Klout | Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration

Social Pros 14 – Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer

Posted on 03. May, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, influencer identification, Jason Falls, Klout, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This is Episode 14 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Jason Falls, the founder and principal of Social Media Explorer. Read on for insights from Jason, and more information about his Explore conferences that are happening around the country.

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Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy).

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

Eric: Good afternoon or good night, depending on where and when you’re listening. My name is Eric Boggs, and welcome to Social Pros podcast, episode #14. Joining us today is the uncanny Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, who probably requires no introduction to our listeners. Also pitch-hitting for Jay Baer is the venerable Jim Kukral of digitalbooklaunch.com.

Jim’s been a guest host with us before, and he’ll be chiming in shortly. Before we get going, special thanks to our sponsors, which includes my company, Argyle Social, developers of data driven social media marketing software; Infusionsoft, developers of email marketing automation software; and Jim. Jim Kukral of Digital Book Launch. Jim, while I’m thanking you as a sponsor, I guess it’s a good time to welcome you into the call.

Jim: Thank you. Please, go ahead and spell venerable.

Eric: Hey, man. This is not a spelling bee.

Jim: Oh.

Eric: I lost a spelling bee in sixth grade because I misspelled Petunia, and that still sticks with me.

Jim: Now I’ve got to go look it up.

Eric: Normally we kick these shows off with Jay ranting about something. That is sort of a sacred thing for Jay. I’m too tired and not really in a ranting mood, so we’re going to skip right ahead to our special guest, Mr. Jason Falls, whom doesn’t require an introduction, but I will begin with an anecdote. The first time I ever met Jason was actually on a Skype call just like this. 30 seconds into the call, he made an incredibly offensive joke, and I’ve loved him ever since.

Special Guest: Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer

jasonfalls square Social Pros 14 Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer

Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer @jasonfalls

Jason: Now you’ve got to repeat the joke, I don’t even remember what it was.

Eric: No. I think this is the second or third time I’ve actually introduced you in front of a crowd, Jason, and I’m not going to repeat the joke. Sorry.

Jason: OK. That’s fine. I’m glad Jay starts off with a rant because that’s not beneath me. I would be more than happy to wax poetic on whatever you’d like me to rant on today.

Eric: Well, you have the floor. If you want to rant, we’ll just sit here and listen.

Jason: Well, we could. The thing that’s hot on my mind right now is what I blogged about today on Social Media Explorer, which is the problems with social profiling. It sparked a little bit of a discussion and debate because I think I probably, as I sometimes and want to do, took the point that I was trying to make a little further than I probably really meant to, or should have. That’s kind of one of the things I try to do is poke people so that they think a little differently and deeper about these issues. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a really nice post last week on what social profiling will do, how it will work in the real world. So, services like Klout and Kred that put a number to your social influence.

He was basically saying, with augmented reality and the technology that’s available today, we’re already seeing companies who are saying, OK. The customer in the back of the line has a Klout score of 75, the customer in the middle of the line has a Klout score of 17. We’re going to let the customer with 75 skip the line, because they’re more impactful online. I kind of went off on this post a little bit. It’s not a rant post. It’s actually well thought out, I think anyway, or at least most people have told me today that they thought it was well thought out. My position on Klout and other measurement services like that, that try to measure influence, it has always been that they are just one way of looking at the data. I’m not saying Klout is good, bad, or indifferent. I like a lot of what Klout has to offer, but services like Klout factor in six, eight, 10 data points, and put together an algorithm that scores them and ranks them, and so on and so forth, and gives you a number. Klout currently, I think, takes in, I don’t know, six, eight social networks.

Eric: Yep.

Jason: …and tries to give you a score of how influential you are on social networking. That’s just one way of looking at the data of influence. I’m going to pick on Klout specifically, just a little bit here because that’s the one that everybody sort of seems to talk about. They’re the market leader.

Eric: It’s by far the biggest, and has raised the most money.

Jason: Absolutely. Joe Fernandez, I’ve talked to him about this, he’s their CEO, several times. I like Joe, and I think Joe understands where I’m coming from. I don’t think he disagrees with me. I’m probably a little bit more passionately skeptical about what they’re doing than he is, obviously. What you have to understand about Klout, and services like Klout, is Klout is limited to reaching residents on social networks online. It’s further only limited to a handful of them. It does not measure offline influence. It doesn’t measure your influence through email, through word-of-mouth marketing, through publishing, whether that be online or offline. It doesn’t factor in the influence that your company brings with it, behind your name, the name recognition of you or your company, and so on.

I make a point in the post, it doesn’t measure whether or not you’re connected to the Mafia. There’s so many different areas of influence that come into our lives that it doesn’t measure. We need to understand that going in. Which is why, I hear stories like that of Sam Fiorella, who was profiled in a piece in Wired Magazine, and also in Mark Schaefer‘s new book, “Return on Influence“. About how he lost out on a potential job at a marketing agency because his Klout score wasn’t high enough for the person that was actually filtering and hiring that position. When I hear stories like that, it makes me just slap my forehead. The data that you’re looking at for a Klout score or services like it, is so limited that there’s no way you could draw massive conclusions about a person, like whether or not they’re qualified for a job, based on that particular number. Go ahead.

Jim: It blows me away though, man. It just absolutely blows me away that someone would make that, sorry to interrupt you, but that someone would actually make that distinction. I come from the Internet marketing aspect of all of this stuff, and social media is a small part of what I do. At the end of the day, it’s about results, not scores and stuff. Klout is the Alexa ranking of social media. You know? Let’s be honest, if non-geeky Internet people don’t know what Alexa ranking is, it’s this metric system that is only quantified by this tool bar at .0001% of the world has. People walk around saying, “Hey, I’ve got a high Alexa score.” It’s like, “Yeah? Big deal.” It means nothing. This is the same exact thing I see here. I can’t believe people are doing that.

Jason: Yeah. It really is sad that there are, and actually Sam, in the comments today, actually came in and commented a little bit, and there are other companies that are doing it. He found a job posting, I think somewhere online, that one of the requirements was, Klout score will be factored into our decision. Which, I don’t necessarily think that factoring Klout score into the decision is altogether bad. I just hope you’re not basing the majority of the decision, or even a large part of the decision on that. It’s one piece of data.

Jim: Where’s that coming from? I’ve got to be honest, I teach social media for University of San Francisco. Where are these people who are creating these RFP’s getting that from? I can’t imagine that somebody taught them to do that.

