Oscar is talking about the emerging standard of influence and that though there’s still much debate on what the standard is, how to measure influence, and on undeniable black spots in current solutions, there’s no debate that influence has imposed itself as the new online currency.

As one of the early players in the space (want to hear us speak about clout before Klout came out?), we have seen this industry go a very very long way already experimenting, figuring out repeatable patterns of success and investing more and more money into influence communication. That said, even though the field of influence is still in its infancy, budgets for it and ‘earned media’ in general are still only a fraction of the money invested in more traditional media.

This may all be about to change… a few months ago, I attended a P&G Alum talk in New York with Bob McDonald, CEO of Procter & Gamble. Bob is a very traditional P&G Sr Exec, who grew through the ranks of the company from assistant brand manager to CEO. I was stunned at the time to see that Bob decided to spend most of his time with us talking about the online social phenomenon created by the Old Spice ad campaign and that more awareness was generated for the brand from online spoofs and repurposed content by users than the ad itself, and how this was changing the role of the brand manager at P&G.

Procter & Gamble is the mecca for marketing, advertisement and media buy: pouring the most money and spending a tremendous amount of energy tracking ROI. I thought at the time that P&G’s CEO saying  that brand managers should shift their focus to earned media could be an industry shaking piece of news.

Two month after I attended this event, the other shoe dropped: P&G announced that they will be cutting $1 billion from their marketing budget by 2016 and doing so with a renewed focus on digital media (earned and paid).

If we’re looking for signs of change in the industry, this news is as big as it gets. P&G’s direct impact on the ad industry (being the largest spender) and their tremendous influence on brands and agencies ought to be a waking sign to all communication professionals that the marketing industry is about to undergo a major shakedown. Those already involved in influence communication are on the frontline of this revolution. My advice? If you were walking, run, and don’t look back. The further along you are in this new promising space, the more likely you are to grow with the market.

We have always said that finding, analyzing, monitoring and engaging influencers is HARD WORK. It can yield amazing results as many of our clients have proven time and time again, but it takes effort, craft, and, yes, the right toolset. We have never sold Traackr as the Holy Grail to our clients; our promise has been to be the best platform on the market to accompany their efforts towards high-yield high-return communication programs with influencers.

Another critical element of our approach from very early on was that we never believed that there would ever be “one social media platform to rule them all.” Instead of trying to build a platform that did a little bit of everything from social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, influencer search, to social CRM, etc., we focused on our craft, influencer search, and made it easy for our partners and customers to integrate our influencer data with a solution that catered to their business.

This approach has paid off in more ways than we could have hoped. For one thing, it gave us a sense of focus that enabled us to leap ahead of anyone else on our core expertise of influencer discovery (to my knowledge, we have come ahead in every single due diligence exercise conducted by prospective customers). But maybe even more importantly, this approach has enabled our partners and customers to be creative in ways we never expected. They wanted to exploit the value of the data generated by Traackr and built synergetic ensembles of data, revealing new pockets of value that they identify and build on from.

In this context, last week Engage121, a leading social media platform with a focus on point-of-sale, has announced their integration with Traackr. We have never focused specifically on use cases for our search technology for retail but we now have a partner who is bringing all the pieces together for that market. In all likelihood, they will be able to unleash value from our data for this market in better ways than we could. I’m sure that the partnership and their input will in turn help us build smarter influencer searches.

In the months to come, don’t be surprised as you see more announcements like this one coming out of Traackr, as we’re expanding our reach and leveraging the expertise of business partners to make Traackr a part of many new uses cases on how to create value from influencer and expert search. So stay tuned…

I read this and wondered in what world do people still whine about an old battle, already decided a decade ago (advertisers won that one btw)? Besides, going after PR firms owned by WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, or IPG to defend your PR dollars is not just the wrong battle to fight but, whether owned by advertisers or not, all PR firms are on the same side of the media war.

Many of TRAACKR’s clients are PR and I can tell you that none of them complain about getting their lunch money stolen by advertising. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: instead of fighting off advertisers to keep their budgets, for the first time PR firms can now compete for advertising dollars!

