Online Influence: What Is It?

Klout founder speaks to what Klout does and how they measure online influence. For example, Justin Bieber, per Klout, has more influence than, say, Barack Obama.

But what's key here and not well covered is WHAT is the influence? To drive a new concept? Read a blog post? Buy something?

What do you think?

Amplify’d from www.businessinsider.com

When I think of “influence,” I am reminded of the preparations for my sister’s wedding. For some strange reason, her caterer required equal numbers of the fish and steak at the reception. The week prior to the wedding, they had too many orders for the steak. My sister was worried, but her fiancé, an attorney, was not. He said, “It’s no problem. I’ll get my family to choose the fish. I’ll just ask them the question in a way that ensures they will order fish.” As I’ve been thinking about the issue of influence, this story keeps coming back to me.

Following my post on Measuring the Influence of Influence, I had the opportunity to ask Klout’s Joe Fernandez (@JoeFernandez) about his perspective on influence. I began by asking him how he defines influence. His answer: “Influence is the ability to drive actions.” Following is the rest of our conversation. We cover an eclectic array of issues, including why Justin Bieber has more Klout than Obama, Joe’s perspective on our “attention economy,” how the number of followers affects your Klout score, how The Adjustment Bureau is using influencers as early screeners, how to increase your own score, and much more. I hope you’ll enjoy Joe’s comments as much as I did.

BAM: Why does online influence matter?

JF: I believe we are living in an attention economy. There is so much information coming at us online. We depend on our friends to help broker our time and attention. Your ability to drive others to action is critical in this new economy. We are seeing this in the real world too. People in sales and marketing positions need to have the ability to broadcast their network with authority and trust and leverage social media to get their message out at scale. Now we hear that HR departments are looking at Klout scores as an attribute in the hiring process.

BAM: When you founded Klout, how did you go about determining which factors create influence? Are they the same today?

JF: Thankfully we have added people to the Klout team since we started and I created that original algorithm who are way smarter than I. The biggest change is that there are more signals now. Originally we were only on Twitter and now we have added Facebook and

LinkedIn. There are few things that haven’t changed. I never thought follower count was a very important signal. The concept of it pretty much doesn’t exist in our calculation.

BAM: Online, of course, influence measures are different than offline, but do you marry them with a Klout score?

JF: Online versus offline influence is one of the things we argue about late at night at Klout. Right now our score is purely based on a person’s online influence. We have some exciting ideas about how to address offline influence though. It’s one of the big challenges we are looking at.

BAM: Do you see variations in how different demographics consider influence? For example, someone who’s trying to reach a younger audience might focus their efforts on Facebook more than Twitter. How does that kind of a choice affect Klout scoring?

JF: We look at each network completely independently. The kinds of behaviors that help make you influential on twitter make you annoying on Facebook. We do a lot of work to properly weight the value of each network for every person. This definitely helps our targeting when it comes to hitting specific demographics.

BAM: What are the most common misconceptions about online influence?

JF: The difference between online and offline influence is definitely a challenge. We get a lot of flak for giving Justin Bieber a higher Klout score than Barrack Obama. If you look at the rate of engagement that Bieber drives, the data is pretty clear. Sure, most of the people who interact with him are 14-year-old girls, but the order of magnitude more engagement he drives is staggering. That doesn’t mean he has the power to invade foreign nations or fix health care (my 14-year-old cousin would probably argue that point though).

BAM: Can you tell me a little bit about the changes Klout implemented a few weeks back?

Your blog post noted that some scores would change. What kinds of tweaks did you make?

JF: We make changes to the Klout score all the time. Occasionally they are relatively large and it causes shifts across a big enough segment of our population that it’s worth blogging about it. The big change we made recently was to add more emphasis on the level of influence of the people who interact with you. The goal was to dampen the effect of people using Twitter basically as a chat room and building big scores from that.

BAM: In PR, we always say that controversy breeds interest. I’ve seen a few pieces criticizing the Klout score. I’m sure you’ve seen Jeremiah Owyang’s piece that cited the Kenneth Cole fiasco. What’s your perspective on these kinds of bumps in Klout scores?

JF: It’s awesome to be relevant. We have created an industry standard around a metric that previously was a soft emotion no different from love or jealousy. There is definitely going to be controversy and we certainly have a huge amount of work to do. Our team is obsessed with creating a meaningful measurement of influence. I view all the conversations that go on around us as helpful to us in understanding other viewpoints on influence. We listen, iterate and stay on our mission.

BAM: How does Klout determine a person’s most influential topics?

JF: We run semantic analysis on the content you create and then measure how your network reacts when you talk about that topic.

BAM: I know that you’re looking at adding LinkedIn into the Klout score. Are you also considering content sites such as YouTube and Flickr?

JF: Absolutely. Our goal is to cover the whole social web.

BAM: Do you see a role for sites like Focus and Quora down the road?

JF: I believe that there is infinite data for us to add to the Klout score. We have a whole team focused on just finding new sources.

BAM: We’d love to hear an example or two of how marketers are leveraging Klout to influence or shape their campaigns.

JF: We have done some really fun stuff. Hewlett Packard recently ran a campaign with us where we gave almost 100 laptops away to people influential about film and technology. We also have had the opportunity to work with movies like Tangled and The Adjustment Bureau where influencers got to attend screenings of the movie before it was released. These have been really popular and generated a great deal of word of mouth buzz for the films.

