TRAACKR

Online influence is a hot topic these days. Take, for instance,  Fast Company’s Influencer Project or Brian Solis’s recent blog post, “What Makes an Influencer?” Not only has there been a lot more talk about influence, but there is visible exploration of figuring out what it really means to be an influencer.

Anyone in the social media space is well aware of the backlash that came after only a few hours of the Influencer Project going live. Most of the arguments surrounded the idea that influence, as far as this campaign was concerned, was really a vote of popularity. While I do have to give props to Fast Company for implementing such a brilliant marketing campaign (if you didn’t know who they were, you probably do now), it is nice to know that the general public does recognize a popularity contest over the definition of true influence.

So, back to the question, “WHAT is influence and WHO defines that role?” Well, there is probably not one decisive answer – afterall, influence is very dynamic – but our constant work with influencers from the web has provided us with some insight.

Jason Falls pretty much hits it dead on in his blog post, “Look for Trust, It’s About Trust.” Influence is mainly about two things – context and trust. An influencer is a person (not a corporate blog or publication ) who interacts with and maintains trust among his community and, eventually, gains the ability to influence change within their community. These things happen by becoming a sort of expert in the context they write or talk about. In a certain context, Pete Cashmore or Ashton Kutcher could be considered influential, but in another context, Brett McKay or John Sumser may be more influential. It is all based on what type of person you are looking for and the type of people you are trying to reach. Within their communities, any one of these people are extremely influential whether they have millions of Twitter followers or thousands.

So what do you think? What makes someone a true influencer?

After reading Seth Godin’s latest post, Quid pro quo (santa math), I feel compelled to react.

In his blog post Seth Godin advocates that blogging makes no sense economically because it defies the basic logic of trade: this for that. There is no such exchange in blogging. In his words:

I think it’s more like Santa math. Santa flies around the world, giving stuff away, and for what? He earns gratitude, trust and friendship, that’s what. Sure, one day he might decide to license his image or try to sell you something. But right here, right now, gratitude, trust and friendship are plenty. Especially if you enjoy doing what you’re doing. Quid, no quo.

So, Seth’s advice is: go ahead and blog but don’t expect to get anything back.

In my humble opinion, Mr. Godin is dead wrong on this. This is a gross generalization of a very rich media that can be used for so many different purposes that inferring where bloggers see value in their activity (i.e. selling their products or services) is very limiting. Many people blog, participate in forums, tweet to build communities, share knowledge, assert an expertise, or many other value-creating reasons.

Now, if we limit the activity of blogging to those indeed interested in boosting their sales, Seth Godin is right that drawing a correlation between a blog post and sales leads is not an easy thing to do, though I’d argue not impossible at all, as Hubspot’s success has proven. They even coined the term inbound marketing to describe this activity. And here is the real quid pro quo (read misunderstanding): in this respect, blogs are marketing tools, not sales tools, and the ROI of blogging in such case has to use marketing metrics to assess success.

Not to point out the obvious, but this is exactly how Seth Godin himself very skillfully uses his blog…Go figure…

The hype around Social Media ROI measurement has finally gotten to me: I’m growing tired of 140 characters promises, conference invitations, or free trials to the latest tool solving social media ROI measurement and help brands get on the social media bandwagon.

The promise of a silver bullet to approach this really complex issue is slowing down the development and adoption of social media by businesses, not accelerating it.

So let me call it as it is: measuring the ROI of social media can’t be done. I’m actually quoting here the father of ROI measurement, Bob Kaplan (ref. #SMB10), inventor of the balanced scorecard.

Trying to calculate the ROI of social media is the same as trying to calculate the ROI of email or the road you drive to work on. The costs can be approximated but the benefits can’t. Their reach is too broad and too many other factors are at play to even to list them all, let alone attempt to measure profits.

Maybe even more importantly than one’s inability to measure ROI for social media, the main problem of this ROI hype is that it fuels the idea that social media for businesses is an end in itself and can have its own P&L. It’s not, it’s a capability (or rather a very broad set of capabilities) that serves other business objectives and of course one should measure success associated to these business objectives.

I can’t tell you the number of clients of Traackr who asked me whether they should be on Facebook or Twitter. My answer is invariably the same: what are you trying to achieve?

There is no ROI associated to social media. There is an ROI associated to business objectives and social media can help achieve some (many?) of them.

The decision whether to invest in social media doesn’t lie in an excel spreadsheet, rather it’s a leap of faith and a belief by some business leaders that they are better off with it than without it. The tipping point for companies is based on risk tolerance, peer pressure and critical mass, not on a dubious ROI calculation.