Jason: Well, I think it’s just the fact that Klout, to Joe and his team’s credit, have done a very good job of sort of infiltrating the mainstream mindset. They have been written about and talked about in places like Fast Company and Wired, and so on and so forth. So, people who are not sort of in the echo-chamber, as it were, where we have a tendency to play and read blogs, and so on and so forth. They hear Klout and think, oh if you have a high Klout score, you are influential, because they see little mentions of Klout in very brief snippets. They would see a quick story on CNN that mentions, oh the Klout is doing this, and it measures your influence. If you have a high Klout score, you could get perks from American Airlines, or whatever, and they think, oh high Klout means that person is better. They don’t actually think, they don’t actually take the time. Again, it’s not just marketers and business owners, it’s everyone in the whole world right now. We are all looking for the easy button. We will not take the time to sit down and read the entire email, or click through and try to find out what is exactly behind this Klout score thing. We just take the media snippet and say, “oh high Klout means this person is more important, therefore I’m going to judge people based on their Klout score.”

Eric: I want to chime in briefly with a devil’s advocate position.

Jason: OK.

Eric: If people thought about credit scores the way they thought about Klout scores, we would have anarchy on our hands.

Jason: Yes.

Eric: So, do you think this is a tempest in a teapot? A minute ago you said Klout’s sort of mainstream appeal. I would argue that their mainstream appeal is the mainstream of a very, very small, and very, very nerdy online marketing segment of the actual mainstream.

Jason: Well, I think you’re right, but I also think when I say mainstream appeal, I think outside of that sort of nerdy echo-chamber. I think that they’ve done such a good job of getting publicity beyond the technology world, beyond the blogs that we read and the world that we sort of commiserate with other in. I don’t know that my mother-in-law right now, really knows what Klout is, but I bet my brother-in-law does, and he doesn’t read Tech Crunch and he’s not on Twitter, etc., etc. He probably knows what Klout is because he reads Wired and Fast Company, and so on and so forth.

Eric: Sure.

Jason: So, he sees that and goes, oh well if I enhance my online footprint through my Facebook or my LinkedIn connections, or whatever, I could get a higher Klout score and I might be able to get a deal from Netflix or whatever as a result.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: So, I think they’ve infiltrated a market that was it really smart to infiltrate quite frankly, from a market standpoint.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They’re getting a lot of clout with a C, in areas where they need to, in order to have a mainstream push. Which the people who are investing in them obviously like to see, because they don’t just want to be relevant to the tech sector.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: I do think, to your question, this is a tempest in a teapot to a degree. Where I think I took my blog post today, sort of over the line a little bit, was that I likened social profiling of basically hearkening back to Jeremiah’s post. Where a clerk at a store can actually look through the viewfinder of their iPhone and through augmented reality a year or two from now and see everyone’s Klout score appearing above their head as they shop in the person’s store, I sort of likened that to racial profiling.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: I basically say in the piece that if we are going to allow technology overlays to help us judge people based on their appearance, which is what this is.

Then I think we are inviting the legal system to tear us apart. We are inviting Congress to say, “You can’t do that.” Because every time in the history of the United States when we have had some sort of system set up to judge people based on how they look, Congress has come in and said, ”This is not right.” Quite frankly, rightfully so, they’ve come in and said, “You can’t do this. This is not fair. This is not right and this is not accurate, and Civil Rights laws apply here.” I think we could be, potentially, now I don’t think we are necessarily, but we could potentially be opening a can of worms here, that invites the legal system and Congress into our business.

Eric: I’ll tell you. If there ever was an inopportune time for online marketers to open yet another can of worms with Congress, it’s now. With all of the ending cookie legislation happening in the European Union and the beginnings of that starting to bubble up in the United States Congress, we don’t need more. We need less attention around online marketing.

Jim: They’re already in it. I’m on the affiliate side, and they’re in with Amazon and all of that stuff. They’ve got laws passed in states and they’re going for the gusto, man. Jason’s right. When you start opening that door, eventually. They’re looking for any possible crack in that door, so they can stick their foot in, because at the end of the day the government wants the money. They want a piece of everything that goes on in the Internet, and they’re not getting that.

Eric: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. This is turning into the conspiracy theory episode of Social Pros. I want to keep pushing a little bit, Jason, and I think someone brought this up in one of the comments on your post. Marketers do segmentation and targeting based on things much more, either much better or much worse depending on your perspective, than an inaccurate social score. For example, when I was accepted into graduate school, evidently that showed up somewhere in my credit report or something. Even today, a couple years after graduation, I still get three credit card solicitations in the mail every single day. It’s because I have an advanced degree. That’s very personal, very private information that all of these credit agencies have access to, and of course all of these marketers have access to through God knows what sort of back channels exist. I’m sure it would be horrifying if we knew the whole story. So, is this not just a logical progression, this online influence, or is it really as sinister as you think?

Jason: Well, I think it’s a logical progression. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of sinister intent here, but keep in mind that anytime you put something in the hands of human beings, someone’s going to screw it up. Human beings are infinitely fallible, and there’s always someone out there with ulterior motives. While, yes I know, and this is again just an idea. I may be completely wrong here. I hope I am. But yes, marketers are currently using segmentation and targeting based on your income, your education, your lifestyle, and even your race quite frankly.

Eric: Yep.

Jason: And age, and so on and so forth. So marketers are using that information to segment and treat you differently than other prospective customers. What I think Klout and services like it do, social profiling. If it opens the door for legislators and government to come in and say, “Wait a minute. We don’t like the fact that you’re playing favorites here.” I think online influence metrics like Klout could open the door for the government to come in and do a full-scale war against marketing and say, ”You can’t use this at all for anything. You cannot racially profile, period. You cannot profile by age, period, whether it’s online or offline.”

I don’t know that that’s necessarily the wrong course of action for a government to take, quite frankly.

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: Hot dang. This is interesting.

Jason: I’m telling you the next 10 years are going to be really, really challenging for not just Internet marketers, but marketers.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: …because this whole world of social media is new. Which means, the government, the courts, and legislation and what not, they’re always about 10 years behind the new waves.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: OK? So the clue train was about 12 years ago, so social media marketing really sort of reached its initial implementations online about maybe 10 years ago, nine years ago. So now the courts are starting to catch up. We saw the court case, I think it was in Seattle or maybe in Portland, Portland I believe it was, earlier this year of the blogger who did not want to reveal the source.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Because they thought they should be protected like journalists. Unfortunately the young lady thought she didn’t need representation in a court of law and lost the case. We’re starting to see the courts get a hold of some of these hot button issues that cross and blur those lines in the legal world. I think online influence scoring is going to be one of those things that some Congress person somewhere is going to see that they have a 21 Klout score, and their opponent has a 54, and they’re going to lose their shit over it.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They’re going to enact some legislation that says, “This is inappropriate profiling.” Then, all of a sudden, if you think SOPA was a mess. Oh my God.

