What has the Fall of The Roman Empire got to do with Social Media? Is this another of those weird analogies that “guru’s” like to throw around? Possibly, though I hope you will see the connection in the way I do. Over the past few years those of us who advise others on how to get the most from marketing through social media channels have agreed that the model which works best for all size businesses is the outpost model. I referred to it as the hub and spoke model others use different terms but we all mean the same thing.

The Collapse of The Social Media Outpost

One of the major contributing factors to the fall of the Roman Empire was its size. It became too big to be sustainable. The Roman’s had outposts at every point of the known world. Communication became harder and harder, supply become harder and the trade that was supposed to flow back to Rome started to diminish. So focused on their outposts were they that they ignored what was going on in their own Capital. In the end the model collapsed. Roman was over-run by hoardes that didn’t rely on developing large empires but instead existed in small groups that were more sustainable.

So how does this affect Social Media? The truth is that the model that so many of us have been promoting is about to collapse. There are just too many outposts. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Plus, Pinterest, Tumblr, WordPress, Forums, Email, and endless other places to establish an outpost, all with the same end to drive traffic back to our Capital.

Retreating From Your Social Media Outpost

Look at your own statistics, how many of the various sites that you have established as an outpost is actually generating significant traffic? Why are you still there? The low numbers tell you that the people interested in you aren’t there, you are either doing a poor job of maintaining your outpost or you just aren’t providing the locals with what they want. Either way you need to get out before it becomes obvious that you can’t sustain that outpost.   In a recent post Chris Brogan says:

2012 is the year where social media oversaturation hits hard. We will scale back on our participation in social networks, and we will most certainly scale back who we choose to follow as sources.

He is right (he usually is), and if that is the case then that scaling back by users means that your content is going to get even less eyeballs at your outposts. Your empire is about to be over-run by hit and run hoardes who are better able to leverage those particular outposts than you are. So why wait for that to happen?

Deciding Which Social Media Outpost To Keep

I am not suggesting you abandon all your outposts, but take a good long hard look at all those outposts you have established and see how often you are posting – not automatically cross-posting from other places, but actually generating original content targeted at that particular audience. If the answer is “not much” then that outpost probably needs to be abandoned.

Just because new sites appear doesn’t mean you should immediately establish an outpost – try instead to see if there is a real fit for your business. Currently lots of people are trying to shoe-horn Pinterest into their marketing mix – for some this will become another cross-posting, under-supplied outpost that will die off in a few months. For others it will become a major driver of traffic, allowing them to remove other outposts that are not performing as well. But simply building an outpost for the sake of it is not a strategy for success.

Which Social Media Outposts can you let go of?

Yesterday saw the confirmation of the sale of Social Location Marketing app Gowalla to Facebook for as yet undisclosed sum. This is part of the compression of the space that many predicted would happen this year. Earlier in the year we saw Whrrl bought and closed down by Groupon. Gowalla, in their announcement yesterday noted that the service will close at the end of January.

Gowalla Closing:Impact for Marketers

So what does this sale mean for marketers who, for the most part are only just discovering the power of Social Location Marketing? Firstly, it means that their choice of potential partners is now limited to only one serious player – Foursquare. While there are other apps available they are either minor players or niche focused. A great example of this is CarZar, which is both a photosharing app and a location sharing app rolled into one. However, it is only of interest to car enthusiasts. Good for marketers in that space but limiting for marketers outside of it.

Gowalla Closing:Impact for Users

I’ve been a Gowalla user since its first version. I loved collecting the digital objects, these became increasingly less important as Gowalla tried to become more Foursquare like with badges. Even then their focus on being a “beautifully designed” platform set them apart. Their focus switched to being more about experience and location, providing badges for states, which as someone who travels frequently were fun to collect. However, their latest iteration seemed poorly thought through. Some pundits have said that while Gowalla is going to Facebook your data is not. Josh Williams has been quoted as confirming this though the official announcement on the Gowalla blog does not say that.