Brillant idea by John Fluevog to create an open source footwear project where people can contribute shoe designs. The community votes on the best designs that are then produced and sold by Fluevog (much like Threadless).

When TRAACKR talks about how online influencers are a game-changing phenomenon, this is very much what we have in mind: a new way for companies and their customers to collaborate, in which everyone wins. Corporations lower the risk associated to launching new products and services (as they have already been vetted and will be supported by their customers), reduces drastically costs of development, while their customers enjoy recognition (VIP status) but more importantly a positive experience with products and services they care about.

I won’t ramble too much on this as Bill Taylor, writer for Harvard Business, already says it all in this video.

Kudos to John Fluevog taking the leap in this new world.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out the new site for Skittles (yes the candy…www.skittles.com).  It has generated an enormous amount of chatter and buzz online this week because they are doing some very interesting experimentation.  At the beginning of the week, the home page was, essentially, one big Twitter search for the term “Skittles.”  The entire page was really a  Twitter search page.  They had a small Skittles box with a nav bar on the top right corner of the page where you could link to other Skittles pages.  I just noticed that they just switched the page to their Facebook profile page.  I am sure this switch will generate another wave of online chatter.  It’s really fun stuff!

We have to commend Skittles for having the chutzpah to play with their main site like this.  It’s a fun experiment and something very interesting for those following the social media world.  But, is it working?  We’re very interesting in hearing what everyone thinks about it so far.

Certainly, it is generating an enormous amount of chatter and buzz.  I’ve received 5+ tweets about it in the past 2 days (and I’m not following that many people).  I’ve seen another 5 blog posts about it (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m sure).  And here I am writing a post about it myself.  While I don’t know how much traffic it has generated to the site, I would have to say that based on “buzz” as a metric, it seems to be working very well.  It’s an interesting phenomenon – they are using social media tools to generate buzz through social media networks.  Fun.

With that said, is this strategy working for the Skittles brand?  What image is it creating for Skittles?  Is it appealing to the right customers or is this just a “social media publicity stunt” that won’t drive sales or additional brand affinity?  No real way to tell at this point, but my gut says that this experimentation has helped secure a fun, free and wild image for the Skittles brand and that it will ultimately lead to sales.

Love to hear more thoughts, though.

DS

Since yesterday’s announcements from Google and Facebook (a couple of hours apart) that they would both make their social ID standard available to all sites, the (micro)blogosphere has been quite active to look at the merits of each solution and try to predict who will emerge victorious.

Social data standards are paramount to TRAACKR and we’d like to chim in with our own point of view on the suject. So, Facebook or Google? WHO CARES??!?

No, seriously, who, outside of Facebook and Google, cares? We should just all be happy that this arm wrestling between the 2 giants is taking place because it means that standards are indeed converging, which is really all that matters.

Why should there even be 1 single standard? We tend to forget that the “winner takes all” approach to Web businesses doesn’t always hold true, far from it.

If OpenID and Facebook Connect are both adopted widely, it won’t be long before some small genius businesses (like yours truly) start building bridges between the major standards to unify them. I’d just be content  if we’re left dealing with only 2!

We only wish for this battle for standards to expand in scope and start including more social data types than basic social network info. It’s undoubtely the way it is going and the fact that both Google and Facebook are leading the charge will only accelerate this trend.

So our opinion on this? Keep on the good fight!

Dentyne launched a new ad campaign I saw this morning in the subway for the first time around the idea of spending quality time with real people rather than on chat rooms and in front of your PC: make face time.

I really like the creative work and concept of the campaign. You should check it out.

Now, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it says about the brand… People don’t chew gum in front of their computer so they should go out? Chewing is a social activity to be shared among friends? I don’t get it.

My guess is that someone at the ad agency came up with this cool concept for a brand like Quiksilver or REI and the brand passed on it, so they repurposed and repackaged it.

So as much as I like the execution, it’s really missing the point that whether with old or new media, advertising is supposed to communicate something meaningful about the brand. From that very basic measure of success, it fails. Too bad.

Technocrati is releasing its 2008 State of the Blogosphere. Some interesting tidbits of information are worth calling out.

Yesterday’s piece on the How of Blogging gives some interesting insights on what the top bloggers (as defined by Technocrati) do different from others.

In a nutshell, and it should come as no surprise, top bloggers: 1-Publish more often, 2-Use tagging of their posts more intensively, and 3-Leverage any and all tools and tricks to promote their blog.