Eric: Oh, yeah.

Jason: Wait until some of these online marketing metrics and tactics, and what not even in the affiliate world, watch Congress get a hold of those and really investigate and understand what happens.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They will go ape nut crazy trying to legislate what we’re doing online.

Eric: Yeah. No one kills the golden goose more quickly than a marketer. I think you are exactly correct when you say that this is a natural progression, that quite honestly could be very powerful. If you talk to a lot of marketing academics, or people that have been in this business for a while, they have this really interesting perspective around marketing-as-service.

Jason: Yeah.

Eric: Really, marketing can be a service. I’m interested in buying a new car, for example. It might actually be useful for me to get targeted ads about specific new cars based on my personal information, my family’s information. Marketing through that lens can be viewed as a service. The reality is that most marketers aren’t that good.

Jason: That’s right.

Eric: You give them more data, you’re basically just giving them more rope to hang themselves.

Jason: That’s true. I think the other main problem, especially in the online marketing world, and Jim I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Is I think that what we’ve done, what websites, and marketers, and companies have done over the years, especially with Google, it makes more sense for Google to track your user behavior online so that they can present more relevant search results to you. I get that, we get that, we understand that from a marketing perspective. However, the mainstream general public doesn’t get that. They don’t understand that Google might be watching them. I don’t think Google or any other website service out there has ever done a very good job of letting people opt out.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They give them that option, but it’s always hidden on some 27th click-through in their settings. Now the Facebook privacy kerfuffles have sort of brought that to light for a lot of people. I bet you never thought you would hear the word kerfuffle on this show.

Eric: I’m pretty sure it’s been used before, but we did use venerable earlier.

Jason: That’s true.

Eric: …for some of you said.

Jason: The Facebook thing has brought that to light for a lot of people, but I still think the average website user, the average web user, social networking user, etc., etc., doesn’t get it. You have to make it really, really easy for them to understand, and then you have to hold their hand and walk them through it for them to understand, wait a minute. We’re tracking what you’re doing, and because of that we’re able to present more relevant advertisements, and offers, and content to you. Are you OK with that?

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Most people don’t realize that Google and Facebook, and other websites are doing that. I think when the government realizes that web companies have not been as apparent and forth-coming as they should have been, to give people the option to opt-in rather than opt-out, then I think we’re going to be in a whole world of trouble too.

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: You’re right. People don’t know. Here’s the other truth is, they really don’t care. Until it affects them in a way that’s negative, in terms of spam or some type of interruption. The truth is that, as an internet marketer you learn people just don’t want to be interrupted and they don’t want to have stuff given to them that’s not relevant. That’s where good marketing comes in, when you can deliver relevant, high quality content or ads or whatever to a person that needs or wants that. That’s my definition of doing good marketing. If I use the re-targeting ad, that one across three websites to give you an ad because I knew you were looking at Chevy Tahoes, then I think that’s fine.

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: The line comes when all of a sudden now I have your email address that I didn’t get. Obviously I’m spamming you. The other thing is Google Plus was invented specifically for the fact that Google didn’t have Facebook’s data. Facebook knew if you liked Coca-Cola and everything else in the world, and they can run targeted ads to you. Google said, “Wow, we have to have that. We can’t scrape that from Facebook.”

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: So that’s why they invented it. You’re exactly right, Jason. The future of search, as according to Matt Cutts and Google, is social recommendations. You are going to get results based upon what your friends in your circles that you’re connected with have shared. I see it every single day now. That’s why I always say, everybody’s got to have that Google Plus account.

Eric: Let’s change gears, but this is good stuff. It’ll be interesting to get Jay’s take. We might have to do a recap of this to get Jay’s two cents in the next episode. Jason, tell us a little bit about the conferences that you’ve got going on. I was at Explore Nashville. It was great. I know you’ve got some other ones coming up this year.

Jason: Yeah. We’ve tried to take a stab at giving people a different option in the sort of social media digital marketing conference out there. Our events are called Explore. We had Explore Nashville a couple weeks ago. We’ve got Explore Minneapolis coming up in Minnesota on August 16th and 17th. (editor’s note: Jay will be speaking) Then, we’ll be in Irvine, California in October, and then Portland, Oregon in November. Basically what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to push the thinking. That’s the challenge that I’ve given the speakers. That we don’t want to talk about the same stuff over and over again. We want to challenge marketers and business owners, and marketing decision makers out there, to not only produce better digital marketing and more meaningful digital marketing, but do it in more creative ways. Measure it more infinitely so that you can be able to optimize and tweak and be better at what you’re doing, trying to connect those audiences with your message and/or your product. I think we’ve started to strike a cord. A couple of the pieces of feedback that we’ve gotten from participants and sponsors alike is, this is a different event. It sounds different, it looks different, and we walk away from here feeling a little bit more energized than we have in a conference for a while. We know that conferences and events, there’s a ton of them out there. We know we’ve got a lot of competition, but we think we’re doing something a little neat and a little different. Pushing the thinking both from a speaker standpoint, so we’re challenging them to be better as speakers, and from an audience standpoint. People are walking away from the event I think thinking about digital marketing a little differently.

Eric: I’ve always been curious about the business behind the conference world.

Jason: Sure.

Eric: Are you sort of throwing darts at the United States, picking these cities, or do you have anchor sponsors or anchor clients there? Are you strategically targeting Nashville and Minneapolis?

Jason: Honestly, what my philosophy has been in picking locations is I want to make social media and digital marketing expertise more accessible to people. Not that there’s not perfectly good experts and agencies and what not in all of these towns, because there are. I mean, hell, Minneapolis, they’ve got just a ton of smart people there.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Lee Odden and Arik Hanson, and so on and so forth. Albert Maruggi, I’m sure somebody’s going to yell at me for not mentioning him. What I wanted to do, is I wanted to go to cities where national conferences either aren’t or aren’t stopping, or they’re underserved by sort of the national touring speakers, if you will.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Obviously, the bigger the market, the more of an audience you have to choose from. So we started out in Dallas, we are doing Minneapolis, but instead of doing L.A., we thought, hey let’s go to the O.C. Let’s go down to Irvine because there’s a lot of companies there, there’s a lot of marketers there. But they often get told, well if you want to go to a conference like this, you have to come to L.A.

