Sensei Blogs

Are You Trolling For Numbers?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Jane Perdue asked this question on her blog this week: “Are you trolling for numbers or meaning?”

It’s a powerful question at a time where numbers seems to be judge, jury and executioner in our online marketing efforts. From simple numbers such the quantity of “Likes” and followers to numbers that purport to indicate one’s social influence to the black ‘n red numbers on a balance sheet, it’s all about the numbers today isn’t it? Strategies are crafted, decisions are made and conversations are influenced based on numbers. Business – and marketers in particular – love everything tied up in a nice little package: the number.

Notice that Jane asks if you’re trolling for numbers or meaning, which indicates they’re mutually exclusive concepts. Can’t numbers also have meaning? Albert Einstein suggested that a number, in and of itself, has no significance. Beyond representing the quantity of a group of similar objects, it has no meaning, right?

Yet there are many different kinds of numbers such as rational and irrational numbers, real and complex numbers, algebraic and transcendental numbers, perfect numbers, surreal and hyperreal numbers, and finally square and triangular numbers. In these cases, the numbers begin to represent concepts and not just quantity. So maybe the question of number vs. meaning is flawed? Maybe numbers can have meaning? As an example, numbers can represent the percentage sales increase in year-to-date revenue. If an organization collectively imposes meaning on numbers, those numbers mean something to the stakeholders.

So what’s the answer?

It doesn’t matter; the issue is not if numbers have meaning but our reliance on them, regardless of any associated meaning. The overload of data created and exchanged across a dizzying array of distribution channels, which is accessible at our fingertips and on demand, has changed the rules of the game. We can’t get away from it. We need it. We want it. We seek it out. In fact, in most cases we don’t need to find it; it finds us. The resulting interaction of data between people, between people and business, and between people and devices has made numbers – regardless of what we agree they represent – meaningless.

Gross domestic product, inflation rates and economic structures that were once cyclical and predictable are stumping the most experienced economists. The reality is numbers do, in fact, lie. Numbers direct the marketer’s attention toward current trends instead of the trend currents; what is “the now” instead of what that current activity predicts about how consumers will communicate, think or consume our products in the future.

From connections on social platforms to social influence scores, numbers have become a marketing disease causing short-sightedness in strategic thinking. What’s the cure? Stop giving numbers meaning; focus on contextual relationships and communications instead. Insight can no longer be gained by mathematical calculations or by parsing Big Data. The more data we exchange across a greater number of devices, the less meaning numbers will have and the more importance human insight and intuition must be given.

Are numbers meaningless? Are they creating short-sightedness in marketers? Is human analysis becoming more important in the face of growing artificial intelligence?

Agree/Disagree/Why?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Announcing New Book: Influence Marketing, by Sam Fiorella & Danny Brown

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The hype around social influence has been circling around me like a cyclone for a few years now, online, in-print and in-person. I’ve been open and honest with my views on the challenges with the current methodology being used by marketers and software providers alike until someone asked me to “put your money where your mouth is.”

And so I am.

This spring Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson, will release Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing coauthored by Danny Brown and me!

Danny and I will move the conversation beyond social influence scoring and give you a start-to-finish blueprint for making influence marketing work in your organization.

Featuring case studies, empirical evidence, digital workshops and much, much more, Influence Marketing is based on successful campaigns that Danny and I have jointly and independently executed in this space. We look forward to sharing more with you in early January!

In the meantime, you can take advantage of the Cyber Monday week-long offers on Amazon.

Reserve Your Copy Today!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Where Culture Derails Social Influence Marketing

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

During her 2005 tour of Japan, world-wide music superstar Madonna publicly praised Japan’s “Washlet,” an “intelligent” toilet that provides - among other features - posterior-cleaning water jets, hot air dry function, ambient background music and odour-masking technology. "I've missed the heated toilet seats," the pop-diva promoted upon leaving the country. She was not alone in her praise, many famous and well-connected people have gone on record promoting the virtues of the ultra-modern toilet.

It’s the earned media and public advocacy that brand marketers would die for, the type of public promotion many try to emulate when accessing social celebrities and socially-active people with high Klout scores. Find people who are perceived to have a popular voice and get them to talk about your product and their audience will beat a path to your door, open wallets in hand.