I think it is naive of anyone to think that the Gowalla purchase was solely about hiring talent. Facebook is about data, the more data the better. The value that Gowalla brings is from its users data, so you can expect that the data was part of the deal. After all look at the game developer Zynga, their potential valuation at somewhere in the region of $10bn is not because investors think that Farmville is the most awesome game ever created, it is because Zynga collects vast amounts of user data every day about the millions of people who play their games. Your Gowalla data is much to valuable to Facebook for them to simply let that slip away.

Gowalla Sale: Facebook & Location

Some pundits are postulating that we can expect to see a Gowalla like environment in Facebook next year with a renewed emphasis on Social Location Sharing. I doubt this very much. Facebook knows its audience and its audience never really saw the benefit to sharing their location through Facebook when they were already using Foursquare and other platforms to check in. I do agree with those that say we might see some of the design ethic from the Gowalla team make an appearance in Facebook and I for one would definitely welcome that.

I’m sad to see the end of Gowalla, having lived in Austin and met the team several times I know that they truly believed in their product as did their users. They have a lot to offer Facebook and I hope that they are given the opportunity to contribute to the direction that Facebook takes next year.

Update: Josh Williams, Gowalla CEO – restated on Twitter that “Facebook is not acquiring any user data. It’s just that simple. No story here. No spin.”

If you attend any conference that has any kind of social media component you will no doubt hear reference made to the savvy consumer. You will hear how they are demanding transparency and engagement and want to be included in the conversation. Most importantly you will hear that they don’t believe the lies of advertising anymore and that social is the way forward.

The Savvy Consumer – Mythical Being

The Savvy Consumer is not a new being. Contrary to what social media “guru’s” might tell you. Consumers have been savvy for decades. They have been discerning, they know a real deal when they see one and they know when they are being ripped off. The rise of social technologies like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus didn’t give rise to the Savvy Consumer. Consumers have been having the conversations over the garden fence, around the water cooler, on the phone and in the stores where they shop for as long as shops have existed.

The demand for transparency pre-dates social technologies by several decades – I don’t remember reading about Erin Brockovich using Twitter to demand transparency from Pacific Gas & Electric Company – though I have no doubt she would do so today. Consumers have always wanted to have transparency in their relationship with brands. So where does this idea of the sudden appearance of the Savvy Consumer come from?

The Savvy Consumer & Social Technologies

It is far more likely that social technologies like Facebook, Twitter, Google + and blogs have woken marketers to the depth of understanding that consumers have of their methods rather than those technologies giving rise to the Savvy Consumer. Marketers are being shown that Social Media allows them to follow and even join in conversations, as though these conversations were new. They are being sold on the idea that if they adopt these technologies that they might stand a chance of catching up and perhaps regaining the upper hand with the Savvy Consumer.

The Savvy Consumer has decades on the newly sophisticated marketer. Social technologies will not make up for that gap. Social technologies are revealing the extent of the gap between marketers and the Savvy Consumer. Social technologies are providing the opportunity for the Savvy Consumer to organize around issues that matter to them faster and in a much more cohesive manner than ever before. The biggest revelation that social technologies has brought is not the existence of the Savvy Consumer but the existence of the unsophisticated marketer.

The Savvy Consumer and the Savvy Marketer

The Savvy Marketer is learning from the Savvy Consumers behavior. Learning to use the social technologies in the same way. Social technologies have brought back the need for artistry to marketing. Finesse rather than brute force in messaging has always been the core of great marketing. Perhaps this is the most important lesson marketers can learn from the Savvy Consumer, not that they don’t want marketing, not that they don’t want to be sold to, but rather that they want it to be done with style and grace.

I tell audiences, clients and anyone else who will listen that there are three main components to any successful marketing campaign that involves social technology. Fun, Repeatable and Shareable. To combine these three in one campaign is a difficult act and one that actually requires a lot more thought than many marketers are willing to give to their campaigns. The Savvy Consumer knows when they are being played, they also know when it serves their purposes to join in.

What are you learning from the Savvy Consumer?