So we’re just going to go to Irvine.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: It was really just trying to find cities that had a nice population base certainly, had some nice brands certainly. But we felt may be a little underserved by the type of content that we’re delivering.

Eric: Cool.

Jim: Hey, Jason. I’ve got a question. Who’s the show for? Is it executives?

Is it for small business owners? Who’s the best target?

Jason: The best target is going to be the medium to large business marketing decision maker. That could be the CEO, it could be the CMO, it could be the Director of Marketing. We don’t usually use the term marketing decision maker in our literature because that’s kind of one of those sort of amorphous terms that you can apply in different situations. It’s the person who’s going to make decisions on your marketing, whether it’s how we’re going to strategically go to market, whether it’s what kind of tools we’re going to select and purchase to use. The person who’s going to make that call from a direction and a budgetary standpoint is, I think, who our ideal sweet spot person is. However, probably about 25 to 30% of our audience is made up of that person.

Then, we also certainly have a number of small businesses, a number of business owners, a number of community manager, social media manager, director types, aand then, sort of the gambit of the marketing professionals. So, your Directors of Marketing, maybe your Public Relations Director. There’s obviously going to be some agency and PR firm folks in the room, but it’s anyone who is involved with high-level decision making for marketing, PR, and communications campaigns, particularly in the digital world. We’ve had everyone from 101 nubes who have no clue what we’re talking about, who have walked away saying, “Man, I learned so much. I don’t understand it all, but I at least have, my brain is firing.”

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Some of our speakers walk away from our events saying, “Man, I learned a ton today.” So, we’re pushing the envelope on even the expert level thinking. To a degree. I wouldn’t say that Jim Kukral is going to come to this thing and walk away with a whole new cadre of knowledge, but at the same time I think he’ll get some stuff out of it.

Jim: Well, I can’t wait to come. How come we didn’t start that other conference we hatched at dinner in Washington?

Jason: Oh, yeah. Was it the booze conference?

Jim: Drunkly.

Jason: What was it called?

Jim: Drunkly.

Jason: Drunkly. That’s right. We’re going to do a conference called Drunkly and it we’ll just get together and drink. Which is what most conferences end up being.

Eric: I was going to say that I’m pretty sure that’s why most people go to conferences. So, Jason I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. Well, one last question. We like to wrap things up asking our guests for a Social Pro’s shout out. Off the top of your head, give us two or three people you’re reading, books you’re reading, things that are making you think online.

Social Pros Shout Outs

Jason: Ooh, that’s good. OK. I’ve got to start out with Roger Dooley, who wrote a book and has a blog called “Brainfluence:100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Customers with Neuromarketing”. So, he gets into how your brain works, and why you make decisions, or why consumers make decisions, and how marketers can capitalize on that. I don’t read books very quickly. I read a chapter and then put it down for a week, and then come back and read another chapter. I’m working my way through Brainfluence right now, and I think it’s just flat awesome. Roger’s really, really smart.

I also am falling in love with another book that I’m piece mailing my reading of, “Small Town Rules”, which is by Barry Moltz and Becky McCray. I’m from a small town in Eastern Kentucky. A lot of what I’ve been preaching over the last few years on how you can take sort of that small town approach to just being a genuine member of the community. They’ve taken those ideas, not from me necessarily, because Becky lives in a small town too, and they’ve put it into a book. I think they’re subtitle is something along the lines of how brands and businesses can prosper in today’s economy, where you can have those sort of small town ethics and approach business. The principles in this book are like things my mom taught me growing up.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: I’ve fallen in love with that book, and I just think it’s awesome. So I think those two books are the two big shout outs for me. That’s where my brain is right now.

Eric: Awesome. Very cool Thanks for sharing.

Jason: No. No problem.

Eric: We’ll wrap it up with that. Jim Kukral, thank you very much for guest hosting.

Jim: Thank you.

Eric: Jason Falls, thank you very much for being the super special, all star guest.

Jason: I’m super special in the short bus way, though. Right?

Eric: Exactly. Exactly. Next week our guest is Marcus Sheridan, also known as The Sales Lion. I’ve never met Marcus but look forward to doing the show with him. Special thanks to our sponsors, Jim Kukral, who was on the show today, Infusionsoft, and my beloved company, Argyle Social. Thanks, guys for tuning in and we’ll talk to you again soon.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

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Social Pros 14 – Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

How and Why to Create Smarter Content

Posted on 12. Apr, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Duct Tape Marketing, Google Analytics, Klout, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media

How and Why to Create Smarter Content

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

For several years now people like me have been advising you to create educational content as a foundational element of your marketing – and many of you have listened and profited.

law_keven via Flickr CC

But, and you knew this was coming; it’s no longer enough. Now that pretty much everyone gets that content is a must, it’s time to send your content creation and distribution to school to get smarter and more sophisticated.

The technology that gives you the ability to tailor your web content to the more specific needs and attributes of individual visitors exists right now and is very affordable.

Smart marketers are using these tools to deliver entirely different web page, message, offer and browsing experiences tied to the history and known data of the visitor.

It just makes complete sense that someone that comes to your site by way of a very specific search term, for example, would respond better to content that specifically addresses why he or she came in the first place, rather than the default home page experience.

Starts with analytics

The engine that drives the smart content experience is data. To gain full access to this level of personalization you must use a tool such as Google Analytics or Spring Metrics (a client) that can allow you to access publicly available data on your visitors such as IP address and location.

You can further enhance this approach by integrating CRM data as well. Imagine how powerful it would be to deliver only upsell products to current customers or special offers and discount coupon content as a way to reward customer loyalty.

Social tells story

For years I’ve followed the notion that 20% of your customers offer the opportunity to produce 80% of your most profitable work and sales. This isn’t new math, most people get this, but the trick is oftentimes it is difficult to identify the 20% simply based on their past purchase behavior.

I believe that social media offers us one of the greatest opportunities to identify those 20% based on a layer of influence, sharing and activity. A seemingly small client, in terms of purchasing from you at the moment, may be your greatest referral source if treated as such. Adding the social layer of data allows you to put metrics to that assumption.

What would happen if, for instance, you were able to determine a customer visiting your site had a high Klout score and therefor equipped them with content, context and offers that made it easy for them to talk about you. We all know hotshot online folks that get all kinds of free stuff in hopes that they will talk about their experience. What if your content on your site could automate that for even the smallest business?

Location based content

In my mind, there are several very obvious uses for smart content. One of the first is location based. Imagine if you had a business with offices in a couple cities. What if you could deliver the hometown office info to visitors by city?