Yet, while the ingenuous toilets are found in 70% of Japanese homes, hotels and businesses, they’re one of world’s best kept secrets. Hiromichi Tabata, head of the international division at Washlet-maker TOTO does not hide the company’s desire to become a major player in international markets. They’ve been attempting to crack foreign markets, including the lucrative US market for more than 10 years with little success despite the volunteer endorsements by many internationally known celebrities and business executives. "It's because of the cultural taboo over talking about toilets," reports Tabata. "Americans avoid talking about those kinds of things so we can't expect success from word-of-mouth, even if they recognise our products are excellent.”

Influence Marketing vs. Purchase Decisions

The lesson learned from this case study is that influence marketing (marketing campaigns oriented around individuals perceived to have influence over a larger community), are ineffectual on the consumers’ purchase decisions when they are not interwoven into a more complex influence campaign that takes into account other decision-making factors such as culture, purchase lifecycle, context of the relationships between “influencers” and their audience, etc.

Too many businesses have been quick to jump on the bandwagon of early adopters such as Klout and Peerindex, allocating large marketing budgets to thin influence programs without proper consideration of the customer’s decision-making process. It’s the dichotomy of social media; it has inspired the creation and popularization of these platforms but also created an environment that generates disruptive forces in the communication paths between advocates and customers.

I’m not suggesting that social scoring platforms be ignored or thrown out; rather, I’m suggesting that the focus and blind faith being attributed them be rechanneled towards the customer’s decision-making process.

A new influence marketing blueprint is required.

Do you agree? Disagree? What might that new blueprint look like?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Get Off Your Ass; Identify Your Own Influencers

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

It’s becoming clear that social influence scoring is not going away anytime soon – or ever – and so the debate over the validity of such scores and the businesses that provide them rage on. I know I’ve contributed my fair share of thoughts, dialogue, and rants on this subject and I have to say I’m rather tired of the same old debate. I’ve yet to read an article that satisfactorily explains how any software-generated score in isolation accurately dictates the real influence of an individual to measurably impact the decision-making of an audience based solely on their activity across a few social networks. Yet the providers of these scores remain in the spotlight; in fact they’re multiplying across business silos and industry verticals.

So what have we learned or accomplished?

Nothing. People are still gaming online engagement to increase their scores, marketers and HR professionals are still basing decisions on these scores and brands are still distributing product samples to those with high scores. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

So maybe it’s time we change the focus?

Can we change the public discourse from what a social influence score is or isn’t and, understanding that this virus is incurable, focus on how to successfully use it to our advantage? What would that look like?

We know, for example, that “social celebrities” who work the digital channels to get a lot of attention for their heavy social chatter and activity are popular – maybe even famous – due to their many thin connections that rank them highly by social influence scoring platforms. So if you define “influence” as the ability to amplify a message across social channels, then I guess you can call them influential and we can close the book on this discussion. However, from experience these amplifiers don’t impact short-term decision-making, which is true influence. Is there something the score can tell us anything that is important?

Can social celebrities have real influence? Of course they can. I consider bloggers who elicit many reactions as witnessed through thoughtful commentary, phone conversations and subscriptions among their audience, real influencers. There’s a dramatic difference between these two. Someone with 50,000 Twitter followers, lots of retweets and blog mentions but with little to no engagement on that blog is less influential than someone with only 5,000 Twitter followers, fewer retweets and blog mentions but consistent and meaningful debate among a targeted community within his or her blog. Most social scoring platforms – as they work today – would elevate the former with a higher score and deem them more “influential.”

Mapping Influence Marketing

What’s missing from the ongoing debate around the value of social influence scoring is the potential value in mapping the many degrees of social connections and relationships. Some are thin and vanity-driven; others are deep and meaningful, as is also the case in the traditional media and offline realms. Understanding the degree of relationship between individuals and groups is key to understanding the nature of the influence they might exert.

For example, I often tune into the Fox News broadcast when travelling though the US or watch it online when out of the US. I tune in enough to be one of the people that they claim to be a “regular viewer” and a data point in the rating statistics they use to sell advertising space. However, while I consider myself a “conservative,” the reason I tune into Fox News is the same reason I sometimes tune into America’s Next Top Model or slow down to gawk at a car wreck. I’m fascinated by the spectacle, the ugliness of humanity. I don’t tune in to educate myself or seek information in my decision-making but to gawk, a sick guilty pleasure. Fox News data crunchers and advertisers consider me someone they influence but do they? Maybe, but certainly not in the manner they intend.