Image used under CC license by Elsie

Google Plus is the newest social effort from the Google empire. I was never a fan of Google Wave or Buzz and felt that Google had missed the point of social completely with both of them. However, from what I have seen from the Google Plus demo this incarnation has real potential.

Google Plus – Why It’s a Threat to Twitter

A lot of posts and articles were published yesterday on why Google Plus will spell the end of Facebook – I disagree. Facebook’s hold on social networking is fairly unassailable. Certainly Google is unlikely to make much of an impact in the next year on Facebook’s position as the number one social networking platform. However, where I do see it making a clear impact is on Twitter. Twitter hasn’t evolved in the past 4 years since its appearance. Sure it has gotten bigger and added things like the Retweet feature and that is about it.

In the past four years Facebook has added and redefined features throughout the site, paying particular attention to both advertisers and brands that want to leverage the platform. They are making money from their modifications. While Twitter, who currently claims it has attracted 600 marketers to run “sponsored” tweets with them is not making money. In addition its lack of innovation and evolution is concerning. Add to this the fact that its creators, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and now Biz Stone have all left the company or at least greatly reduced their involvement and you have to question how much longer Twitter can limp along.

Google Plus Features

Let’s look at the feature set that Google Plus seems likely to launch with:

• Circles – think of this as being similar to Facebook lists or more importantly Twitter lists. Facebook lists, even by Zuckerberg’s own admission are only used by a small percentage of Facebook users (I happen to be one of them). Twitter lists however are what power Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite – three top Twitter applications and what make the Twitter stream readable. Without them there would be no Twitter. Google Plus is coming out with these as a central feature, which immediately means that you can sort the noise from the signal.
• Hangouts – Facebook has nothing like this, but Twitter does – Hashtags/Twitterchats. Google Plus goes one better by including video. Every tablet, laptop and a lot of Desktops now ship with a webcam built in. I for one could definitely see standout Twitter chats switching to this medium and becoming much more engaging. For example Mack Collier‘s Sunday evening #blogchat with video would be an amazing show that would be hard to miss for anyone with an interest in blogging.
• Sparks – This is basically the incorporation of Google Reader into a social setting – think Twitter search/Hashtags. Tell Google Plus what you are interested in and it delivers it.
• Photos – Think of how many picture uploading sites there are on Twitter – YFrog, TwitPic and of course now Twitter has it’s own – Google Plus is launching with this feature included but goes one step further by allowing you to decide which Circle in your network can see the pictures. So perhaps you have a Circle of fellow foodies, you take a pic at your favorite restaurant and instead of slamming everyone’s stream you only share it with those people you know will be interested.

Google Plus Intimacy

What I see dominating Google Plus is “intimacy”. Or at least the ability to create intimacy. A way to truly connect with people without having to reduce the size of your network. By A list comparison I have a fairly small Twitter network at just over 9,000 followers. I find it hard to keep up with all the great content that is sent my way through the network, I have 20 Twitter lists and numerous searches open in Seesmic all the time as a way of filtering that flow. Google Plus seems to recognize both the need and the desire by users for this type of filtering and I’m glad to see them building it into the beta.

I’m not suggesting you shut down your Twitter account just yet, but as soon as you are invited to the Google Plus beta I would make sure that you start to create an environment that allows you to transfer your activity there from Twitter should things pan out the way I think they will. What do you like about Google Plus?

You have a really interesting life. Apparently, at least according to some companies, our lives are now so amazing, so packed full of interesting information that cannot be missed at any cost, that we must have Social Media streamed to us wherever we are in case we miss something important.

Social Media Makes for an Interesting Life

As a marketing professional and one that spends a good amount of their day submerged in social media channels I like to stay on top of what is happening, trends, breaking news etc. I would however, be the first to admit, my life really isn’t that interesting, not exciting enough that I can’t afford to walk away from Facebook or Twitter or any of the other platforms that remain open on my desktop throughout my working day. Some even get scanned after the working day has finished, you know, just in case. But of course that is my personal addiction to social media, and I know its one shared by many. If I’m honest with myself and you, I don’t have that much of an interesting life.