SOCIAL IS WHERE THE BATTLE IS BEING FOUGHT

For generations, mass media has governed marketing. TV alone would represent over 80% of an average marketing budget. Ad agencies have made a living of charging brands obscene amounts of money for creative and media buy.  A senior exec at one of the top ad agencies told me just a few months ago, “when I meet with a CMO for an hour, do you think I sell them a $15M ad campaign or $200k in social media?” This is still today’s reality in an ad agency. The truth is that the economic model of an ad agency is based on big dollars and social media is small dollars – ad agencies haven’t figured out how to earn money on it, and this is their Achilles’ heel.

For better or for worse, PR firms have experience working with small budgets. They have also cultivated the art of the two-way communication with their target required to perform on social media. In many ways, social media is very much an extension of PR’s existing business model that only requires tweaks to succeed, not a business overhaul. This is the edge PR has over advertising in the land grab for social media ownership and budgets.

SOCIAL IS ELEVATING PR TO CMO-LEVEL

As much as advertising agencies have a basic economic problem dealing with social media (not enough money going around to make the effort worthwhile), brands don’t. Brands owe it to their shareholders to create the most value for each dollar invested. If Social yields better results than other media, it becomes a priority. The ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling you get for having a Facebook page with tens of thousands of ‘likes’ only gets you thus far in spending real dollars though… but social media is changing fast and as social media communication develops and more companies gather metrics, we are discovering some fascinating facts:

1. Well-targeted and executed social media campaigns can yield much higher results and ROI than ad buys. In influencer marketing (our field of work and study), we found that less than 3% of the participants in an online conversation yield over 90% of the results (depending on the campaign, measured as reach, sales leads, viral distribution of a message). Considering only their reach, these same 3% even beat TV programming.
2. The social media component of marketing campaigns is growing. According to Forrester Research, the US market for social media communication doubled last year to reach $1.5B and will keep expanding at the same pace. As the practice of social becomes less of an experiment and more of a component of success for marketing, brands can focus on result-oriented initiatives, measure performance and tune their practice of social media.
3. Brands look for expertise in social media as a key component of selecting a marketing partner. Though anecdotal, I can’t tell you the number of brands we met with who decided to take social media away from their main AOR and gave it to PR or a ‘next gen’ marketing firm and have started transferring budgets from advertising as they see results materialize.

CMOs are now starting to pay attention to social, and as a result to PR. The simple equation each CMO constantly runs in their head (sales per marketing $ invested), has gotten premiere brands like P&G or Pepsico to multiply their investment in social while shrinking their involvement with traditional advertising. External factors, like the economic crisis we’re going through have also contributed to accelerating this transition.

If budgets for social media communication are exploding,  success stories from social campaigns keep coming out and advertising agencies are still chasing their tail in social, why on earth doesn’t PR own social by now?

SOCIAL RELATIONS IS THE NEW FRONTIER

There are really two main reasons why Social is still up for grabs. One legitimate, one not.

Historically, PR firms haven’t been early technology adopters (I see some of our clients cringing here: of course there are exceptions!) and the move towards social media has required PR to embrace new technologies, use new tools in order to perform the work, and learn how to navigate an ocean of data. Mainstream PR is slowly  going over the technology hump, but it’s taken a while. Early technology adopters in PR have long passed that point and can maneuver technology and social media tools easier than I ride my bike.

The second reason why PR has yet to ‘kill it’ as an industry in Social very much relates to the content of the PRWeek article I was quoting at the beginning of this post. I’ll call it the ‘post-traumatic mass media era disorder’ or PTMMED Much of PR still feels like the step child of marketing and fears the mighty advertisers with their lavish lifestyle.

No more! Our PR clients, all early adopters of technology, paving the way to what the PR industry should become, are proving to their peers that through Social they get access, they get budgets, they get more work than they can handle, and they are not afraid to tell advertisers to bring it on!

Interestingly, the fact that mainstream PR has yet to fully embrace their social practice has created a void on the market and a new breed of agencies have emerged as a result to fill it with some success. What innovative PR firms and these ‘next gen’ marketing firms have in common is that they have both understood that the new frontier for communication is Social Relationships. Call it SR, call it PR 2.0, these firms are defining a new industry where much of the money spent on social media is pouring in. My advice: you want to be on that train before it leaves the station…

Ten years ago, I was working at a technology consulting firm in NYC, called Viant. Along with other Vianteers, I set-up an office at our client’s on the 38th floor of World Trade I. I was lucky enough that Tuesday morning to be late for work and only made it as far as a few blocks away from WTC to witness the catastrophic events of the day unfold.