Analyzing the Data

Until factors such as degree of relationship, context of engagement and sentiment of commentary are successfully interpreted and analyzed by software, the onus is on YOU to do the work. Does this make social scoring platforms worthless? No. Can they measure the nuances required? No. As I discovered in an interview with Andrew Grill from Kred.com, progress is being made. In the meantime, get off your ass and do the work.

Look for companies like Jugnoo or Kred that provide the raw data around audience engagement and use it as one metric among others you collect, vet and analyze to understand who has true influence over you target audience. I’m talking about the power to influence a purchase by a prospect, not the power to amplify a generic message to a loosely identified group of people.

Mama always told me “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” She is one smart lady.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

How Kred Changed My Point of View

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

My disdain for social scoring platforms is no secret. Not only have I expressed my opinions on this site, my perspective on – and experiences with – these tools have been widely written about in books, magazines and on other blogs. I’ve been interviewed on Web, radio and television broadcasts where I’ve shared those same views. I’ve not been able to attend or speak at a conference this year without someone yelling: “Hey, it’s the Klout-guy!”

If all of those articles and interviews were to be boiled down to one sentiment, it would be that you’re a fool if you pay any attention to social scoring platforms. There are many factors that have impacted my view on these, from my personal experiences during job interviews, inaccuracies in scoring algorithms, security concerns, poor operating practices, and of course the fact that these platforms can be gamed, thus rendering the scores meaningless.

While I’m not the lone marketer with these apprehensions, some have asked why I’ve been so vocal in my opposition. In truth, it has been less about the business of social scoring as it was about the use of social scoring. A new breed of “professional influencers” who understand how to game the algorithm for personal and financial gain has emerged and they’ve muddied the social pool, making it difficult to distinguish real influencers from fabricated ones.

Brand marketers (and others within the organization) were misplacing their trust in these scores and crafting communication strategies around them without understanding the context or accuracy of the reported influence. As a marketer who prides himself in successfully creating word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that drive measurable results, I took exception to how these scores and platforms were being used.

Overcoming Prejudice and Logic

A lunch-time conversation with Dups Wijayawardhana, the co-founder and CEO of Empire Avenue, shed some new perspective on the debate when he challenged me with this statement: “Even if you believed none of these tools could accurately measure influence, in combination with other tools and processes, they have value.” In theory I understood his point but in practice I could not get over the inaccuracies that many have proven exist in these measurements or the subject matter of said influence, not to mention the fact that I could not always gain direct access or ownership to the actual database of names these tools spread my message to, or the algorithms used to identify them.

The one point I could never argue was that such tools – and the very concept of scoring influencers – will not go away. Scoring influencers was done before social scoring platforms like PeerIndex, Klout and Kred became so popular and I’m certain many more will emerge in the future. I owed it to my clients to further explore the current state of these platforms.

Meet Kred.com

After a lengthy and very frank discussion on the subject with Andrew Grill, CEO of Kred.com and Lee Bogner, Vice President of Business Development, I began to see the evolution of these tools and, for a moment, had hope in the future of the practice. Created by social analytics leader PeopleBrowsr, Kred measures influence in online communities connected by interests.

For influencers, Kred presents a visual history of a person’s social media influence in a rather cool drill-down dashboard that’s fun to play with. However, cynicism saw this interface as another gamification tactic to keep us interested and playing their game. On the other hand, for marketers Kred offers four distinct services:

Brand Follower Scores
Find the most engaged (influence) and engaging (outreach) followers of your brand over a select timeframe.
Brand Champion Influencer Identification Score
Find the most engaged and engaging users around your @name #hahstag, or keyword matching your brand over a select timeframe.
Competitive Follower Score
Find the most engaged (influence) and engaging (outreach) followers of a competitive brand over a select timeframe.
Competitive Mention Score
Find the most engaged and engaging users around a competitor’s @name #hashtag, or keyword matching your brand over a select timeframe.

It’s not these services that had me rethinking my stance on Kred, but its philosophy and business practice in providing those services.

No Secrets

Kred is an open book. It doesn’t hide the algorithms it uses to identify, segment and rank individuals, which is extremely helpful for those of us who like to do a deeper dive into the nature of relationships between influencers and followers when designing influence marketing campaigns. Further, its history as a data management/analysis firm becomes evident when you review its methodology; Kred gets it.

