such as sales & marketing, customer service, business strategy & leadership, communication and/or social business and get to the heart of WHY we believed what we did.

Each year sees a new trend in the evolution of business communications. Over the past years people have called out Unified Communications, Cloud Computing and more recently Mobility and SIP-Enabled Infrastructure. Most predictions focus on the evolution of the technology rather than the cultural changes that impact how we communicate within our organizations and beyond. Some argue that technologies evolve to meet the changing needs of business communications. Others argue that technology inspires shifts in communication patterns.

Influence-Suicide: [noun] the action of intentionally killing one’s influence.

Instances of professional men and women committing influence-suicide are no longer a closely held secret. For the past six months, news articles, blogs and podcasts have been reporting stories of social-media-lites purposefully opting out of klout.com, the self-anointed standard of influence measurement.

Successful businesses must now stand for a great idea, not a great product.  Products, no matter how great they may be are commodities. The need for a product or the value it has in a consumer’s life is too easily dictated by public opinion – to its benefit or its detriment.  Business leaders looking for an edge must create another point of differentiation: the brand’s ideology. 

Brand Ideology is that almost mystical association a product or business has with the aspirations, beliefs and lifestyle of its target market.

In this series, I’ve been challenging business leaders to compete by changing the rules of the game instead of trying to be the best player at the game. Doing so requires breaking free of industry best practices and radically rethinking your business. In this post, I’m asking you to answer how standard customer service measurements enable those game changing strategies?

To change the rules of the game, your business must stand for a great idea, not just a great product. Anyone can sell a great product but it requires truly empowered and insightful employees to convey a great idea.