Social Media Books | Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration

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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Activation, Comfort, and Other Secrets of Online Community Management

Posted on 08. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, BlogWorld, community management, interviews, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media books

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

(Abbreviated transcript below. Please watch video for entire interview. Somehow, my side of the video got cut out, so it’s only audio for me!)

Jay: Welcome everybody to Convince & Convert. It is Jay Baer joined today by a very special guest, my friend who is the Director of Community and all things fabulous at BlogWorld and also the author of Online Community Management For Dummies, Ms. Deb Ng. Deb, how are you?

Deb: I am terrific, Jay. How are you?

Jay: I am marvelous. I love your festive red background for videos.

Deb: Thank you. This is my dining room. We’re renovating. So everywhere I was sitting today, I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want people to see that. Oh, I don’t want people to see that.” So I came in my dining room where it was just a red backdrop.

Jay: It looks great. You should use it. I really like it. It pops as they say.

Deb: Well, my husband is Chinese, and red is a very lucky color.

Jay: Well, I loved the book. I thought it was really, really fantastic. I recommended it to several clients already. It really is a treasure trove of advice and best practices around community management. How was it writing it?

Deb: It was fun writing it. It’s the stuff I’ve always wanted to write, and it’s the stuff I talk about when I speak at conferences and I blog about. And it was actually a hard sell for Wiley. They weren’t sure people would want to buy a book about community management. But it sort of wrote itself. It was the easiest thing I ever wrote, I have to say. It was so simple to write.

Jay: Wow. That’s a ringing endorsement. Easiest thing you ever wrote. That’ll work.

Deb: Well, it’s second nature I think, to me. I don’t know if that sounds kind of silly, but it just all came so quickly.

Jay: You can tell when you read it that you actually have done this and that you’re speaking, in many cases, from a place where you have experienced these scenarios. That’s one of the things I really liked about it is that it walks you through a lot of “Hey, if this happens, do this thing, and if this other thing happens, do this thing.” It’s not just theory of community management. It’s very tactical, very practical and something that I think people will keep on the shelf and pull down and say, “Let me flip to that section. I remember Deb said something smart about that.”

Deb: I hope so.

Jay: One of the things that I see all the time, and you do as well I’m sure, now that many companies have come around to the belief that they should have a community, there isn’t a lot of community activation, or perhaps not as much as there should be. You talked about that a little bit in the book. How can we get people to do stuff as opposed to just click one button and join?

Deb: It’s hard, because we don’t want to spam people, and we don’t want to say, “Will you please comment on my blog, dammit?” I think we’ve all had those frustrating moments where nobody answers our calls to action. So I think we have to make it entertaining. We have to make it enjoyable. We can’t always be a commercial for our product. You have to make life a conversation and draw the community in. If they feel as if they have a say in the brands and that they’re a living, breathing part of the community, they’ll participate more, and they’ll advocate for you.

Jay: What we see now is, as companies get more serious about this kind of work, an increasing usage of content calendars and community calendars and things that have more of a plan around how to do this. Do you think that kind of work is the enemy of true community, or can they coexist?

Deb: Yes and no. I do have some things that I do on a regular basis. For example, the first Monday of every month is brag your blog day on the BlogWorld Facebook page, because I don’t want to forget. If I don’t schedule a certain day for things, I forget. I will say I’ve never scheduled a tweet in my life. I don’t believe they’re engaging. I have scheduled blog feeds on Twitter, but I don’t schedule tweets, because you can’t have a conversation. You can’t schedule community. So, I think there are times when you can create an editorial calendar and plan out a course of action. But as far as scheduling engagement, I just don’t see it happening.

Jay: I like that quote, “You can’t schedule community.” That’s good. Consider that stolen.

So many times now, it seems that Facebook in particular has become the de facto community platform. How do you feel about that?

Deb: I have mixed feelings. First of all, Facebook is where the people are. The majority of Americans or even globally, the people who we want to reach are on Facebook. So it makes sense that we put a lot of our effort into Facebook. Most of my friends and neighbors don’t want anything to do with Twitter or Google+ or Pinterest or any of the other social networks, so it makes sense that we’re on Facebook. But I really do wish that I had the same engagement levels on the other social networks. Twitter has turned into such a disappointment for me, because it used to be the best place to go for conversation. Now, it’s sporadic unless we have our weekly Twitter chats, and it’s sort of like a link farm. So, I will put half my efforts, I would say, for the day into Facebook to grow that community, because that’s where we have to be, and that’s where most of our community are, but I won’t give up on the others as well.