Advanced Filtering

It understands that social scoring gamers, employees (yours and your competitors) and others “work the system” to artificially increase their scores, so it actively seeks out, flags and removes these individuals from the lists Kred provides its clients. In that same vein, Kred analyzes the sentiment of content shared by those it scores to offer greater and more accurate segmentation of the audience.

Kred’s focus is not to sell scores or be a facilitator between you and your audience but on providing a customized consulting service that works to help identify the multitude of considerations and filters required to accurately manage an influence marketing campaign. Oh, and if you don’t want to use Kred to broadcast a message, you can take the list and work it yourself.

Multi-Dimensional Scoring

Its scoring is two-dimensional and evolving. Kred states its scores “reflect trust and generosity, the foundations of strong relationships.” It scores “influence” as the ability to inspire action and “outreach” that reflects generosity in engaging with others and helping them to spread the message. “In the future, you’ll see the scores become multi-dimensional with the inclusion of even more data sources that could include attribution, affinity, context and more,” states Mr. Grill. This provides marketers greater insights and allows for better planning and decision making in our outreach efforts.

It's About Me

Kred’s business plan, service and platform are designed to build their business by truly improving the effectiveness of a business’ influence marketing efforts, not to increase its own revenues by being a middle man between the business and a black hole of undisclosed "influencers".

While I’m still wary of any platform that claims to be able to unequivocally and scientifically rank something as fluid and unpredictable as influence, I appreciate the openness and flexibility of Kred and how it provides me with solid data points that I can choose to incorporate into my own influence marketing programs.

Could there be hope for social influence scoring platforms?!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Does Social Influence Scoring Drive Value to Brands | #bizforum video debate

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

There’s been so much talk about the accuracy, value or benefit of social influence scoring tools this past year; most of it about you. What does it do for you? How does it impact you? How do you game it? What’s your score? And that’s how social influence businesses like Klout like it. Keep the focus on you.

Their game is to play on the vanities of individuals, which is fuel for their “service” and bank roll. The longer and harder you play their game the more money they can generate by selling access to you. Good ole American ingenuity. In fact, they also love those who claim to “not care” because by not caring (especially when you secretly do), you don’t opt out. And by not opting out, they will continue to use your online activity and persona to make money by selling them to advertisers.

But this post is not about you (I know, don’t be too upset). The debate I’m surprised no one is having is the value (or lack thereof) of the information collected, parsed and presented as real market data by Klout for Brands? Businesses are paying top dollar to access the real influencers, which Klout claims to be able to identify but are their clients getting their money’s worth?

The #bizforum video debate experiment continues at New York City’s Internet Media Labs by exploring this topic with Ric Dragon, the author of Social Marketology and Fred McClimans, Managing Director of the McClimans Group.

What are your thoughts? Do you believe Brands are getting their money’s worth by paying for access to the Klout-annointed? Businesses have been successful at influencer-outreach programs pre-Klout but the criteria, manpower and human intuition that went into these efforts seem to have given way to the short-cut of online measurement tools.

Is this just a short-term gimmick sucking ad dollars from brands or is it a legitimate customer acquisition strategy for marketers?

Agree/Disagree? Get in on the debate via the comments below.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Social Scoring, Misdirection and HR Recruiting

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You’re not active on Facebook? You may not be qualified to work as an Engineer.

Not Tweeting? Sorry, you can’t be hired in the Travel & Tourism industry.

No Pinterest board? You’re future as a Chef just hit a major roadblock.

To rational people such statements will seem ridiculous but in reality they’re not far from becoming factual accounts of real life job seekers if the alarming social influence measurement trend is not curbed quickly.

Gauging a person’s influence is nothing new in the marketing world and recently the socialverse has been turned on its ear with the hullabaloo over pseudo influence measurement tools such as Peerindex, Klout and Kred. Sadly, this trend is making its way into other areas of business including Human Resources. New tools such as Reppify, Identified and BranchOut are targeting HR executives with the promise of providing accurate insights into the personality and even qualifications of potential hires based on one’s social interactions.