Services such as Get Smart Content are springing up to make this a very simple thing to do at the full page or even page region level. Imagine if you were holding an event in a specific community and wanted every visitor to your site from that community to get a sales message for that event while people from everywhere else got another message. Now you can.

Segment based content

Many businesses successfully sell multiple market segments that have very different needs. Imagine how powerful it could be to deliver market segment content based on how a visitor came to your site.

Get Smart Content founder Jim Eustace showed me a mini case study for truck dealership that sells a line of very green electric delivery vehicles as well as traditional commercial trucks. They found that it was rather easy to distinguish, through search queries, the very different content needed by these two market segments.

Cycle based content

By adding CRM type of data to the measurement mix you can customize content delivery on your site based on the history of a prospect. Someone that has come back to your site after requesting a free eBook by filling out a form or clicking on a link is probably ready for different information or even very specific product or service information based on their past activity.

There is no magic wand one can wave to make this work for every business. It is certainly a trial, test and refine project that will get it wrong from time to time, but even simple enhancements to what content gets featured and when can dramatically impact the initial and ongoing experience for your visitor and allow you to use content as a clear competitive point of differentiation.

Klout and the Reality of Return on Influence

Posted on 06. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, interviews, Jason Falls, Klout, Mark W. Schaefer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media books, social media marketing

Video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive, great service.

(Abbreviated transcript below. Please watch video for entire interview.)

Jay: Welcome, everybody. It’s Jay Baer at Convince & Convert, joined today by a very special guest, my good friend Mark W. Schaefer. Mr. Schaefer, how are you, good sir?

Mark: I could not be better.

Jay: What does that W stand for anyway?

Mark: Wannabe.

Jay: Which brings us to today’s book, Return On Influence. Usually when I wave the book in front of the camera in these interviews, I have the book, but because I was graced with the electronic version of the book, I think I owe you $25, and I only have printed out the cover so that you can see what it looks like.

Mark: The hard copy book is coming to you. I’m going to be signing some copies next week. Of course, you’re featured in the book so I owe a great debt to you for your help.

Jay: Well, I think it’s quite the contrary, but thank you very much. It is a terrific book.

Mark: Thank you.

Jay: I devoured it. I devoured it recently on an airplane as I typically do. It was really, really good and obviously a tricky subject. There was a reason why nobody in social media has written a book about the nature of influence. Tell us why you decided to tackle this tricky subject?

Mark: The history of the book and how I got there is actually quite interesting and quite dramatic in some ways. I got really interested in the subject about a year and a half ago. I noticed that anytime someone wrote a blog post about Klout there would be this foaming at the mouth. People would be violent in there. One guy said to me on my blog, “Mark, are you with me? We’ve got to stop this.”

Jay: And you said, “No, I’m not with you.”

Mark: I’m thinking, wow, people don’t react this way over pagerank. This is something new. And then Jay, I started hearing about all these companies that were actually using it. Disney, Audi, Revlon; these are not schlock companies, so I got really interested in it. I thought that this could be a mainstream trend. Of course, now everybody knows about Klout and talks about Klout, but a year and a half ago it was unknown. And really, it’s actually still obscure to most people other than people like you and me. I made a proposal to my publisher, McGraw-Hill, and this was the tricky part. I turned in an outline and I said I don’t know what this book is going to be about.

Jay: That’s always what they want to see in the proposal process.

Mark: That got their stamp of approval right then and there, baby. And I said, because there is no story, there are no experts. This is completely new. It’s developing week by week. I can give you an outline of what I think it’s going to be, but I’m going to let the research tell the story. I turned to experts like you and to Robert Scoble, and the famous acclaimed author, Robert Cialdini, the author of “Influence at Work.” I did about 70 different interviews and I also did academic research to figure out how did we get here? What the science behind these formulas?

We don’t know their secret sauce and we never will, nor should we. It’s their secret sauce. There’s enough academic research out there that you can piece it together and have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing.

That’s what I did, and at the end of the day I tried to present a balanced book where I really give Klout and the other companies that are now flocking into this space a lot of credit for trying to do what they’re trying to do, but I also say there are problems. There are problems with gaming the system.

There are a lot of issues, as you know, with privacy. I addressed some of those issues head-on, but at the end of the day, I do think they’re onto something. I think that there is something legitimate here. I think that there is solid science developing here and that this is a trend we need to pay attention to.

What Defines Influence?

Jay: The book is called “Return on Influence”. The question people always have about Klout and similar services is how can you possibly deign to measure something as amorphous as influence? How would you, Mark W. Schaefer, define online influence? What is the marker of online influence?

Mark: That’s difficult.

Jay: Well, you wrote a book about it. It shouldn’t be that difficult.

Mark: It’s difficult to say in a sound bite. The first half of the book basically explores that question. It explores that difference. This was the interesting thing Jay, because not a lot has really been written about this. Volumes have been written about how to be influential and win friends and influence people, and how to be a better car salesman, and how to be a better this and how to be a better that, in the carbon-based world. But there hasn’t really been a lot written, and I was really amazed, Jay, at the lack of even research that’s been done as far as this idea of influence online.

Jay: One of the things that I think people struggle with, with regard to Klout and online influence, is this notion of reciprocity. We talked about that a little bit for the book. We have very much in our social media bubble this culture of “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.” Klout, by their own admission, says if you interact with people with higher Klout scores it will raise your own Klout score. That’s part of the algorithm. They’ve acknowledged that over time.

As we talked about in our interview, though, if people are doing things because it’s intrinsically beneficial to themselves, are you really influencing somebody when all they’re really trying to do is benefit themselves ultimately?

Mark: That’s so interesting. It’s such a interesting question. I really enjoyed exploring that part of the book, because what makes it so fascinating is that what I’ve found out through the academic part of the research was that humans have this insanely deep innate process to return a favor. We almost can’t stand it. When someone does something nice for us we just have to pay it back. We’re almost driven to pay it back.

In the offline world, in the human world, usually that means whenever you do a favor for someone you’ve got your skin in the game. Someone’s knocking at your door at midnight saying, “My baby is sick. Can you take me to the hospital?” Certainly, a gift, a favor, something that happens at work, a promotion, you don’t forget those things.

Here’s the interesting part. Even though reciprocity on the social web can be something as small as pushing a Like button, that human instinct is still the same, so it’s way out of whack. I’m sure you experience this, and you mention this in the book, is that people maybe you don’t even know are tweeting you and maybe they’re leaving a comment, and in their mind they’re building up this social capital in your bank. Then all of a sudden they ask for a withdrawal and you go, “What? What? Where’d this come from?”