Jay: One of the things that you said in the book was trying to steer your community away from negativity, which I thought was a really commendable point to make, because we see, certainly in the social media space, there are blogs out there that seem to use negativity as their oxygen. I try not to fall into that trap myself, but they’re out there. What’s your take on it?

Deb: I think that negativity begets negativity. So, if you have a space that makes people feel uncomfortable, it’s going to be like the earth after the apocalypse. Only the cockroaches are going to be there. People who thrive on negativity are going to stick around, but the people who want an intelligent conversation where they’re not always being accused of something or being called a loser, they’re going to move on. So I have no problem with disagreement as long as it’s respectful disagreement. I know that I’m not right all the time, most of the time. But you can tell me why without telling me to go make a sandwich.

Jay: So, can we disagree without being disagreeable?

Deb: Exactly.

Jay: One of the things that I loved about the book was your section on the welcome plan, which I think gets overlooked so often in communities. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a blog or Facebook. That first time that person peeks their head out is when you really have to give them succor and comfort and make sure that they stick around. Can you talk a little a bit about that welcome plan and how you think it should be done?

Deb: Sure. I compare it on my community to the high school dance. So nobody ever wants to be the first one up to dance. So maybe the chaperone will sort of start encouraging people to get up and dance. They might introduce a couple or get up to dance herself, although we would laugh at any chaperone who did that.

Jay: I was just thinking about that. I’m like, yeah, that would really get the party started, when the chaperones are dancing.

Deb: But somebody has to get the party started, and that’s where the community manager or moderator comes in. This probably works mostly for forums or blogs, because they have an area for this, but a welcome folder with frequently asked questions, a place to introduce yourself, and just a place to ask questions make people feel at ease. Then maybe the community manager can help to get that person, make them feel comfortable around the community, introduce them to people, and just bring them into the conversation. I honestly believe that it’s in a community manager’s best interest to know as much about her members or his members as possible, because then they can draw them into the conversation and know their areas of interest.

Jay: One of the things that you’ve always done really well is the combination online/offline community. Your community doesn’t really exist unless it exists at some point in three dimensions. Can you elaborate on that a little bit and how you can make your community work in the real world?

Deb: I think that it’s fine and dandy for you and I to tweet a lot and talk on Facebook now and then. But what do we really know about each other besides what we share? You don’t really know a person, I think, until you meet them online. When you know people, you trust them.

Jay: And that’s one of the great things about BlogWorld. It allows those kinds of interactions and conversations to take place and why it’s an event that most of the people in the social media and blogging industry would never dream of missing.

Deb: It’s the first conference I ever attended actually.

Jay: Wow. I want to see if anybody else who is watching this video, the first time they ever went to a conference ended up being the community manager for that conference. That would be some sort of a crazy . . .

Deb: Years later, too. That was in 2007. I was hired in 2010.

Jay: Wow. I didn’t know. That is a crazy tale. How about that? Good for you.

I am a big fan of this book, Online Community Management For Dummies. Do not let the fact that it is a Dummies book scare you, or do not look down your nose at it, because I feel like I know a fair amount about this kind of stuff, and I learned a lot from this book. It’s like a fire extinguisher of knowledge, and I’m really, really glad that you wrote it.

Jay: Deb, thank you as always for all that you do and for writing the book and for spending a little time here at Convince & Convert.

Deb: Thank you so much for having me, Jay.

Will You Abandon Your Friends to Seek Real Relevance

Posted on 01. Nov, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, book review, brian solis, Connected Consumer, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Book, social media books, social media research

(video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive video editing and production. Check em out!)

Excerpted from the video:

I was happy to interview Brian Solis, a futurist, new media raconteur, and principal at Altimeter Group. Brian recently published his 5th book, The End of Business As Usual
which I believe to be his finest work to-date.

Jay: Hey everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Hope you are having a fantastic day. I’m joined this afternoon by a man who needs no introduction, but I’ll provide one anyway. Futurist, big thinker, gadabout, raconteur, and author of “The End of Business as Usual”, Mr. Brian Solis. Also a champagne lover, as I recall.