Yes, you read that right. Analytics software is predicting your qualifications for any job type based on your social conversations. Reppify, for example is a new service that provides recruiters and HR teams an online dashboard that pulls data from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even GitHub profiles. By scanning the job candidate’s resume and social connections it generates a “job fit score” for “reputation,” “influence,” “footprint,” and “overall candidacy .

To their credit, unlike flawed influence measurement tools like Klout.com, Reppify allows hiring managers to set some parameters with which to score candidates. However, the fact remains that your personal social engagements are being scanned to determine your fitness for a job that most likely has nothing to do with social engagement, like a network engineer or a quality assurance analyst.

There’s Reality and then there’s Reality.

Reppify representatives argue that their service, unlike Klout or PeerIndex, asks permission before it creates a score; however, that’s only half true. Reppify uses the email address and resume data you provide to a potential employer to match it with the public data it gathers from Google searches as well information from social network that don’t require a “friend-level connection”; in other words anything you post publicly on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Etc. So a score based on limited resources establishes an initial impression and metric about your job candidacy for HR managers who subscribe to the service.

Reppify notifies you that a potential employer generated this initial score and offers you the option to grant it access to your private social network connections and data so it may augment the initial score. If you accept, you’re granting a third party (and a potential employer) access to information you purposely didn’t share publicly. If you don’t accept, you’re essentially creating another impression of yourself. What do you have to hide? Without sharing that additional information with the potential employer using Reppify, you’re job application is labelled with a limited score.

Some, like the CEO of Reppify argue that there’s no need to worry about such scores since they are only one tool in a list of apps and measurements used to determine your job compatibility, but from personal experience I can tell you that overworked HR teams don’t exercise such sound judgement in these decisions. And mine is just one of many such stories. If you choose to opt-out altogether you’re required to shut off public access to all your personal information across all social sites. The onus is on you to do so. And once again, based on personal experience with Klout, "opting out" really means they can and will reinstate you at their leisure or when it suits them.

When did we lose the importance of human insights?

When an HR manager or potential employer chooses to do some research on you as a candidate and scans your LinkedIn profile or tweets on Twitter, he is forced to exercise some judgement through the context of the information he’s reading. Software doesn’t utilize such filters and, for example, may record comments you disagree with – but are posting to share with others – as your views.

“If I get a recruit who has only half a dozen connections on Twitter or LinkedIn, they are tainted with the belief that they are not connected and not up-to-date,” reports Human Capital Management Systems CEO Trevor Vas. Perception is reality and those perceptions are formed with lack of data as much as they are with thousands of data points. Never has this been truer than in our over-connected world where social engagement is given so much importance.

Where you have HR scoring systems based on social interactions, just like the marketing versions before them, you will see people gaming the system to mislead those they wish to impress, further poluting the metrics and diminishing the validity of the score's claim. And there's no end in sight. From marketing to HR and next: Customer Service. Via Salesforce.com interface, call centre operators now have access to a callers’ Klout score so they can respond with the appropriate amount of deference if someone has a complaint (be extra nice if they have a high Klout score...don't fret if they have a low score).

Again I find myself calling out businesses for their reliance on third party social scoring metrics as any form of guideline in making business decisions. The increasing volume of content being generated on the Web and through social channels (what some are calling “Big Data”) isn’t necessarily “Smart Data”. Proponents of these tools and services will claim that those who use them understand that they are limited and should be used as one of many factors in making business decisions. However, we understand the reality of tight budgets, short timelines and frankly, human nature. Where a short cut is available, the short cut is almost always used.

Am I the only one who is frightened at what the future holds as businesses continue to use pseudo-scientific analysis of people's social media engagement (or lack thereof) as indicators of real real-life substance or value? People thought Klout was harmless yet the trend is now permeating other areas of the business with reckless abandon. I pray that this trend will turn out to be a fad we'll all be laughing at 5 years from now, like bell-bottom pants or leg warmers. In the meantime, someone needs to give those executives relying on such tools a reality check.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Can You Be Influential While Under the Influence?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The debate around influence scoring and measurement has once again reared its ugly head with a new series of articles written in Wired Magazine, Forbes and Social Media Examiner, among others. Mark Schaefer also published a book recently titled: Return on Influence, which presents the online influence tracking service Klout.com as the future of marketing: low-cost, high-speed, influence driven, and powerful.

I’ve now had a well-documented history of highs & lows with Klout that eventually led me to declare my freedom from the self-serving, vanity-driven business and more recently, to create a public awareness campaign for those afflicted from fallout of opting out of Klout.