Does social media really make our lives that much more interesting though? As I puruse my Facebook wall while writing this post I notice people celebrating their wedding anniversaries, announcing that its been a while since they have had a relationship, telling me about the amazing seminar they are hosting tomorrow, sharing quotes from unknown (and probably untraceable) sources or their latest technology find. Now some of this is quite interesting, a useful distraction while I’m writing and that’s great but can I live without it? Well of course the answer is yes, none of this information is essential to me, none of this information is going to change my life. We are being conditioned to believe however, that we can’t live without this constant stream of sharing in our lives. That if we disconnect, even for a few hours that we will somehow have missed essential information and will be behind the curve. This puts me in mind of people who find it impossible to take vacation from their job because they worry that the office will fall apart without them, what they really are worried about is that it won’t, that in fact nothing much will change. The inability to walk away from Twitter or Facebook or your distraction of choice because you might lose the connection with others or that you worry they won’t notice you are gone is increasing.

An Interesting Life As A Selling Point

Now manufacturers want to use this compulsion to sell us their products. Most notably car manufacturers, in the guise of being “hip and cool” are creating the socially aware vehicle. For example Chevy & OnStar ran a commercial during the Superbowl and since that shows a young man checking the Facebook stream of the girl he has just taken on a first date – video below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHDFafqykI

?t=14s

Mini has also got a similar feature allowing you to listen to your Facebook stream -

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zvp7D5KGtE

?t=57s

And if you actually get out of your car but still can’t stand to be away from the constant information stream of your interesting life, Fossil has a watch that connects via bluetooth to your smartphone so that you can check on what color nail polish your girlfriend just had her toes painted without taking your phone out of your pocket. This of course allows you to stay connected to your interesting life in front of others without making it look like you are complete loser, after all you are just checking the time.

Your Interesting Life – It Isn’t

All of this reminds me rather sadly of the 80′s and people who carried pagers everywhere because they wanted to give the impression that they had it “going on” – maybe they were surgeons or special forces who just had to be connected 24/7. Honestly if texting is now considered a distraction while driving and cities and states across the country are banning the act while driving, how much more distracting would it be to have your car, in all its cold, metallic, robotic, androgynous voice announce that your girlfriend just changed her relationship status to “single”?

While all this connectedness is fun from a geeky perspective, do we really need it? I think I’d rather see car manufacturers create vehicles that are safer rather than ones that  will read my Twitter stream to me, because, as much of a rockstar as  I might like to think of myself, I don’t have that much of an interesting life, do you?

Jet Blue has launched a social location marketing campaign using Facebook Places called Go Places. There are several noteworthy features about this campaign. For example it is one of the first of its type to be created using the Facebook Places API. For the non-technical amongst you what that means is rather than simply having Facebook Places control the campaign, in the way that many of the previous campaigns have been run. Jet Blue, who partnered with Boston based Brand Networks to develop the app, are controlling the campaign directly.This gives them much better access to metrics about their campaign and better visibility to who is engaging with it.

How are JetBlue using Facebook Places?

Using the Facebook Places smart phone app, users check in at any U.S.-based JetBlue terminal location to unlock virtual and real rewards. Once they complete a check in task, the system will automatically trigger a request to reward their True Blue account. Of course to benefit from this you first have to have a True Blue frequent flyer account. Don’t have one? No problem, you can sign up from the app. Once you have signed up for the frequent flyer account you can join the True Blue community where Jet Blue provides information about deals, packages and other relevant information for travelers. You can also find other members to network with, according to the site there are 78047 current members, though the first few pages seemed to be mostly test data, (to be fair it is still in beta).

I reached out to Morgan Johnston, Manager of Corporate Communications at JetBlue to ask about the campaign:

Simon Salt (SS) : Why Facebook Places over the other Social Location Apps?

Morgan Johnston (MJ): Facebook certainly has a larger base than the notable social location applications out there, so it was a consideration as we looked to engage with a large section of our customers.  We’re already active in Facebook so it was a natural evolution to continue extending that relationship with our customers in that community. Also, because Go Places is our own application, built with the Facebook Places API, it allows us some greater control over the experience while keeping the overall engagement in a social space our customers already know and are comfortable with.