Brian: This is true.

Jay: So that is a lot of things. Congratulations on the new book. We just can’t stop you from writing books!

Brian: There’s just a lot to say right now.

Jay: You won’t be held back. I appreciate that. It’s great. I really actually read it, on a long plane flight out to the west coast. In fact, I was in your town for about five minutes earlier this week, but didn’t get a chance to say hi to you or the folks at Altimeter, but really, really enjoyed it. And what I like about this book in particular is that it’s got a lot of chapter breaks in it, it’s really the kind of book that you could read for half an hour and then set aside and then come back and not feel like you’re all confused. It’s really well packaged in that regard.

Brian: Thanks for noticing that, actually. And for everybody watching this, I did not seed that question. I appreciate that, because this time I wanted to write a book that could be, I don’t want to say easy to read, but could be thoughtful in how the reader would sit down, considering all of the things that they have to do, and still provide value knowing that they’re busy. I also wanted to write at the executive level, because one thing I heard about The End of Business As Usual
was that Engage was more of a reference guide than a book. People would read certain chunks as needed . . .

Jay: And refer back.

Brian: . . . and refer back. This one, even though I’d like to think it’s also a reference guide, it tells a story.

Jay: Yeah, but it’s a story that I find you don’t necessarily have to read in sequence, which I think is really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of UnMarketing
, although obviously at a much more executive level and detail than that. You probably could read it in somewhat random chapter order and still get a lot out of it. I think that’s really commendable.

Brian: Thank you.

Jay: One of the things I loved about the book is you talked about how we’re all wired for distraction now. We’re always like, “Squirrel! Tweet!” And it’s so true. It’s so true. I really notice it now, how hard it is to pay attention for any length of time. I don’t think it’s probably a net positive as a people or as a society, but I’ve thought a lot about, “gee, is a book too much sandwich to ask people to eat?” Should we be publishing sequential chapters in eBook format or things of that nature? Obviously the publishing business is disintermediated, and we understand that. But is long form publishing counter-cyclical?

Brian: Wow. So much to think about here. The answer is you can’t stop creating the content in the way that people you’re trying to reach consume it. That was the most challenging part of writing this book. You’re an author. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve got to write a book. You have to keep up your blog. You have to keep up your Twitter stream. You have to keep up your Facebook. Now your Google+, your Foursquare. You have these seminated audience or groups of people that are connecting with you because they find value in those channels. But yeah, there’s a fantastic audience for books and the need to have information at their fingertips. But I did design this book a little bit differently, considering that we are wired for distraction. Every chapter has almost tweetable summaries of what the insights were in each chapter. So if you have to go back and just kind of remember what the value was, or just read those, you could still walk away with the value your way.

Jay: Absolutely. Great summaries. It was a fantastic illustration that you have in the book that shows your own personal media usage habits and the channels across the social Web that you used a few years ago versus the ones that you use now. I counted them up, and it was something like 47 different outposts that you were present in. Flickr, going back to FriendFeed and Plurk and things that we don’t necessarily use now. Then I counted the ones that you use today, or at least refer to in the book, and I think out of that 47, there’s only 10 that you still use. So I think to some degree, the industry is wiring itself for distraction, because we keep creating new stuff and new stuff and new stuff. You and I have the rare luxury of doing this for a living, but take an average marketing director or average CEO. They’ve got to be like, “What the hell is going on?”

Brian: Right. I was talking to John Battelle on the video show that I run, and he’s got a book called “What Hath We Wrought?” that’s coming out in a year or so. It really looks at how it’s not the technology that wired us for distraction. We embraced this technology and wired ourselves for distraction. There’s sort of a subliminal message in the first half of my book where, even though it’s written for executives and professionals to help them understand how to embrace this type of consumer, there is this underlying theme there where I hope that people pick up on it, that if you are that “connected consumer”, that you’re understanding that, number one, you’re not alone. But number two, part of the onus of improving your own online experience, your own digital experience, is becoming a very critical curator of those experiences through relationships, through information that you share and consume.