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?

The business of Klout.com is monitoring the quantity of social interactions one has with others, the nature of those online interactions and predicting the impact these individuals have on their social graph. Online interactions are churned through their proprietary algorithms to produce a ranking of Klout-decreed influencers on various topics using a score of 1 to 100. Brands then shell out top dollar to access these people and reward the elite with product trials and offers in hopes that the chosen will promote and encourage purchase of the brand’s product among those they supposedly influence.

In other words influencer marketing; a concept and tactic that pre-dates Klout and even the Internet and social media for that matter. Now, I’ve been at the enterprise marketing game for almost 20 years and so this concept of engaging influencers is not new to me, in the offline or digital space. Yet I don’t understand the current fascination and blind trust that brands are placing in Klout.

What happened to accountability?

What I do know is that before Klout and their ilk became water-cooler fodder, influencers were held to a different standard. Their selection process required more accountability. CMOs demanded empirical proof of the candidate’s influence – and in many cases actual guarantees of the impact they’d deliver.

I suspect the renewed fascination in influencer marketing – and specifically online influencer marketing – can be attributed to:

The public’s mass adoption of social communications and networking
The brand’s lack of understanding of social media nuances
The brand’s continuing struggle to monetize social media
The marketers need for quick fixes and quick results

Klout plays on these trends and promises brands they can connect them with those who will positively impact their business’s sales and profitability. If not, why would anyone pay top dollar to access the Klout-annointed?

Is that blind faith well placed?

Even if you would accept that the social concept of influence can be accurately and scientifically measured with limited or sporadic data points (and let’s face it, it can’t), please consider:

1. Klout is a game. Klout plays on the vanity of individuals through various gamification techniques, which encourages those individuals to change their social behaviours in order to receive the perceived clout and “perks” awarded to those who play the game well. The fact that the game can be, well, gamed should raise serious questions in the minds of brand marketers when considering this channel for their marketing strategy and budget.

2. Undefined Context. The context of the influence is loosely – if at all – defined. Of bigger concern, the fact that who is being influenced is even less defined. For example, the king of all influencers on Klout is Justin Beiber with a perfect game score of 100. Brands are rewarding high-scorers like him with upgrades on hotel accommodations or special privileges on airplanes. Upon receiving such a perk, the hope is that The Biebs will Tweet: “This is a great hotel, you should check it out” and his followers would flock. Given that his followers are predominately pre-teen girls, the likelihood that his advertisement will have his audience pulling out their credit cards seems unrealistic. Granted that Justin is an extreme example, the point is still relevant. Where’s the audience context that is demanded in any other form of marketing plan or budget allocation?

3. Troubled History. Their self-professed “standard in influence measurement” is based on experimental and frequently changing algorithms (anyone see the contraction here?) that have caused scores to dramatically jump or decrease over night. Just the fact that we’ve proven you can game your score would have scientists releasing their rats and refocusing on another hypothesis. Yet marketers continue to believe, or maybe it’s hope?

What I believe this all boils down to is: if the individuals that Klout is selling access to are playing the game, tweeting whenever and whatever it takes to increase their score, limiting their conversations to only those that are more influential than them…are they really influencing anyone? Can you count on those people to be honestly and genuinely influential if they’re “Under the Influence” of the Klout game?

What do you think?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Image Credit: The Aminated Woman

Influence Suicide: The Next Global Pandemic

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

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.

This disease, once only seen in few disparate cases has spread rapidly and is now threatening to become a global pandemic. The ailment, clinically diagnosed as Klout_OptOut_Itis, results in the utter destruction of the patient’s professional experience and social stature. These once successful and well respected members of the business community are fading away into nothingness, soon to be remembered only through footnotes in the annals of history.

Without this arbitrary Klout-rank, brands, employers and the general public have no discernible method to determine the actual influence of the individual. They are left to collect their own data, ask questions, read resumes and consider the context of those data points as it relates to their goals and needs; effort and thought that has even the brightest of executives cowering under their desks.

Hello, My Name is Sam Fiorella and I Have Klout_OptOut_Itis.

Social scientists are actively tracking back the connections within these influence-suicide cases to discover patient zero in hopes of finding a cure. However, the shame of not having a public Klout score seems to have sent the afflicted into hiding. Those searching for the cure are asking for the public’s help in identifying those with Klout_OptOut_Itis.

