Unconventional Wisdom - The Tuvel Communications Blog – Engaging Your Customers in Unconventional Ways

What We’re Reading, June 24th

June 24, 2011 by Kari Rippetoe

Happy Friday! As you’re gearing up for your weekend, we’ve compiled a few stand-out blog posts we found interesting this week for your reading pleasure. Social media marketing ROI has been a hot topic for a while, but you can never diminish its importance. In a world where more and more businesses want to jump on the ol’ social media bandwagon, goals, measurement and ROI should be the driving forces behind any social media marketing campaign or program.

Making the Case for Real ROI in Social Marketing from ClickZ – “engagement” is not the same as ROI, and Dave Evans of Social Dynamyx offers ways of linking social marketing to customer service processes to measure “real” ROI.
HOW TO: Calculate the ROI of Your Social Media Campaign from Mashable – this presents a somewhat oversimplified process for calculating social media ROI, but at least provides a good, workable foundation.
Social Media Reality Check: 10 Things to Keep Top-of-Mind – Mitch’s latest for Social Media Today is a checklist of fundamentals to consider before launching into social media.
The Current State of Social Networks [Infographic] from Social Media Today – interesting infographic that covers some relatively unknown social networks, especially given recent data released by LinkedIn about how social networking-savvy men and women are.
Women Still Don’t ‘Get’ LinkedIn, Says LinkedIn from The Atlantic Wire – and here’s a link to that recent data!
How to Hire for Social Media Management from Social Fishing – Maddie Grant of Social Fish has officially called BS on not hiring interns to look after social media. Even though we’ve seen several cases of what can happen when an untrained intern is let loose to handle an organization’s social media presence, Maddie makes a substantial case.

And the Winner of the “Name Our Blog” Contest Is…

June 23, 2011 by tuvelblog

Congratulations to Don Schaaf of ds+f / Don Schaaf & Friends! His suggestion of Unconventional Wisdom has been chosen as the new name for Tuvel’s new blog!

Thanks to everyone who entered – your suggestions rocked! We loved all the ideas, but alas, we could only choose one. Don has won a $50 Amazon gift card and the satisfaction of seeing his suggested name in the masthead of our blog (which we’re working on and you’ll see very soon…stay tuned).

How Klout Should be Measuring Social Media Influence

June 22, 2011 by Kari Rippetoe

Something that I’ve noticed and kept tabs on in recent months is the preoccupation with influence in social media, specifically how to measure it. Since we’re in the business of locating influencers and running campaigns to build relationships with them on behalf of our clients, I’ve keeping a close eye on emerging tools for identifying said influencers and determining, well, just how influential they are (BTW, here’s a really great infographic that maps out influencer ecosystems and roles).

One of those first tools out of the gate that so many in the social media world have been chattering about lately is Klout. Klout started out as a tool that measured a person’s influence based on Twitter only, which caused a bit of a stir from those who rightly thought that influence should not be determined by tweets alone. So, they added Facebook and, most recently, LinkedIn to the mix of profiles that help calculate a person’s Klout score. They also added the ability for others to give you Klout (or +K) in a certain topic – which is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of how influential others think you are. Klout is now starting to emerge as the tool for measuring social influence.

Well, almost.

When we think of social media, straight away we think of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, right? But when we talk about social media influence (or, better yet, social influence), we’re talking about an animal of different stripes. Social influence isn’t just gauged by the “Big 3” social networking sites, it’s gauged by your entire social sphere and how your network is engaging with you. Influence in a certain topic shouldn’t necessarily be determined by how often you tweet about that topic, either (case in point – Klout has determined that our own Mitch Arnowitz is influential about ice cream and I’m influential about cars) – it should take into consideration other sources of content you’ve posted about the topic.

In terms of how they should be measuring influence, here’s what I hope to see from Klout in the near future:

Blogs

Ability to add your blog to your Klout profile to help determine score and influence in certain topics based on readers’ level of engagement with your blog (i.e. shares of posts, comments, Facebook Likes).
Ability for your blog readers to +K your blog posts for certain topics (imagine a +K button you can add to your blog).
Consideration of the comments you leave on other blogs (determined by services like Disqus).

Consideration of posts in LinkedIn groups and how many people Like or comment on those posts.
Consideration of Answers you’ve provided on LinkedIn and how many were chosen as “Best” to determine topic influence.
Ability for companies to add their company pages.

Facebook

Ability for companies to add their Facebook pages.

Other social networks

Ability to add your Quora profile so Klout can analyze your answers to questions to help determine topic influence.
Ability to add your profiles from location-based services like Foursquare or Gowalla to factor in friends, tips (and how many people have “done” the things your tips mention), mayorships, badges. This might help to determine local influence. Update July 14: Klout has added Foursquare as one of the services affecting scores. No details on what kind of activity affects it (natch), but apparently they’re still trying to figure that out.

How do you think Klout should measure social influence and what should they be taking into consideration?