In the days that followed September 11, 2001, our team and the New York office received so many notes of support. I especially recall one that came from Charlie Conn from our Boston office simply saying, “today, we are all Yankee fans.” For some reason, it has stuck with me all these years. I think I had been in crisis management mode immediately following the catastrophe, and only after reading Charlie’s note did things start sinking in and I got to appreciate what we had just been through (for a diehard Red Sox fan to rout for the NYY, clearly something of unparalleled gravity had just happened). 

Today, I remember our project team (Adam, Aiko, Annmari, Brandon, Calvin, Caterina, Chip, Chris, Dan, Dave, Henri, John, Leslie, Melody, Sunghee, Yvonne, and many others) and I’m so thankful we all made it alive; I remember those we passed every day in the elevators and corridors of the World Trade who were not as lucky as we were; I remember those who walked into the fire to save lives and gave theirs when the buildings crumbled; and I remember the months that followed 9/11/01 when New Yorkers showed their true colors and with resilience, courage and solidarity overcame the adversity that had just hit us.

Ten years later today, let’s once again all be Yankees fans.

1- SalesForce bought Radian6 for a mere $326M in March

2- Google acquired PostRank last month for an undisclosed amount

Up until now, acquisitions in this space had been small (20/30M) and focused on marketing/pr (like MarketWire buying Sysomos). What sets these 2 acquisitions apart is not just the size (at least for the Radian6 deal) but more importantly who the the buyers are: two of the biggest gorillas of the tech scene.

Google and SalesForce are sending a message loud and clear to the market: social data is not a hype and it’s not just a marketing play. Even if this is not new news to analysts and other people in the space who have been saying the same thing for some time now, the move remains significant as it’s backed up with serious investment and it is a sign of things to come. So what’s next?

First, social and enterprise data will become more integrated. Though the rational by Google and SalesForce behind each of their acquisitions is probably quite different, the 10,000 foot view is the same: integrate social data and intelligence with other data types already tracked by each company (CRM/sales data for SalesForce, web analytics for Google) in order to increase the value to users of the combined data set – for more on this, Brian Solis of Altimeter wrote an insightful blog post on this right after the Radian6 acquisition by SalesForce. Google and SalesForce have made a business of being early movers and you can bet that it won’t be long before others follow suit in increasing the breadth and depth of social data integration and exploring synergies.

Then, and more importantly, these new found synergies will fundamentally change the way we do business by surfacing opportunities and exposing flaws in the way businesses had been looking at intelligence they can use, act on, and expose to their customers and partners. For example, what would a company do the day they discover through SalesForce social data that their best sales person actually doesn’t work for them but is a customer making referrals? What if another firm finds out their top subject matter experts are buried deep in the company org chart and tend to leave their job as a result? Traackr’s customers and partners remind us constantly of the seemingly limitless (for sure vastly untapped) opportunities of exploring the potential of influencer data – and we’re only one part of the social puzzle.

The result? The dichotomy between social and enterprise data will become obsolete (very much in the same way it did last decade between online and offline) and we’ll start treating all data and intelligence built on top the way we’re looking at social data. Charlene Li had it right when she said 2 years ago that social data will be like air (she actually said social networks – I’m generalizing her point) and 10 years from now, people won’t even remember what social data is, it will just be data (how else but social??). The impact of this cultural and economic shift is still very much ahead of us. The reason why I want to emphasize what just happened at Google and SalesForce is because it’s the sign that we’ve passed the time for experimentation and are now entering the era for transition.

So congratulations to all involved at SalesForce, Google, Radian6 and PostRank on being a part of what is likely to be an inflection point in the market transformation. For Traackr, we couldn’t be more thrilled to be in the thick of it all and play our part in making change happen. A lot of work and fun ahead.