Jay: Yeah, it happens.

Mark: In their mind this is legitimate. It’s just like doing some big favor for you in real life. So there is this disconnect, and that is a big difference between influence in the online world and the offline world.

Maybe Narrowcasting Trumps Broadcasting

Jay: One of the premises of online influence and Klout and things of that nature is your ability to move larger than average numbers of people to act in some way. Yet, as our friend Jason Falls talked about in the book and I thought was really interesting, in many cases success on the social web isn’t so much about breadth in broadcasting, but about narrow casting.

As he says, he only needs a few clients at a time. He only needs a few people to read his blog, a few people to sign up for his monthly advice service for this to be successful. To some degree we’re being encouraged to build these big networks, but maybe we really just need a smaller network that really and truly cares about what we do.

Mark: I thought that was a really interesting contrast. In the book I used the example of my friend who really built a career because he was so likable and it got to a point where he kept getting promoted, and it got to the point we were saying, “Is this guy really smart or is he just so likable?” In that situation he has zero room for error.

If you build your career on likability in the offline world, you can’t have any enemies. You’ve got to really drive that. As Jason said, the numbers are so big in the online world you can afford to not necessarily be liked by everyone. I think he said, “I just have to be liked by six marketing directors in the world. That basically will make my career very nice.” That’s another very fascinating difference to explore.

Jay: Although if you look at it, I feel like there are people in our world who are inherently more likable or believed to be so, or that’s the public persona they project. It certainly helps if they have the chops to back it up. Look at somebody like Gini Dietrich, who is by all accounts highly likable and everybody wants to be around her, but she also knows what she’s doing, which doesn’t hurt. The combination of the two is really powerful.

Brogan is the same way. Very likable guy, much more so than most people would expect. Falls is the same way. It’s interesting. When you get it coming from both directions, I think it’s a one plus one equals three circumstance.

Mark: Absolutely. I think in many ways the social web really amplifies personality. If you’re a jerk people are going to sniff you out. You’re not going to be able to fake it very long.

Mark: Some of the people that you mentioned, I haven’t met Gini yet. I’m going to meet her at Social Slam.

Jay: Is she coming to Social Slam, too? Social Slam, April 27th, Knoxville, Tennessee, run by the man, Mark W. Schaefer. It’s going to be incredible.

Mark: What an amazing lineup. Gini is a keynote speaker, Mitch Joel, Tom Webster. Jay is going to be there, Marcus Sheridan, Stanford Smith from Pushing Social. This is amazing firepower in one room for an $89 ticket. It’s an amazing day.

Does Klout Score Mean You Know What You’re Doing?

Jay: It’s interesting, though, looking at it from the other perspective, something that a lot of people kvetch about it, they may not talk about it publicly as much, but this notion that just because you have online influence doesn’t necessarily mean that that qualifies you to be a consultant or an adviser to corporations. It’s the, “Just because you can write a blog that’s successful doesn’t mean that you should be in the blog advice business.”

I think Klout feeds into that mentality a little bit. People would say, “Well, I have a Klout score of 67, therefore I must be a social media consultant. I must be worthy of your time and attention.” That, I think, is a little dangerous.

Mark: It is dangerous. It really is dangerous. I think a lot of people draw similarities between a Klout score and a credit score. A credit score is not even an indication of your integrity, it’s not an indication of your ability or your willingness to pay off a bill, but it’s an indication of something. As long as you know that it’s very limited and what it’s an indication of, you’re going to be okay.

If you start using credit scores to make assumptions about people beyond this narrow little sliver of what it’s suppose to represent, it’s wrong. I talk about this in the book. I’m concerned about some of the human aspects of what could happen as these scores go mainstream, and that’s one of them.

It’s going to create almost like a caste system of haves and have-nots.

Jay: I’ve not experienced it personally, but I’ve heard tales of people putting their Klout score prominently on their resume, and people being hired and not hired for social media positions based on, at least to some degree, Klout score and things like that.

I think that’s a little bit of a misuse and misapplication of the data. But there are good examples of companies using Klout for promotional purposes or influence or outreach. What are some of the examples or cases studies that you think are interesting?

Effective Klout Case Studies

Mark: I think I’ve got at least 15 case studies in the book. To be honest with you, I think it’s the highlight of the book because these are case studies that have never been seen before and it lifts the veil of this mystery of what the brands actually do with these things.

What I love about that chapter is the creativity. You look at the one example from Burson-Marsteller, a large PR firm based in New York but they’re global, I think there are 80 offices or something like that, how they’re using Klout scores in crisis management. If something breaks, bad news for one of their customers, they’re actually looking at what the Klout scores re of the people who are trying to share this information and they’re making decisions.

They can predict if this thing is going to move or if it’s not going to move based on the Klout score. I actually think that’s a good use of the scores, because I think Klout scores are an indicator of how well people can move content through a network and beyond a network. I think that is what is the small sliver of what’s being measured here and increasingly well.

Jay: One of the things that I think you mentioned in the book, and I’ve heard people from Klout talk about it in presentations, is that on average somebody who is tapped to participate in a Klout Perks kind of program creates on average 30 pieces of content about whatever business that they interact with. Between Instagram photos and tweets and Facebook status updates and LinkedIn posts and blog posts, etc., it almost doesn’t matter as much the amplification of that person.

If you could say, “Look, here’s what we’re going to do. If you pay this company some money, we’re going to find some people, regardless of influence, and each of them are going create on average 30 pieces of content about your brand.” That, in and of itself, has value. That forced amplification opportunity is pretty interesting.

Mark: It’s measurable, and you can compare that type of impression in some ways to traditional advertising impressions. Here’s the power that a lot of people aren’t really understanding. This is the power of someone creating these impressions, let’s say, about a new Subway sandwich. While they’re sitting in the store eating the sandwich they’re taking pictures and they’re tweeting and they’re talking about this.

These are people who love your product, advocating your product where it’s being used. This is entirely new. Really, it’s a new marketing channel. This couldn’t have happened two or three years ago. You needed to have this widespread adoption, you would have had to have widespread access to high-speed Internet and widespread adoption of these publishing tools for this to even be possible.

The layer on top of this is the algorithm, figuring out who’s creating buzz. That is revolutionary. This whole process of creating an influence score like an E-score or a Q-score used to be, this is behind the curtain secret stuff, what’s Tom Hanks’ E- score, what’s George Clooney’s Q-score. Now everybody has an influence score, and brands are tapping in and finding these people. It’s a new marketing channel.

