Social Engagement – Target Marketing

Measuring Social Influence in a Post-Klout Digital World

The much-maligned Klout app that infamously attempted to rank our influencer status across all social media channels disappeared from the digital landscape forever on the same day that GDPR arrived on the scene. How will marketers measure social influence in a world of self-proclaimed experts, ninjas and gurus in a post-Klout world?

Last week, the much-maligned Klout app that infamously attempted to rank our influencer status across all social media channels disappeared from the digital landscape forever. Conspiracy theorists might question the coincidence of closing on May 25th which was also the day that GDPR came into force, but the effects of Klout on our lifestyle are still very much alive.

When Klout first arrived on the scene, the platform proudly incentivized attention-seeking on social media and we all know the mess that created. There were also many embarrassments along the way such as US President Barack Obama being less influential than tech blogger Robert Scoble.

Even though the platform has now disappeared, don’t be fooled into thinking that the concept of reducing people to a mere number based on an arbitrary algorithm have been retired with it. New iterations such as Skorr are waiting in the wings and Lithium are also working on a new social impact scoring methodology based on Twitter.

Protecting Your Reputation in a ‘Rating’ Society

The big questions that remain are how do you ensure that your digital footprint doesn’t affect your reputation? And how will marketers measure social influence in a post-Klout digital world?

Maybe it was Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror and the famous Nosedive episode that gave self-obsessed social media users the much-needed wake-up call they needed. But the effects can still be felt all over the world. For example, China’s social credit system takes things to another level where your social score could determine your next job, hotel stay and even your internet speed.

Anyone with a low Uber rating will also tell you the inconvenient truth that the score against your name already determines the quality of service you receive. Whether it is eBay, Airbnb, Tinder, Amazon, or even the dreaded corporate appraisal system, we are all surrounded by ratings.

Ironically, for ten years Klout attempted to rank people with a cold robotic quantification, but it disappeared at a time when it was needed most. More than ever, marketers need a tool that will help expose fake influencers along with the infamous army of self-proclaimed experts, ninjas and gurus. There is an argument that Klout was ahead of its time.

The Rise of the Micro Influencer

Klout was often accused of encouraging its users to be fake or conniving and game the system to achieve higher scores. But, as our online behavior has evolved, content creators no longer need approval from a third party social media metric score to obtain a stamp of approval. The cost of entry into the influencer bracket has slipped from 500,000 Facebook fans or a viral YouTube video to 5,000 followers on a platform to get your hands on free stuff on sites such as Famebit.

Just because you call yourself an Instagram or LinkedIn expert with your 87 followers doesn’t mean that you are. Can you trust someone that introduces themselves as an influencer? But, maybe this is the point. In a digital age of ruled by algorithms, does the demise of Klout indicate a new beginning where we celebrate the complexities and richness of the human condition?

Engagement, Not Follower Counts

Rather than chasing huge numbers against a profile name, many marketers were forced to learn the hard way that the influencers with a large audience often received much less engagement on their posts. There is now a trend towards working with multiple highly engaged micro influencers than an individual with a meaningless two digital metric against their username.

In a world of fake accounts are littered with bot followers, engagement has become much more important than meaningless follower counts. Hopefully, the days where marketing departments would seek and only engage with Twitter users that had a Klout score of over 70 will be retired along with Klout.

As a marketer here in 2018, can you genuinely put a number against a fellow human to determine if they are worthy of an interaction with you or your brand? Hopefully, you answered no, and this must be considered progress, right?

‘SoMoBiDa’ Isn’t a Song: Like It or Not, the Confluence of Social, Mobile and Big Data Is the Future of Marketing

Are you familiar with the word “SoMoBiDa”? SoMoBiDa is an abbreviation for Social, Mobile and Big Data—a combination of the three great trends in today’s marketing world. In a practical sense, what does SoMoBiDa mean for marketers?

Social—it’s become cliché to say it, but social media has changed the way in which brands engage and interact with their customers. On one hand, social media has given marketers an incredible platform for disseminating content to the masses, and at an incredibly low cost. Social has given marketers the ability not only monitor what customers are saying and feeling about the firm and its products (social listening or monitoring), but it’s opened the door to actual two-way conversations with clients (social engagement).

Listening to, responding to and engaging with users on Social is a challenge that marketers will be forced to meet with increasing effectiveness in coming years. Recently, a host of new solutions has sprung up to help with the task. Using a Social CRM tool, for example, marketers can match Social Insight against existing customer and prospect data, creating a powerful marketing tool for acquisition, retention or customer service.

Similarly to campaign management, marketers are already starting to experiment with ways to automate some of their organization’s Social Engagement. In fact, some believe that a large portion of Social Engagements can be automated, and new tools have sprung up to fill the need. When it comes to the tone or content of the social conversation, however, many firms have discovered that Social Media is a double-edged sword where control of the conversation has shifted to the crowd—truly a frightening concept to any marketer! Ultimately, marketers who ignore Social do so at their own peril.