Influencer engagement is often seen as the cornerstone of this major transformation and we’re only at the very beginning of this shift and we have everything to invent about the way the $300B industry will restructure itself and fully integrate collaborative marketing.

We’ve observed very recently that we just passed an inflexion point in influencer outreach campaigns and moved from a place where most marketers had to be convinced of the value of influencer engagement to one where many see it as the silver bullet of “earned media” marketing. And though this is amazing news that could accelerate this major industry transition, we are now entering a danger zone in which peoples high hopes about influence engagement could easily be crushed by unrealistic expectations and poor execution.

So let me set the record straight: if you’re expecting magic from your influencer campaign, it won’t happen. Here is why:

Influencers can’t cure ‘suck’.

If your product sucks, if your marketing campaign sucks, even if your influencer targeting sucks, influencers won’t help save the day.  Good PR professionals understand this perfectly as this is not a new challenge to them. But this reality is completely foreign to many marketers who have been trained to control the brand message and throw media dollars at the campaign, the theory being that there is a dollar amount to spend past which perception trumps reality. Big Oil Inc. has an image problem? Let’s come up with a cool environmentally friendly looking logo, create TV ads about everything your company is doing for the environment, and run it enough times that people believe it. This is yesterday’s mass marketing reality. Try this in today’s new reality where  marketers don’t control the distribution of the message and you’re in for a treat – ask Toyota for example who tried to buy Mommy bloggers opinions $10 at a time.

Here are three simple rules that should help you leverage the power of influencers (and avoid getting burned).

1- Your product sucks? Fix it!

Here is the crazy part of this piece of advice, ready? More often than not, even when marketers are trying to convince the public that their product works just great (while it really doesn’t), the rest of the company is working very hard already on fixing and improving it. Why are we assuming that deception would yield better results rather than bring transparency on everything the company is doing right to fix issues?

In order for brands to gain trust and support among influential voices, they don’t even need to have taken care of their product issues, but simply to show good faith and effort in the process. Toyota, learn from Honda on this, who managed to get UK-based environmentalists on their side during the Insight launch by sharing their clean energy roadmap. Smart.

Something we’ve observed through our client work that I find fascinating is that when well-targeted influencers are prompted to review or discuss a product they don’t like, very very rarely do they publicly trash that product or brand. Instead they stay quiet and decide to not get involved. Not true if you offend them in the process or if your target is ill-defined. If you run your influencer campaign and don’t see much traction, make a point to still engaging individually some of the people in your target to get feedback. They may tell you something you don’t want to hear but guess what – you will have to face the music one way or another…

2- Don’t make influencer engagement an after thought in your campaign: the earlier you involve influencers, the better.

If you already have your concept and creative pieces for a communication campaign underway or done, and someone on your team says, “now that we have this great thing going, let’s get influencers to talk about it!” please just smack that person over the head because he or she is setting you up for trouble.

The beauty of influencer engagement is the idea that by bringing to your side a small group of people who have built authority in a specific community, they in turn will bring their following. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that the reason why these people have built a certain aura in that space you’re interested in is typically because they have expertise (or at least acute interest) and integrity. In order to sway them to your side as a communication professional, you will have to do better than, “hey here is 10 bucks, can you say something nice about my brand?” or “I built this really really cool widget, how about you stick it on your blog?” or “I’ll send you a free <insert your product name> if you write a nice review about it” (btw, all true stories). Real influencers care too much about their reputation and integrity within their community (that’s their social currency) to be lured like this.

If you want influencers to get involved, you need to speak inside their story, not yours, and build an engagement campaign that will resonate with them. Take for example NY-based marketing agency, Campfire, who sent survivalist influencers a personalized survival pack to introduce them to the new season of Discovery Channel’s show, The Colony. Some of our clients have even involved influencers in the conception stage of a new product to get their input and ideas early enough to influencer-source (a variation on crowdsource) the product design and features. What kind of coverage and endorsement do you think they will get when the product hits the market later this year?

3- Identify targeted influencers based on the desired outcome.