Using Klout Scores Internally

Jay: One of the things I think is really interesting, especially for the enterprise, is to measure internal influence, right? Who is influential within the company so that they can have teams coalesce around them, or communicate more effectively with coworkers, or answer more questions in terms of knowledge transfer. I really like that idea.

Mark: Thank you. That was one of my ideas.

Jay: Of course. Yes, I know. That’s why I brought it up. It was in the book.

Mark: Oh, thank you. Flattery will get you everywhere, Jay. It’s a little scary, too, because now you just can’t tell somebody that you’re being successful at an account or that you’re influential at an account. Why couldn’t you apply these same measures in an internal environment? Here’s the thing. Very rapidly, these online conversations are being connected to offline behaviors.

Look at the Facebook timeline and what Facebook is trying to do there; document every step of your life. Many people are willing to do that, so increasingly you’re going to be able to say, Jay Baer writes about a new restaurant or a new record album, and people are going to be putting on their timeline, well this person is connected to Jay. He’s influenced by Jay, and every time Jay writes about Radiohead, Mark Schaefer goes out and buys this album. Those dots are being connected. In short order, you’ll be able to do that in many aspects of our life and use it as an internal gauge. There’s no reason that that couldn’t happen and I think it will.

Jay: We’ve talked about this in the past and we’ve each written about it. Klout, itself, has some weaknesses. They’re trying to quantify something that’s very difficult to quantify. There are other companies in this space, PeerIndex, Peek Analytics, that are all trying to do opinions, people are trying to do virtually the same thing.

It’s a tough nut to crack, but I think we both agree that this concept of influence measuring is here to stay because it’s so valuable to businesses in this sea of information where every customer is a reporter, to be able to say, okay, well if every customer is a reporter and all these people are communicating about and to us, within that field, which of these people have a larger audience? I think that clearly is something that companies are going to gravitate toward and build into their day- to-day operations.

Mark: I think that wisdom is being cloaked by emotion. It’s a difficult situation because they’re innovating and iterating in public. You’ve built companies, I’ve built products and I’ve built companies and worked for big companies, and sometimes it’s like making sausage. It is ugly. You make mistakes, but hopefully at the end of the day you’re going to have a beautiful, tasty product. Klout has made some missteps. If it was a typical company, a normal company, we wouldn’t even know about it.

But they’re iterating in public and they’ve created a lot of controversy for themselves. Some of their mistakes were based on some of the judgments they made. Some of them it was the situation. Nevertheless, it’s created a lot of emotion that I think has cloaked this fact that they are onto something.

Let’s get through the emotion. Yes, there are problems, and yes, there are things that are wrong, but we’ve got to look at the facts. We’ve got to look at the very real business opportunities and look at how businesses are using this and driving action to their bottom line.

Jay: Certainly, and something that will help people cut through the emotion and understand the facts is the new book, Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing.

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Klout, the Super Bowl, and Our Addiction to Shooting the Messenger

Posted on 26. Jan, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, influencer outreach, Klout, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media case studies, super-bowl

Two weeks ago, I received a Klout Perk to be part of the Social 46, a gathering of Indiana’s top social media influencers. According to the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee, Klout was used to help identify the participants, and the list was augmented manually with known local bloggers, gadflies, and connectors. I do not know how many of the 46 were “found” by Klout versus already known by the committee, and it’s not particularly relevant.

Last week, the group convened to learn more about the Super Bowl festivities – which have a breadth almost unfathomably far beyond the football game. (see the killer mobile app) In addition to a briefing by the host committee, we were exhorted to help make Super Bowl 46 in Indianapolis the “most connected” Super Bowl ever. What that means in practice was (and remains) a bit murky.

The original plan was for the participants in the Social 46 who created the most chatter to receive special prize packs for their social diligence. This idea was scrapped by attendees who almost universally expressed a desire to help shine the light on Indianapolis as proud residents, eschewing game mechanics.

Generally, the group has taken to the cause like a crafter to Pinterest, with dozens of tweets, photos, blog posts, and more popping up daily – and the game isn’t for another 10 days. Former reporter, now PR guy Tom Spalding is chronicling the blow-by-blow with regular Storify collections from the Social 46 trenches.

Personally, I’ve done very little on the Social 46 front other than live tweet the initial confab. There are three reasons that I’ve been on the sidelines:

I’m a new Hoosier, having moved to the state in August 2010. I don’t have as much of a connection to it as others in the Social 46.
I live in Bloomington, not Indianapolis. I’m about 75 minutes south, and still get lost in downtown Indy where the festivities are taking place. I don’t have a lot to offer in the way of insider tips.
My “influence” is not Indiana-based. 4% of my Twitter follower are Hoosiers, according to Peek Analytics (which I love for in-depth examination of persons in social media). This compares to 84% for Tom Spalding, for example.

I’ll do more next week, when I’m visiting the official Super Bowl Social Media Command Center (run by Indy social/content agency Raidious), and checking out Super Bowl Media Day, the Super Bowl Village, and NFL Experience with my family.

Shooting the Super Messenger

For now, however, I’m more interested in the burgeoning kerfuffle (a great band name, feel free to steal it) around the Social 46 itself.

isfJm 300x300 Klout, the Super Bowl, and Our Addiction to Shooting the Messenger

Social 46. Instagram shot from @meggiehd

In exchange for lending our time and personal networks to the Super Bowl cause, the host committee plied us with a laptop bag, a Super Scarf, a beanie hat, a time-specific ticket to the NFL experience, a ticket to NFL media day and the “right” to use the #social46 hashtag (which of course anyone could use if they want to do so). By my estimation, total value of $150, max.

Am I grateful to receive these gifts? Sure. The scarf is toasty. The media day ticket saved me $25 out of pocket, and who can turn down the joys of a special hashtag? But do these items influence how, why, or whether I participate in this program? Not really.

However, it concerns me that the host committee did not instruct any of the Social 46 on how to disclose that these items were provided for free, potentially putting the host committee and all participants in violation of FTC disclosure guidelines. A quick (albeit cursory) check of content created by the Social 46 shows that disclosure is wholly absent. I have addressed it below through cmp.ly (which I love, am an investor in, and very much wish the host committee would have adopted).

Beyond the fact that the host committee dropped the ball on disclosure, there is a truly extraordinary amount of vitriol within the Indianapolis social media “community” about who was (and who was not) asked to participate in this Social 46 program.