So what you saw in those two graphs, my point was that I shrunk it and that I found the channels that had the greatest value to me. Not just for me to promote what it is I’m working on, for me to learn. Also what’s really important is that I change who I follow in each of those networks as it pertains to what I find fascinating or interesting or where I think I can add value. So I’m constantly expanding and contracting these networks so that there’s value on both sides. That’s part of the theme of that first half of the book. If you are the people that you’re trying to reach, you have a responsibility to improve your own online experiences, which I call the egosystem.

Jay: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned changing who you connect with in different outposts. As you know, there’s been somewhat of a micro trend recently of people just sort of saying, “You know what? I’m throwing up my hands. I’m going to, especially on Twitter, unfollow everybody and then start from ground zero.” I know Chris Brogan has done it and other people have done it. What do you make of that? Is that a sign of the times? Is that a sign that we did it wrong the first time? To me, that is a symptom of a bigger issue.

Brian: I’ve studied this actually, the idea of social network fatigue. And there’s parts of this in the book where we talk about the effects that this is having on society. I use examples of students who are feeling like, even though they’ve wired themselves for this, they can’t keep up with what it is that they’ve created. There’s this sense that not only are they always on, but there’s this psychological need to be always on. Otherwise they feel like they’re missing out, they’re disconnected, their relationships are going away from them. So part of this is self-created. But also, it’s perpetuated through the “social media experts”.

I can tell you that year after year, I would have to get in debates that would justify my friend to follow ratio on Twitter, for example. And that the idea of following somebody back is of reciprocal value to show as a thank you to someone who’s followed you.

Jay: An interesting stat that I saw in the book was that people on Facebook, I think it was, created 90 pieces of content a month. I think that was the stat that was in there, which is a lot, right? It’s three pieces of content a day. Do you think that can continue to grow? I think we take it as gospel that people’s usage of Facebook has no cap, but I can’t imagine that that’s true. Eventually, enough will be enough, but they seem to try and find other reasons for us to participate on that particular platform. Now with f-Commerce and other things that perhaps you used to have to leave Facebook to do, now they want you to do within their platform.

Brian: I really like that question. They call it Zuckerberg’s Law – that you will double the amount of content that you share every year. And to counter that law, this was a few years ago, I had come up with my own theory, and that theory was something that I called Social Graph Theory. That every year, you would double the size of your social graph, depending on what you were sharing.

Jay: Stands to reason.

Brian: In many ways, that’s proven true over the years. You probably read in the book that I switched. I didn’t want to perpetuate that theory anymore. I wanted to believe that we were going to follow what I call the Interest Graph Theory, and that was that we were going to shrink our networks and rebuild them based on value and interests. We see that with Chris Brogan, for example. We see that with other individuals really starting over again. But the content creation side continues to double, and that is because people find value. This is why I spend part of my time as an aspiring social scientist.

The need for people to share isn’t just because I want to push something out into my network. It’s because I enjoy the reactions that I get in sharing, and that fosters engagement. That fosters community. But I think what we have to be mindful of is we can’t just do it for the reaction. We actually have to do it for the value in that. I know that I’m saying the word value, but it’s true. I want to have more meaningful engagement with the people that I’m connected to, so I’m going to be more thoughtful about what it is that I curate and put into the stream.

Jay: Absolutely. There’s a lot of conversation these days about influence or outreach and Klout, with Klout’s new algorithm change recently. A lot of people wringing their hands and things like that. Whether you use Klout or any number of other software programs out there that can give you some sort of number, do you find that influence or outreach is scalable for brands, that it really has the ability to be a core part of your social program, your communication program?

Brian: This has been another area of study actually going back to the 90s before there were influence scores. I used to call it the IF, the influence factor, and its importance in business engagement. And I started a company in 1999 developed around simply influencer identification and engagement. By “influencer,” I meant people who had the capacity to cause effect, not a score. And by cause effect, that means that I recognize that you, Jay, are a master in the world of new business models and new engagement and media, and I have this particular solution or service or product. You’re going to be influential for me, but I can’t go to a service and find all of the people who have a score above 55 and expect them to take interest in what I do.