This may be THE most important thing of all and sadly the one that gets most overlooked… mommy bloggers, Klout, and (back in the day) Technorati have trained us poorly on the importance of context. There is no such thing as a list of influencers that will heal the world’s wounds. You will find influencers who can help raise money for cancer research, build awareness on the issue of occupied Palestinian territories, or even mobilize crowds in the streets of Cairo to topple the government, but you won’t find are influencers who can do all of these things…

The idea of finding the most influential voices on the web is as empty of meaning as finding Google’s top search results: they only exist in context of what you’re looking for…

A poorly defined influencer target will always result in wasted efforts and disappointing outcomes.  A great example is Tom Webster who wrote a piece recently on “the limits of online influence.” Tom wrote a blog post in support of the people of New Zealand in the aftermath of the earthquake they experienced in February. He managed to get social media’s ‘elite’ (people with lots of followers on Twitter and high Klout scores) to relay his message in the Ether, amounting to well over 500k impressions but a very disappointing 389 clicks, and, only 10 submissions (people acting on the post). Was Tom flirting with the limits of online influence as he suggests? Absolutely not. He actually discovered the hard way what online influence isn’t: ill-targeted popular social media users talking about a topic they have very little to do about to an audience that doesn’t necessarily care. Kudos to Tom Webster to even get these folks to relay his message as it was off topic and off brand for them.

If you want to get influencers to have an impact on your business, you need to pick people who have built trust and a following on the topic you’re involved with and have proven their ability to mobilize people in a way that makes sense to your campaign. Could Charlie Sheen’s over-night ‘success’ on Twitter (2.7M followers and counting) get people to chime in to support a cause (any cause)? Not in a million years, except maybe for endorsing recreational drugs… To be successful with influencer engagement, you need to find those people who care about your topic – people who are relevant to your business.

So, if your product sucks, if your engagement campaign is ill-conceived, or if your targeting amounts to finding the loudest voices on social media, don’t blame influencers. In fact thank them, because they are forcing you to take a hard look in the mirror. It’s up to you to act on what you see and fix it.

Mass media has dominated marketing for so long that many of us have forgotten that marketing is not about painting the pretty picture of an ugly dog, but rather to build a company’s products and values to respond to the aspirations of its customers. So let’s reclaim marketing for what it should be and have influencers help us do that!

PS: This blog post and its title have been inspired by Mark Schmulen from Constant Contact who said at #MSM10 about marketers’ expectations for social media: “there is no cure for suck.” Thanks Mark!

The quality of Google search has been taking a lot of heat lately. It all started with Vivek Wadhwa here, and was then picked up here, here, here, here, oh yeah and here, here, and here. The criticism has been centered on spam and how Google searches get more and more polluted by spam and content aggregating sites (Demand Media leading the pack).

A whole industry (SEO) has been built to game Google search results and Google’s engineers have been working since the early days to stay ahead of the search game and preserve the integrity of their search. So what’s happened? Have spammers and SEO gurus suddenly become smarter? Is this series of criticism a fluke as rebuked by Google? Or does Google’s own business model stand in the way of Google giving its best effort to sort the problem as suggested by Michael Arrington or KD Paine?

None of the above really…

In order to find the answer to this riddle, we have to reframe the problem: the issue Google is facing has nothing to do with spam or SEO; the fact that spam surfaces in Google searches more than it used to is symptomatic of a much more serious issue for Google.

First, let’s remember what parameters are driving a Google search (though the specifics of Google’s search algorithms are a secret as well kept as Coca Cola’s formula, there is a plethora of literature on the matter in the SEO community):

• The site’s PageRank (based on external links and how content-heavy a site is)
• External link quality (links from other sites with high PageRank)
• Presence and placement of the searched keywords in the page

Now two things have happened over the last decade with the emergence of Web 2.0:

1. The deconstruction of the web page: a web page is no longer a unit of content and there is no norm emerging yet on what the new unit is: an Amazon or Yelp review is a unit of content, so is a response in Quora, a Tweet, a comment in Disqus, a video response on YouTube, a Facebook status, a link with meta data posted in Delicious or Digg. Should I go on?
2. EVERYONE has become an author on the web and we have gone from millions of passive web users getting their information from a few thousand sources to billions of active web user-authors getting their information online from each other.