SS:What are you considering as metrics for this program and how are you measuring them?

MJ: We’re hoping this application will continue to build overall brand awareness as customers share their JetBlue experiences with their social sphere. We also expect to see some incremental increases into our TrueBlue enrollment.

SS: Do you already have a sense of which your most popular terminals are in terms of checkins?

MJ:While we certainly expect to see the majority of traffic in our Focus Cities: JFK, BOS, FLL, MCO, and LGB we’re also excited to see what other cities lend themselves to a more ‘connected’ customer.

SS:Will this campaign impact other parts of the business and if so which Ones?

MJ: The Go Places application as a platform for promotions and engagement with customer gives it great potential for future uses, even past this promotion.  We’ll continue to examine how our customers use the tool, and how various teams within the company can use that information to deliver a better experience for our customers.

A survey late last year by Invoke found that of the 302 people they questioned 62% were willing to share their location in return for some type of reward. Certainly Jet Blue offering free flights and other rewards through their Facebook Places app seems to be capitalizing on this. Are you using Facebook Places yet?

If you are any kind of networker you have a LinkedIn account. I joined LinkedIn six years ago after two people told me about it in the same day. For a while it was my goto networking site. Then came Twitter, and I started to realize that a lot of my Twitter contacts were also on Facebook so I started to relax my rules about who I connected with on Facebook and gradually Facebook took over as my goto networking site, for both business and personal use. With the number of other sites I am active on, being able to have just one main networking site made sense for me.

I realize that for a lot of people Facebook is still and is likely to remain a strictly “personal use only” site. I’m not here to try and persuade you otherwise. I don’t believe there is a one size fits all solution for social networking. We all have our own ways of doing it and we all have our own comfort levels. I like Facebook for networking because it gives me an opportunity to really get to know the other person at a level which LinkedIn never has.

All Connections All The Time

However, the one thing that Facebook always lacked was the professional data that LinkedIn had. At LinkedIn I could find out where my contacts worked, when they moved to a new company I found that out as well and got their new job title, all of which is very useful information to a networker like me (865 contacts on LinkedIn, 3100 connections on Facebook). I was a strong believer in the power of LinkedIn and as the new tools hit the market like Twitter it seemed to become even more so. I even wrote a blog post back in 2008 on how to find your LinkedIn contacts on Twitter before LinkedIn provided that functionality.

But until now there has been no real connection between LinkedIn and Facebook. That all changed when BranchOut opened for business. For those of you not familiar with it. BranchOut is a Facebook app that allows you to import your LinkedIn network to Facebook, it then matches that to your Facebook connections and allows you to add those people to your professional network, providing you with the same functionality in terms of places of work etc. that LinkedIn always has.

Suddenly the need for a different site has gone away. Now I’m not saying that LinkedIn is dead because of this but given the difference in membership size. 90 million for LinkedIn, 500 million for Facebook, the opportunity to grow a combined personal/professional network in one place just became a lot easier and more compelling.

Missing the Boat

So did LinkedIn miss the boat by not building their own Facebook integration? I would say so and here is why. Think about the news in December of last year when Gowalla announced its integration with Foursquare. This was considered an extremely smart move by many, myself included. It was, as my friend and extremely smart marketer, Aaron Strout, called it, a disintermediation play that would pay off well for Gowalla. I agree with him. I think the same would have been true for LinkedIn.

Given the amount of social networking sites we all belong to these days, centralizing your information in one place and being able to conduct common activities, whether that is checking into locations or building, maintaining or leveraging your professional network on one platform is going to become increasingly attractive, not just for early adopters but for the mainstream user as well.