Some of the complaints are simply misguided – like this post from local communications consultant Allison Carter – who seems to believe that companies and organizations should be required to publicly state how they determine who to include in outreach programs. I’m sure Wal-Mart will gladly publish their blogger outreach criteria. Ford too. And Dell. Just ask. Maybe a Wiki? Should companies also publish the rationale every time they send a targeted coupon in the mail to high efficacy consumers based on past purchase history? Ridiculous.

In other cases, the ire is downright nasty, with all manner of name calling and reputation questioning occurring on Twitter and elsewhere. I guess I’m fortunate that none of it has involved me personally, but I’ve never been happier to NOT be part of the Indianapolis social media “community” which is making that label look more and more like a misnomer.

As Ms. Carter states in her post:

And I’ll be honest: I would have loved to have been chosen. But this isn’t about me. This is about helping our city come together to show the world what we have. However, this program is causing divisions, cliques and confusion. I hope this program is a smashing success and Indy becomes a social media darling. Social 46? Prove me wrong.

If your objective is to “show the world what we have” then why do you give a hoot about a free ticket, a silly hashtag, and a goddamn scarf? Is the subtext that unless you’ve been selected and anointed as part of the Social 46, that you are not eligible to help visitors enjoy the game? Where’s the community spirit in that? If you want to help, help. By tying reward to the behavior so intrinsically, you are supporting the very construct you rail against.

As Ricky Gervais says, offense is taken, not given. And the participants in the Social 46 didn’t request to be included. They were identified by a computer and/or by members of the host committee. To tear them down because someone – for reasons algorithmic, altruistic, or otherwise – selected them versus you or anyone else is the ultimate shoot the messenger scenario. If you’re not happy about being “left out” of the uber-prestigious scarf giveaway, take it up with Klout or the host committee.

Klout Kan’t Win

I’m on record as liking Klout, and not just because it keeps me ensconced in beanie hats. (see my post: 3 Reasons critics of Klout are missing the big picture) Does its methodology have flaws? Of course it does. But you know what else has flaws? Having PR interns surf the Web to semi-randomly click on blogs and Twitter accounts to put together murky Excel spreadsheets of “influencers” that are then sold to clients as “research.” At least Klout provides half-truths with a side of mathematics.

And the reality is that whether it’s Klout or something else, companies and organizations WILL continue to make liberal use of social scoring data. It’s a shortcut, a way to find the trees in the forest. We are entering an era of bespoke relationships, whereby your real-time interactions with companies will be dictated (at least to some degree) by your purchase history, “influence”, location, and other factors. It’s the Delta SkyMiles program on steroids, and unfolding second-by-second. If you don’t think companies are going to start routing social customer service inquiries to different teams based on Klout score (or similar), you need to wake up.

Do I wish we were all treated equally? As a human being, yes. But that’s not the way the real world works, and it’s certainly not the way we’re headed in an era where every behavior is tracked, and Big Data can be used to filter and segment and optimize.

The Lesson of the Sneeches

Most Klout perks are of the product variety, or are national in scope so that the recipients and non-recipients aren’t personally acquainted. Do I bemoan the fact that I’m not eligible for free RoC Deep Wrinkle Night Cream? I guess, as I’m not getting any younger. But I don’t begrudge those who can use their Twitter habit to smooth their crow’s feet.

In the case of the Social 46, the psychology is altogether different. Because the participants were selected to be signal amplifiers and adjuncts of the host committee, there is a perception that we are “representatives” (albeit reps that are unofficial and untrained – as Ms. Carter wisely pointed out in her post, which was not wholly without merit). And conversely, that those not selected are not “worthy” of being representatives.

The reason people are bent out of shape (far disproportionate to the reward, I’d say) is that the “haves” and “have nots” are public. This is the lesson of the Sneetches, as delivered by the sneakily wise Dr. Seuss:

If the star belly Sneetches got their stars via email; or were notified 1:1 by Sylvester Monkey McBean when they logged on to his website; or just got a star shipped to them via FedEx, the Sneetches without stars would never have known about it, and wouldn’t have put up a fuss.

If you’re going to use Klout as a sorting and identification mechanism, think twice about doing so in a local or regional market (or any other closely knit community online or otherwise). And if what you want your group to do is shout about their participation publicly over a short time frame, be prepared for blowback.

That’s my view from ringside. What’s your takeaway from the Social 46?

Klout, the Super Bowl, and Our Addiction to Shooting the Messenger

Posted on 26. Jan, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, influencer outreach, Klout, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media case studies, super-bowl

Two weeks ago, I received a Klout Perk to be part of the Social 46, a gathering of Indiana’s top social media influencers. According to the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee, Klout was used to help identify the participants, and the list was augmented manually with known local bloggers, gadflies, and connectors. I do not know how many of the 46 were “found” by Klout versus already known by the committee, and it’s not particularly relevant.

Last week, the group convened to learn more about the Super Bowl festivities – which have a breadth almost unfathomably far beyond the football game. (see the killer mobile app) In addition to a briefing by the host committee, we were exhorted to help make Super Bowl 46 in Indianapolis the “most connected” Super Bowl ever. What that means in practice was (and remains) a bit murky.

The original plan was for the participants in the Social 46 who created the most chatter to receive special prize packs for their social diligence. This idea was scrapped by attendees who almost universally expressed a desire to help shine the light on Indianapolis as proud residents, eschewing game mechanics.

Generally, the group has taken to the cause like a crafter to Pinterest, with dozens of tweets, photos, blog posts, and more popping up daily – and the game isn’t for another 10 days. Former reporter, now PR guy Tom Spalding is chronicling the blow-by-blow with regular Storify collections from the Social 46 trenches.

Personally, I’ve done very little on the Social 46 front other than live tweet the initial confab. There are three reasons that I’ve been on the sidelines:

I’m a new Hoosier, having moved to the state in August 2010. I don’t have as much of a connection to it as others in the Social 46.
I live in Bloomington, not Indianapolis. I’m about 75 minutes south, and still get lost in downtown Indy where the festivities are taking place. I don’t have a lot to offer in the way of insider tips.
My “influence” is not Indiana-based. 4% of my Twitter follower are Hoosiers, according to Peek Analytics (which I love for in-depth examination of persons in social media). This compares to 84% for Tom Spalding, for example.

I’ll do more next week, when I’m visiting the official Super Bowl Social Media Command Center (run by Indy social/content agency Raidious), and checking out Super Bowl Media Day, the Super Bowl Village, and NFL Experience with my family.