I have a report coming out on this very soon with Altimeter. That is the difference between social capital and influence, because they’re very different. To answer your question specifically, yes, an influencer engagement program will help businesses cut through the clutter instead of doing this en mass, one to many broadcast technique that they’re very used to doing. I’m focusing on the very select group of people who are incredibly connected within these sites – incredibly influential. I call it the one to one to many approach. Yes, there is value in that, whether it’s through an advocacy, through an influencer program or an engagement program, all of the above, an expert program, an advisory program. All of those things should run simultaneously.

But I do not know that I could find value in social capital relations, finding people who are influential. That said, we are seeing examples of sales, loyalty, and service aspects of the organization embracing all forms of people with social capital, because then they’re excited to share their experiences, and that’s a different value. I guess what I’m saying is it comes down to intent and the ability to know what it is that you want out of those relationships and then design the programs and find the right people that will help you execute, at least according to plan.

Jay: My favorite is the one to one campaign that is actually a broadcast campaign, where you send out 5,000 press releases to theoretical influencers at the click of a button. I’m like, ”
Wow, the irony of this is unbelievable.”

Brian: I have an inbox full of them.

Brian: Yeah. This is an important part of the book. It’s probably also, I wouldn’t say the easiest, but it’s the one where you can have the most impact. Really what the book is talking about in that section is change management, and this is the quickest part to getting on a new road to change. I talk about earlier in the book the idea that your brand is sort of this collection of shared experiences, and I show examples. If you search a particular brand on Twitter or Facebook and you feed that into a word cloud, all of these words are the words that people feel about your brand. There’s nothing you can do or say about that. You just recognize it. This is where a lot of business say, “This is exactly why we don’t want to be in new media, because we lose control.”

Jay: But you actually never had control, but that’s another point.

Brian: That’s right. You never had control, because those are the experiences, real experiences of people right now. You actually now have an opportunity to take control, because you can steer those experiences. There’s a lot of stories and formulas and frameworks that I’ve shared on how you can steer experiences. What’s your vision? What’s your mission? You’re talking about aligning with people, and what people are saying, especially in social media, is they want to be able to align with your values.

Jay: You have to know what those values are.

Brian: Yeah. What are those values? What is our vision? So a lot of companies that I work with today, we reexamine those. It’s quite a political conversation, as you can imagine, but when they see what the output can do, where people can align with it. And then more importantly, that it drives your online and your digital strategy and management programs, because you’re operating around a new vision that people can stand behind. Actually, it takes on meaning, and it’s not just a temporary thing, it’s actually a mantra.

Jay: Absolutely. I’m glad you documented the pieces of change management and the processes you go through, and you actually talk about identifying the “change team” within the organization – having people tasked with making this work. What sort of attributes do you look for in somebody who would be a good member of a change team?

Brian: I’ve got to make the point here that in “Engage” I talk about building a new media task force, where you bring cross-functional representatives together around the table so that each one of those stakeholders, quite honestly, getting their hands dirty and have stake in how social media is going to transform their particular function in the organization overall. But with a change management team, what we’re looking at is sort of taking that idea of a task force, decision makers across the organization who recognize that it’s much bigger than social media, that the business has to mean something to a different customer.

And quite honestly, it’s a healthy exercise to go through, but what we’re looking at is people who can speak on behalf of the employees. For example, HR becomes a big role in this. Legal becomes a big role in this. Leaders of lines of business, leaders of the executive team. In fact, it does talk about having an executive sponsor who can oversee this and has reports that bring it back to the top level. It also shows that the size and shape of that change management team is going to depend on sort of this internal audit that you do that talks to leaders and change agents within the organization to recognize the gaps, so that becomes your mission on how to bridge those. But it really is a powerful team to bring together, because really at the heart of what it is that their tasked to do is change the organization to matter for a new era of business.

Jay: I always find it to be the great paradox of modern business that everything in communications happens so much faster now. It’s Twitter in real-time and all these things. But yet, the type of change that you are recommending in “The End of Business as Usual” is absolutely slow. This is not “we’re going to make this happen in two weeks.” So here we are in this real-time world, but we are predicting change that happens over a period of years?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Many companies that I’ve worked with on these particular tasks, the stories I tell have been underway for two, three, four years already, and we’re still a long way to go. But understanding that it’s slow is why you have to begin sooner than later.

Jay: It’s a great book. I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for being here, Brian. It’s The End of Business As Usual (affiliate)

Brian: Thank you, Jay.