As a side note, we found entertaining the fact that Technocrati highlights the most widely used promotional tool for bloggers to be “List your blog on Technocrati”. Hum… wasn’t the sample they interviewed all bloggers listed on Technocrati? Isn’t that called a self-fulfilling prophecy? Anyways, the article still remains interesting and abstractly valid when it comes to studying and emulating the top 500 blogs on Technocrati.

We take issue though with the fact that except for a handful of bloggers who can realistically aspire to make it to this very select list of most referenced blogs, the methodology applied by Technocrati, thus any advice stemming from it, is utterly useless. What matters for most of us is not what we need to do to become a Techcrunch or RWW but rather how to stand out in our own community.

For exemple, “Tag your posts” is a good piece of advice but it’s not nearly sufficient for me to do anything with it… What I really want to know is what tags have the highest success rate for the topics I blog about.

Contrary to Technocrati’s top-down approach to measuring performance, Traackr has taken a bottom-up one and providing Traackr users with first and foremost a sense of self (what am I doing right, what can I improve) and then a sense of the community around them (who else is in my community and what do they do different).

Hopefully, these 2 opposite approaches to measuring success will meet somewhere. Stay tuned!

Last night, I had the chance to briefly meet Tim O’Reilly at Ignite 4 Boston (thanks Sara!). Better yet: I had the opportunity to talk to him about Traackr!

So I went on to explain that Traackr is about finding and qualifying social influencers in online communities, helping them become aware of their role and influence, and, when relevant, connecting them with marketers (I guess it you’re reading this post I probably didn’t need to tell you all this, right?). Tim’s reaction was to say “you had me until you mentioned marketers”. I tried to qualify what I meant but my window of attention was closing, darn!

I have grown increasingly frustrated since last night about this interaction. Not at all at Tim O’Reilly but at the fact that “marketing” or “marketer” has become a quasi curse word in social media lingo, and in many ways, rightly so due to decades of mass media.

So now is the time to reclaim the term ‘marketing’ for what it is intended to be (and in some ways is): an open channel between a brand and its customers.

For too long brands have had the “luxury” of mass communication, primarily consisting in pouring TV dollars in marketing campaigns. Exxon Mobile has an image issue? Let’s do a large TV campaign on how they works hard at solving all the world’s greatest problems.

The theory behind this approach is that perception trumps reality and you can muscle your way to controlling perception (much cheaper than actually changing reality). There is nothing new here and Exxon has perfected this craft over and over again.

So if *this* is marketing, no wonder that the perception by most is that marketers are there to get you, crafting messages to shape perceptions, deliberately manipulate cognitions and direct behaviors.

Here is the glitch: the definition I just gave is the one for propaganda, not marketing; propaganda never made the list of the famous 4 Ps defining marketing.

No question that some (many) marketers still behave like propagandists. So let’s just call them for what they are instead of polluting marketing.

The good news is that they are an endangered species as the propaganda machine only functions when the leaks are limited, meaning when the audience targeted has limited access to other sources of information and opinions. With mass media is taking a plunge, the one-sided perception of brands is weakening; meanwhile new social media are offering the general public amazing opportunities to voice their opinion, seek the one of peers, unmistakably leading to the end of the era of propaganda. I don’t mean that there won’t be (or isn’t for that matter) propaganda in new media but rather that the openness of the system makes it impossible to succeed.

I understand Tim’s concern when we talk at Traackr about connecting social influencers (i.e. the most influential voices in communities) to marketers, envisioning these community leaders becoming themselves propaganda agents. This is not this type of relationship we’re anticipating.

Traackr’s perspective is that there is a fundamental and symbiotic relationship between social influencers and marketers that is in the making and will accelerate the downfall of propagandists.

What form could this collaboration take? We don’t believe that it is or will be one-size-fits-all. Depending on the role played by a social influencer, their community, and the brand a marketer represents, the collaboration could take very different forms (from simple information sharing to product endorsement).

A good example of how this is already happening may be the way the Obama campaign collaborated with social media moguls to call out the misrepresentation of the facts by the McCain campaign of Obama’s comment on “putting lipstick on a pig”, falsly presented as describing Sarah Palin. All the Obama team had to do to stop the propaganda machine was to make available the full clip of his speech and let social influencers communicate on their own terms.

A more symbiotic collaboration as described above between influencers and marketers has the potential to lead brands into the social media revolution by forcing them to pay more attention to their audiences and not only on how to sell to them but more importantly how to be relevant. Social influencers in turn can provide better insights for the community they represent and further their role by impacting decisions on products and services by brands.

Now I need to find a way to summarize all this in a couple of sentences for the next time I meet Tim