The impact of this shift on Google’s drivers for search is major:

• The PageRank of a site loses most of its meaning when the site represents a content distribution platform like Amazon, FourSquare, Twitter or Digg rather than the entity creating the content
• Stats associated (link backs, votes, etc.) to each content unit are so small that they make the system very easy to game. This issue is not just faced by Google but also Amazon, Yelp, eBay, Quora, Digg, etc. Small numbers are Heaven on Earth for spammers!

So if we can’t trust PageRank to determine the trustworthiness of a source and if link backs (or derived endorsement metrics) are available in such low numbers per content unit that not much can be done to prevent some from gaming results, what can we do?

TRAACKR is developing a new meta entity around the person authoring content rather than the web page where it gets displayed. By replacing the notion of PageRank with the one of PeopleRank* (assessing the legitimacy of the author rather than the site), the small units of content start making sense again.

Using people as a filter to high quality content is a much stronger and more sustainable paradigm than any other meta entity (whether a site, a Twitter feed, or else) and one that offers enough breadth and depth of data to make the system much harder to game.

TRAACKR’s A-List, our B2B search engine for influencer discovery, exposes our current work on this notion of PeopleRank and the tremendous value it can yield to find authoritative voices on any given topic. Finding these opinion leaders, trusted voices, and domain experts is a stepping stone towards this much bigger undertaking on which we’re working: make search cool (and useful) again.

Could Google do it? Sure. This challenge won’t be solved by tweaking Google’s algorithms though; it will require a paradigm shift away from PageRank, away from Google’s bread-and-butter business, towards this new meta entity and as we all know, ninety degree turns are not easy to maneuver when you carry with you the weight of 4 billion users in 160 countries and 40 languages…

(*) Brian Solis is among a select few visionaries who contributed to coin the term “People Rank” and the first reference I could find discussing it in the context of what we’re talking about here. Check out his post on the topic: January 2008, believe it!

Now it prompts the question:

WHAT THE F**K IS AN INFLUENCER?*

Well it ain’t so…

Here are five hard truths on what an ‘influencer’ is and isn’t:

1- An influencer is not a new paradigm – Social media has not created this new breed of people. The fact  that people influence each other’s decisions on anything and everything (from buying decisions to marital advice or health) is at the very core of our social fabric and so is the idea that influence is not distributed equally among us. So we now call those exerting the most influence on a group, the ‘influencers’, big deal. Back in the pre-mass media days, finding these influencers was pretty easy: the community was the size of a village and many of the influencers in the community were fairly clearly labeled: the mayor, the doctor, the teacher, etc. Here is what’s new: new media has made the village global and influential people around specific topics (we’ll get back to this point) or issues don’t wear a name tag anymore, so if you don’t know them, they’re much harder to find.

2- An influencer doesn’t have super powers - I know this will come as a disappointment to some but (most) influencers haven’t been bitten by a radioactive spider and weren’t born on Kal-El then sent to Earth on a spaceship (though some have probably been raised on a farm in Kansas). The idea that influential people can ‘fix’ any PR crisis, make any product succeed, redeem a brand, etc. is just absurd. I’ll release another blog post in the next week or so to expand on this notion that influencers are not a cure for ‘suck’. The ‘powers’ influencers have are shared by all of us; the extend of our influence, where and how it applies will vary greatly with each person but we’re all influencers in our own right. These powers consist of an ability to get passionate about something (could be a brand, product, location, hobby, etc.) and **efficiently** share your interest with people around you.

3- No influencer is ubiquitous – This is probably the biggest misconception among those starting to work on “influencer marketing”. The idea that there is a finite list of ‘top influencers’ that you can go back to over and over again is very appealing but is just not true… Our work on influencer discovery at Traackr has demonstrated that contextual relevance drives influence through higher rates of successful influencer engagement and much higher conversion rates among the community of influencers (leads generated from influencers converting to sales). Of course the size of one’s network matters and just like marketers have been trained to make decisions on where to invest their ad budgets, influence marketers need to determine where to spend their time/money, with one important caveat: influencer marketing is about earned media, not paid media, and marketers need to factor their ability to activate influencers (engage them successfully), and for that relevance is paramount.