Mobile—if marketing is about sending the right message to the right people at the right place at the right time … Well then mobile is the right place. And marketers need to be there. More than simply a “channel” in the conventional sense, mobile is more like a way of life. This is because the mobile device has become hardwired into the way we go about our lives. How do you feel when you accidentally leave home without your phone, or when your phone dies and you have no way to charge it? Not good, right? Can you sit down for an entire meal without picking up your phone at least once to check your email, see what’s trending on Twitter or find out you’re your finds are doing or saying on Facebook?

Mobile presents marketers with an “always on” touchpoint with customers and prospects, giving marketers potential 24/7 access to them, the ability to monitor what they do and where they are, and so on. Now of course being an “always on” channel is both a blessing and a curse. Because the smartphone is used all day long for a variety of reasons, users are understandably hypersensitive with regard to uninvited or unwanted intrusions.

Big Data—“Yeah, yeah. Enough about Big Data, already,” you’re probably saying. At this point, I think it’s safe to say we’re all familiar with this über-meme on a high level. What it means for marketers, however, is another story. Try asking most marketers what benefit Big Data will have for their organizations and their heads will probably start to spin. The trouble with explaining the benefits of Big Data is that Big Data is the activity of analyzing and deriving insight from the mountains of unstructured data that are accumulating within and across today’s enterprise firm, on servers and in stacks, on PCs, in spreadsheets, on the Web and in the Cloud. Fact is, Big Data can tell us anything, or nothing—you just won’t know until you gotten down into the weeds and done the dirty work.

In a great recent post by Sandro Catanzaro titled “Taming the Wild West: 7 Trends Uncovered With Big Data,” the author identifies seven super-practical and highly impactful insights firms have gleaned with Big Data. Among the discoveries that Catanzaro highlights are a retailer who realizes that consumers browse higher-end lines before purchasing one tier down. Another was a discovery by a credit card company that consumers in urban areas viewing an ad for a new credit card on Tuesday are more likely to sign up on Sunday night. Catanzaro gives us seven real-world examples uncovered using the latest tools. These are just seven examples—the potential list is truly endless.

Beyond a sum of its parts, SoMoBiDa refers to the confluence of these three great forces and the immense power this combination unleashes for marketers. Standing alone, any one of these trends signals a momentous shift in the way we do business. When they’re combined together they can become truly transformative.

Let’s look at an example in which a potential customer walks into a retail location and looks at some merchandise. While doing so, let’s say he or she scans a QR Code above the device and learns more about the product using an in-store app. Because it is the first week of the month, using Big Data the marketer knows that this is when most big-ticket purchases are made, right after payday for most consumers. As a result, a special time-sensitive offer pops up in the in-store app asking the user to share the offer with his/her network. The customer then tweets about the product.

Using a Social CRM tool, the firm is able match the social engagement to the CRM database, which has been beefed with Big Data custom attribution modeling leveraging past purchase info combined demographic and psychographic data to identify this Twitter user as a repeat customer with a high lifetime value, who usually buys online from someone a couple days after an in-store visit. Using location services, the firm is able to discern at which location the customer is shopping. To help close the deal, the in-store sales staff is immediately sent over to assist the prospect, armed with complete customer order history and personal information on a tablet. Pretty awesome, huh?

Now of course this is just one example for one type of business. Nor am I claiming to have all the answers now—it’s way too early in the game and no one does yet. But just think for a moment of the power that marketers will have in their hands if they do SoMoBiDa right and incorporate it into their business model? If you project several years in the future, companies that get it right will be the ones that succeed. Those that don’t … well, they probably won’t be around.

Okay, looks like over my word count limit again and I’m out of space for this post. Got any observations or SoMoBiDa ideas for your company or products? If so, I’d love to hear about them in your comments.

—Rio

Is Your Social Engagement Producing Sales?

If you’re like most B-to-B marketers, you’ve been engaging customers on social media for a while now—or at least wading into the water and getting your feet wet. But for many of us, engagement has been a bust; it feels a lot like that mystical practice called branding. Yet a few successful brands are turning engagement into leads and sales. Here’s how they’re doing it and how you can, too.

Popular opinion says awareness (reach) and influence leads to conversion. “Regular social media participation with customers, brand advocates and prospects will ultimately convert them into customers.” Need proof? Here’s some (tortured) research—some fuzzy math nonsense that looks a lot like the “proof” that brand marketers offer up for the last few decades.

This is not to dismiss the need for awareness or take a swipe at mass advertising. Without awareness we cannot create and capture demand, as we know from the fundamental, proven concept represented as AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action). What I’m saying is this: Having awareness, interest and desire of a customer does not reliably convert into action (a lead or sale) unless it is designed to.
We can directly increase the chance of an action being taken (as a result of engagement) by making it happen.

Let’s face it. Engagement is today’s version of branding—something everyone believes in, practices yet cannot define and, in the end, the C-suite doesn’t really expect much from anyway. Bottom line: for most of us, engagement isn’t our best friend. But that can change with a different mindset and approach.

After a year of interviewing businesses experiencing remarkable success using social media I found the common success principle: Ceasing to believe that passive engagement works and designing social media programs in ways that create purpose-driven customer behavior.

In other words, if you want to start experiencing success with social media start giving customers a reason to offer more than a “like” or merely consume content. Use that reason to induce an action using what we already know works: Some kind of irresistible bait … a scratch to a customer’s itch that is part of a pre-planned process that leads them toward a sale.