Of course BranchOut is new and they are experiencing some teething issues - If you are an active member of Facebook you will no doubt have noticed an increasing number of wall posts lately that relate to BranchOut. In fact I have noticed several of my contacts complaining about their wall being dominated by these posts. However, when I reached out to BranchOut they gave me the good news that I am sure a lot of people have been hoping for:

We’re seeing an explosion of invites just like Quora did last month and Twitter in past. We didn’t expect to grow this quickly, in turn finding invites a minor problem. We’re going to be building non-wall posting invite functionality this week for this reason.

Kai Fortney – Online Marketing Co-Ordinater – BranchOut

So have you connected LinkedIn to Facebook through BranchOut, do you love it or hate it?

Privacy is a recurring theme in Social Media, which reflects much of the recurring themes in the real world. When Facebook makes a change to its layout inevitably someone will raise the specter of how it impacts your privacy. But is all this talk of privacy really just a falsehood, a myth that was created a few decades ago?

Firstly, it is important to point out that the “expectation of privacy” in its legal sense is a concept that only truly exists in the United States, while many other countries have a “right to privacy” encapsulated in their laws, only the United States has a legal test for the expectation of privacy. In addition it is important to put that legality into context, it is something that only came to be in the 1960′s a time of great change in the United States, a time of civil disobedience, a time of social change and upheaval.

If you consider how privacy was viewed in the early part of the 20th century and  prior to that, prior to the large scale urban drift, privacy was in fact a luxury afforded only to the wealthy and those in positions of power. For the rest of the population, either those living in small communities in which everyone knew your business or those living cheek by jowl in the urban slums where there was an equal lack of privacy, what you did, how you did it and what the outcomes of your actions were was common knowledge.

As Social technologies pull us away from the isolation created by large urban environments, the distrust created by not knowing your neighbor, the stress and paranoia of receiving barely an acknowledgement from those living around you, we are seeing an increase in the amount of openess that people display. Laughingly we call it oversharing, but really is it? Perhaps what we have termed the global village is in fact creating that sense of “knowing” people around us, even if “around us” means in a virtual sense.

We now choose to trust those around us with the minutae of our lives just as those who lived in villages did before us. We have companies building tools to monitor reputation, ostensibly for companies and brands but just as usable by individuals, because reputation & perceived influence is increasingly important, just as it was in village life.

So do we really have an expectation of privacy if we engage in Social Media? When we fillout profile pages, upload pictures are we still realistically entitled to cry foul when an online organization decides to share that information with others in the global village?

While many criticize Mark Zuckerberg’s “safeguards off approach to privacy, I am beginning to believe that the new residents of the global village already understand that privacy was a passing phase in human evolution, that it was a moment in time, most notably bounded between the 1960′s and the 1990′s and that the citizens of the 21st & 22nd centuries will live without it just fine.

What do you think of privacy and the global village?

Over the weekend I saw a large number of people in my network on Facebook suddenly change their avatars to be cartoon characters from their childhood to show their stance against Child Abuse. This was another awareness raising campaign, similar in nature the to the “color of your bra” and “where do you keep your purse” campaigns that ran earlier this year to raise awareness about breast cancer. I personally find these types of campaigns annoying. To share my annoyance I posted to both Twitter and Facebook that I wished people realized that changing their avatars actually changed nothing.

The post on Facebook attracted more than 20 comments, some supporting my point of view, others disagreeing. The points of disagreement ranged from the general impression that I was being negative, to more focused that raising awareness was always the first step in engagement and that after that people would do something.  Perhaps I am just too cynical but I didn’t agree. As someone posted in the comments “slacktivism” is just too easy. It may also be because I come from a campaign background. I worked for Greenpeace in the UK as an activist and worked with local groups of supporters all of whom spent their own time trying to raise awareness and get people to do something. Often it felt like spitting in a thunder storm.

On Twitter this morning I was sent a link by Trevor Ray Thompson to a slew of news stories, including this one on TechNewsDaily, that show many Child Abuse Charities actually saw an increase in visits to their sites and an increase in small donations. Now its hard to say if this really was the result of the campaign or not. There was no call to action in the campaign other than to change the avatar and to tell people why you were doing it. Some of this increase could be connected to the time of year, typically the holiday season is a time when children are at the forefront in a lot of people’s minds however, I think, even as a cynic, I’d have to admit that would be a strong coincidence.