4- An influencer can come in all shapes and colors - There is no such thing as a stereotypical influencer. Malcolm Gladwell started popularizing the notion in his best seller, The Tipping Point, that there are different types of influencers that need to work in concert for an initiative to take off (whether we’re talking about the Tea Party – and I’m talking about THIS Tea Party not that one – or Hush Puppies). The reality of the diversity among influencers is actually much greater and more complex than the archetypes of a salesman, connector and maven defined by Gladwell. Understanding the type of influencer you need or you’re dealing with is essential to successfully engaging them and reaching your business goals.

5- An influencer can’t be bought - Marketers have to start changing their mindset about the way media gets distributed: when placing an ad, the marketer had the certainty that paying the right price would get the message distributed but had to live with the uncertainty of the effectiveness of the message on their target. Now in influencer marketing, the uncertainty lies with their ability to get the message distributed by people (influencers) who are primarily committed to serving their community or audience and will only discuss a product, brand, issue if they deem it interesting enough. However, what marketers lose in control of the distribution of their message, they gain in effectiveness of the message once it gets distributed because influencers are trusted agents (Chris Brogan, you owe me for an unintended reference to your book) to their community. This is also the reason why influencers can’t be bought: their social currency is the trust they built with their audience and they can’t break that bound or they will very quickly lose their status. For you marketers out there, Jon Bond said it best recently to FastCompany: “Marketing in the future is like sex. Only losers will have to pay for it.”

I’m personally not a big fan at all of the term ‘influencer’ itself as I think it leads to misunderstandings and oversimplification of a really rich and powerful concept. For better or for worse, we’re stuck with it for now and I’m not about to coin yet another buzz word. So let’s make sure that at least, we’re all on the same page when we use the word.

(*) my thanks to Marta Kagan @ Espresso for inspiring the title of this post, inferred from her infamous presentation “What the F**K is Social Media?”.

By now, many (most?) companies have figured out that they *have to* be present on social media. A lot of these companies are just doing it by emulation of others and without really understanding the benefits they can gain. So, they build a Facebook page, spend money on legal counsel to reclaim their Twitter handle that had been snatched by a college kid and then what? Before investing REAL dollars, management wants to see the Return Of Investment of social media. So they throw the “R” word at their agencies and social media ‘experts’: what are the returns on our Facebook page, our online brand community space and our Twitter handle? Everyone involved scrambles to put together ROI studies, customer research projects, measurement tools, etc. that will PROVE beyond doubt that a follower on our Twitter handle is worth $1.34 while a subscriber to our YouTube channel only 79c.  And here starts the social media ROI madness…

Why is it madness? Because this quest for the Holy Grail will return empty. Let me be unequivocal on this: SOCIAL MEDIA ROI CAN NOT BE MEASURED. I’ll add that it SHOULD NOT be measured either, at least not in a silo. A Facebook page, Twitter handle, LinkedIn Group have no ubiquitous ROI.

Social media is a tool, rather a series of tools, available to us to do business. Just like the ROI on a hammer and nails very much depends on the project you have at hand, investing in social media is empty of purpose (and ROI) until you apply the investment to a specific business problem or initiative. Once you have identified a project, you will need to define success and how to measure it in order to get to ROI measurement.  In other words, no KPIs, no ROI!

I’m really not saying anything new here. I guess everyone got caught up in the ROI frenzy and forgot Charlene Li‘s 2006 blog post about the ROI of blogging, where she emphasizes that meaningful ROI calculations can only take place in the context of the business objectives one is trying to reach.

Just like it didn’t make sense then to try to calculate the ROI of blogging without defining the business objectives associated to the activity of blogging, today, a brand’s social media presence, investments and ROI have to be framed exactly in the same way. Don’t blame your boss for asking where her money goes (which is really what the ROI question is ultimately about), instead make sure you re-frame the question around the business objectives of the campaigns you’re trying to get budgets for and how you will go about measuring success.

Here are a couple examples of ROI calculations our clients have used that you may find useful to link business objectives to ROI. These case studies are all centered on influencer engagement:

As you can tell, there is no one-size fits all to measuring “social media” ROI. Each project brings its own objectives and, as a result, its own definition of success with the metrics that you can use to measure it. Note that these success metrics can only be used efficiently to measure the ROI of the associated project if you have defined them ahead of the start of your project, set expectations on how success would be measured, and built a process to collect the data.