I, myself struggle from this sickness. I opted out of Klout in November of 2011 and while the recognition and perks received from brands, business and individuals have actually increased and become more meaningful since, I recognize my malady and so am asking for your help.

As with other addictive diseases, admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery. A public awareness campaign was launched this week to encourage the afflicted to acknowledge their condition. If you’ve committed Influence-Suicide or know someone who has, I encourage you/them to visit Klout_OptOut_Itis and create a Twibbon for your avatar. It’s only step one in finding a cure, but every journey must start with that first step.

Good luck.
Get Your Twibbon:

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Challenging the Rules of Social Darwinism

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

"Survival of the Fittest”, first championed by philosopher Hebert Spencer is an extension of Charles Darwin’s theory on “natural selection”, which describes the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. Spenser’s sociological adaptation of Darwin’s biological theory has been sometimes referenced as "Social Darwinism” (note: the term “social” was not used to reference modern day “social media”).

In the business world, the term has been interpreted in many fashions but the main premise always remains: a product or brand whose attributes (naturally occurring by characteristic or manufactured by marketing) predisposes it to being beloved and supported by a the majority of consumers.

The economic applications of this principle have rarely included the social media factor; a new, disruptive player in the ecosystem. Can popularity, amplified by social media, alter the premise of Spencer’s fittest paradigm?

Case Study: Research in Motion (RIM).

Spoiler Alert: this is not another blog post about how RIM is circling the drain or speculating why or who should buy it. It’s about you and your part in dictating its history.

Recently, I engaged in a rather heated debate with colleagues about the merits of Apple vs. Google vs. RIM devices and operating systems. After what seemed like an eternity of technical diatribes, someone asked a simple yet pointed question and one that may be closer to the heart of the issue: how do consumers go from being diehard fanatics to diehard detractors over night?

Of course they were referencing the meteoric fall of RIM, which decended from "inventor of the Smart Phone”, enjoying the world’s largest marketshare to vulture food in what was really a nanosecond when you look back. RIM’s Blackberry was supposed to be (and for a short while was) to the smart phone what Kleenex is to facial tissues.

Was the debatable innovation or technical missteps of RIM’s executives what caused it to go from the world’s mobile “fittest” to economic “weakling” overnight? Even passionate advocates of Social Darwinism will concede that any form of natural selection does not happen this quickly without some external factor such as an economics-version of a tsunami or meteor storm that kills off a species in one fell swoop. So what’s the external factor at play here?

Disrupting Social Darwinism

While we’re still charting the full impact of social media’s amplification factor vis-à-vis social influence, social status and networking, we can all agree that social bandwagonism is alive and in fact, rampant.

What is the impact of social media’s mob-mentality on the rules of Social Darwinism? In the case of RIM we might argue that it expedited – or possibly created – the speed at which it has lost public and investor favor.

Is RIM’s product so poor, so deficient that its death should be preordained? It has a proven history of innovation, an international network and large recurring revenue stream (albeit drastically lower than it once was) so why have consumers jumped off the bandwagon so quickly to avoid the “Blackberry plague” that threatens to kill their social cool-factor?

It is possible that RIM or its Blackberry device would have failed regardless of social media’s spotlight but would it have happened so quickly? The new world-order for consumer brands seems to be ruled not by the survival of the fittest but social-popularity. Blackberry fanatics have thrust their “blue thumbs” into their pockets way too quickly for us to not concede that social media peer-pressure elevated social popularity to the top of the priority list over technical considerations and brand loyalty.

Mission Impossible: Overcoming “Social Media Darwinism”

In fact, I would argue the point a little further and state that it has created a hostile environment where even a very fit business can’t survive. RIM has not closed its doors yet pundits and analysts have all but written their epitaphs. The same way they wrote off MySpace, which despite the reports is enjoying a surge in popularity …and even revenue growth today.

I understand that this is their job...whatever sells the news but the general public isn’t selling anything? Or is it? Are we selling our own popularity…our own status? Are we all too happy – and too quick – to join the cool-kids that we’re inadvertently poisoning the environment for fit brands?

What are your thoughts? Has social influence created a social media tsunami? Have the rules of "survival of the fittest" been changed? Can a business overcome it?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Yoru Community, Not Your Ego