So perhaps there is something to these seemingly vacuous campaigns that have always appeared somewhat self-serving to me.

What do you think?

Increasingly brands are becoming obsessed with finding and reaching out to the people that they perceive as, or are told are, social media influencers. Agencies, Digital Marketers, Social Media “experts” are telling companies that this is the way “to do” social media effectively. After all there are 500 million people using Facebook, you can’t reach out to all of them. What you have to do is find the key influencers in your market area and reach out to them and let them do the outreach for you.

The theory is in fact fairly sound. In the military this is known as a “Force Multiplier” something that increases the ability of a military unit by a known (or sometimes) unknown factor to improve the odds of success. In marketing this is of course the “holy grail” of “viral”. Senior exec’s have been known to use the “V” word in conjunction with types of media as though they were synonymous, “I think we should make a viral video”, “how do we get the Mommy Bloggers to make this viral for us?”, yes these are things I have actually sat in meetings and heard.

The Myths

1. Tools that measure influence are the best way to target influencers
2. Influencers are grateful for the exposure the campaign will bring them
3. Working with influencers is free and so we can count it as earned media

Let’s take each of those in turn:

Tools that measure influence are the best way to target influencers: Tools like Klout use fairly sophisticated algorithms to calculate a number that represents influence. They take into account the level of engagement, the size of the network, the composition of the network and a variety of other factors to generate this number. However, Klout relies on the user to actually connect their tool to the users own social media networks, otherwise its calculations are based only on Twitter.

While Klout has definitely managed to move beyond just the popularity metrics that some earlier systems used, simply generating a list of people based on a score is not the way to find social media users who will act as force multipliers. It is however a quick and easy way to do it and of course that is the attraction. Marketers who are already overwhelmed by the size of the social media landscape and are being tasked to get their company involved are seeking these options. A better but of course much more involved and drawn out process is to actually spend time finding the users who are already promoting your brand, or are active in your brands area. For example if you are in the automotive industry finding bloggers who write about the industry, who provide good content to their audience and are actually listened to is going to result in more action than working with a group of people who have a “score” above a certain threshold but who come to your event purely for the freebies.

Influencers are grateful for the exposure the campaign will bring them: While this is certainly true for some influencers, the point here is that if they are influencers they already have exposure. You don’t need to provide events for them to increase their exposure, the idea is to increase your exposure. In this relationship you definitely want to achieve some form of balance and synergy however, that isn’t done through the promise of exposure. Of course this has become the accepted form of barter in the world of social media since the FCC stepped in and demanded an increased amount of disclosure, disclosure that serious influencers were already providing. I am a strong advocate of finding something else to barter with. Sometimes that bartering tool will actually be MONEY. Yes, even in this post FCC regulated world it is ok to pay a blogger. Contrary to popular belief the FCC did not mandate that bloggers and other social media users not be paid, what they mandated was that the user be transparent about the fact that they were recompensed in some way.

Which brings us to the final myth.

Working with influencers is free and so we can count it as earned media: Earned Media is the term marketers apply to mentions, posts, articles and other forms of communication about their brand, product or service that they did not have to pay for. Of course social media influencers fall immediately into this category because after all, they are so grateful that a big name brand reached out to them and invited them to talk about their new widget that they will gladly do so for free and therefore generate earned media. Which in turn means that the C-Suite can be told, yet again that social media is free and it generates money by off-setting paid media. Then everyone can all join hands and skip merrily into the sunset.

The reality is that influencer measuring tools are not exclusive to marketers, social media users view them as well. They check their scores, they compare them with other users. They have a sense of their “value” to a brand. At the very minimum what these tools are doing is adding to the sense of entitlement that some of these users are now getting. Increasingly we are seeing influencers demand some form of compensation for their involvement. Which, while it may come as a shock to some marketers, is actually appropriate. Why should these people work for free or for a bag of swag?

So those are 3 of the Myths I have seen, what are yours?

image used under license by crackdog