Bringing such discipline to your campaigns involving social media may seem both overwhelming and ‘unfair’: why such strictness applied to social media while old media and old ‘new media’ (web ads) don’t seem to be held to the same standards? One answer is a simple fact: that’s what you get for being the new kid on the block! No one knows you yet and people need to figure out what you’re about… A better answer is that social media is a new field and we still have much to discover about it. Experimentation is the only weapon to unveil the value of social media and enforcing strict success metrics is the best way to benchmark success and failure of initiatives and to quickly identify the highest value points to focus on.

So stop spinning your wheel trying to measure the ROI of social media and start focusing on measuring the ROI of your business with social media.

In this post, I’d like to share the approach we have taken at TRAACKR that is somewhat of a departure from others in our space (that is influencer discovery and measurement).

If you’re in the business of measuring online influence, you’re faced with 2 very basic challenges:

1. Clearly define what you’re trying to measure: what is influence and how does it manifest itself in quantifiable ways? Brian Solis and team created a whole project just around framing online influence for PR professionals. You can imagine that if influence means different things to different people within PR, things get much more complicated as you expand into other industries…
2. Figure out how to measure it: each site and media type has its own way of measuring things, with limited cohesiveness. So you’re left trying to compare friends and likes on Facebook, reviewer ranks, feed subscribers and votes on Amazon, views, channel subscribers, comments, and favs on YouTube, etc.

Now bring these two propositions together: you don’t know what to measure or how to measure it. Encouraging, isn’t it?

Most have tackled this challenge by doing 3 things:

1. limiting their scope of study to a universe somewhat uniform and controlled (be it a site like Twitter, a type of online communication like videos or blogs, or a closed community)
2. making assumptions on what influence is and how it manifests itself in their controlled environment
3. building a mathematical model that, with the support of technology, measures ‘influence’ in this limited universe

Though the approach is appealing because it makes life easier to those doing the measuring, there is a glitch: if you reduce the size of what you study to make it manageable and more linear and then make a series of assumptions on what influence means so that your mathematical models and computation work, you have most likely stripped out any possible interesting insight from your results even before you even started processing data.

As an example of this, Science Magazine has been covering a research project to measure influence on Twitter conducted by 2 PhD candidates at HP Social Computing Lab, that concluded: 1- influence is not popularity (and by that they mean having the most followers doesn’t mean you’ll get the most retweets) 2- Mashable, CNN, ESPN, The Onion, and the BBC are all very influential Twitter feeds. Well ok but maybe you could tell me something I don’t know…

At TRAACKR, we have taken a very different approach: instead of limiting our universe, we have extended it; instead of dogmatically defining influence, we have built a process to progressively discover what drives influence.

Our discovery-driven technology solution is architected and built on the premise that our process, data set and scoring are all bound to evolve. Here are the few rules we applied to make this possible:

1. Harvest all online data we can put our hands on. Analyze the data, look for patterns and correlations, expose the data to the users and observe usage patterns. This approach allows us to lower the threshold to add a new data type or data source and start collecting information even before knowing how we’ll be able to use it.
2. Build a modular scoring system (ref. graph above) to fetch, normalize, and score influencer data. This approach is essential for us to be able to add new data sources, alter scoring computation, and even test new scoring algorithms without disrupting the overall scoring system itself.
3. Let our users determine what defines success for them (influencer engagement), correlate success patterns with our data collection and scoring, adapt scoring.  We do this in 2 ways: 1- letting users weigh in on the quality of the data presented 2- tracking success metrics per campaign. This feedback loop enables us to constantly improve our scoring methods.

This empirical, discovery-oriented approach to measuring online influence makes some of our mathematician friends uneasy (as they favor a more purist theory-driven model as described earlier). As we ask them for forgiveness, we remind them of the wise words of Jim Sterne, one of the godfathers of web analytics more recently turned to social media measurement: “online marketing has been suffering from a delusion of precision and an expectation of exactitude.”  Imposing scientific rigor on influence measurement results in stripping findings from most of their potential value. Traackr has focused on preserving and exposing the value of the influencer data while building a solid foundation to measure influence.