BAM: Finally, I’m sure that people ask you this all of the time, but we have to! What are the most important things someone can do to increase his or her score?

JF: Ha, it’s impossible for me to attend an event without getting this question. The big thing I always tell everyone is to be consistent and be themselves. This is a much bigger challenge than it sounds though.

Read more at www.businessinsider.com

UK Major Social Site Charging For Basic Services: A New Trend?

In December I began receiving emails from networking sites promoting services at bargain rates: LinkedIn promoted 50% off savings if I'd pay for some premium package a year in advance. Execunet had a major percentage off for a year's pre-payment. Ecademy promised outstanding benefits as a BlackStar for a bargain rate of under $50/month - be sure to beat the $80+ monthly cost starting in January!money, money, money, money!

I ignored all these since there's no direct benefit I can establish...given the plethora of freely-available tools and social networking sites available.

Surprise!  Upon returning for an infrequent visit to Ecademy to tune up my profile, I was amazed.  They're real serious about charging for not just BlackStar, but now you must pay up to do almost anything:  They've disabled status updates, tweets, and just about everything interactive.... even responding to a message??.... in order to generate more... revenue???  Really?  Either pay up about $15/month for "PowerNetworker" or..??

I wonder what they based this decision on, don't you? Their reach is not very international and it's still populated by primarily UK denizens with some European business people.  I have met some delightful people through Ecademy, but I've also run into them on other networking sites.

Any business tries to dominate their market, serve the market, and make money. How is Ecademy going to dominate their market by charging for basics?

What do you think? Can they pull this off?

Phishing by Telephone or Bad Credit Card Company Approach?

Wouldn't you think a credit card company would be sensitive to data security issues when on the telephone with a customer?  I once thought so.  Just received a call from an 800# that my smartphone didn't recognize and upon my answering, was told by the woman caller that she's from Capital One.  

She states that she wishes to speak with me about my credit card ending in "1234" (really, the 4 digits ending for my card).  So far, so good.  Next she states that she has to validate my identity and asks for my date of birth.

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I'd been wondering where the call really originated...based on the caller's accent, so when she asks for my date of birth I politely object. I wonder if I'm being phished.....  I decide to explain and advise her that I would provide her with only what's easily available about my identity, since she is the one who called me.  Right?  I also politely note for her that the number from which she has called me is not Capital One's regular customer service line and that this makes me even more uncomfortable.  

She becomes a bit offended with me, says I can call the number back and that would prove it's Capital One, to which I respond that dialing back and hearing somebody state "Capital One" would prove nothing.  Further, I explain, why do I need to provide any information for Capital One since it's Capital One who called me and who undoubtedly knows a great deal about me.  She thereupon said she would end the call and hung up.  

I've heard nothing since, but I still wonder:  Could this be a new variation on a phishing-type scam?  While I don't get many spam emails asking for my banking or credit account information, I've been spammed to death by email claiming to be from the IRS or USPS or UPS (all of which I've shared with appropriate authorities).  I don't really think it's a scam...but why chance it?

My takeaway?  If this was really Capital One, they need to revise their approach.  This one doesn't work.  Why should anybody answer the phone to some unknown caller who happens to have the last 4 digits of any piece of plastic (which probably isn't hard to find) and then provide more private information? 

What do you think?  

Walmart's Customer Experience: The "Easy" Self-Checkout Line

My customer experiences with self-checkout at Walmart are so unreal - so awful - that I'm finally taking the time to vent about them. One would think that the firm who drove major changes around the globe for supply chain standards would have an IT group that could do better than this hideous, customer-abusive atrocity.

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While trying to save time and check-out, listening to the idiotic message being stated repeatedly by this badly designed system "please put item in bagging area", I wonder exactly who was the design leader for this system?  What requirements managers were involved with this effort?  Was there no software quality assurance in place?  I can't imagine any SQA engineers with whom I've worked blessing this system for customer-readiness.  And did the project leader decide to forego any pilot with real-world customers?  Even if Walmart purchased this system, didn't they perform any validation?  Think:  For a retailer the size of Walmart, isn't the checkout system one of the primary points of customer engagement??

This system is, without a doubt, the worst self-checkout I've encountered and may well be the worst system that interfaces between customers and a company I've seen.  And that, seriously, is saying a lot.  A few of the design flaws - and by no means would I consider this list to be all-inclusive:

  1. The system doesn't provide any logic for a customer to utilize a larger tote bag:  There's no room for one and there's no way to deal with it whatsoever.  Either take on endless fragile plastic bags from Walmart or suffer interminably while each item you put into the large tote (which you've placed on the floor) results in the squawking voice from the system.  (Delay here while you ponder whether to deal with the big or little bags...)
  2. Worse, if you do decide to buck-the-system - using your larger tote and then repeatedly punching the optional "not bagging this item" -- the system will absolutely get even with you by finally (after about 3 items) freezing up with a message that a supervisor is required.  More delay here...
  3. The system insists on your placing one item at a time into the bagging area.  So, if you try to multi-task and save a bit of time by grabbing two small items and trying to push them through, the system will balk.  Once again it will squawk about putting an item into the bagging area and will not allow you to scan the second item. (Delay here, start over, sometimes wait for supervisor.)
  4. If you are a bit quick and scan an item, place it into appropriate flimsy small plastic bag, and quickly scan the next item, guess what?  The system cannot accommodate that speed and may squawk again.  One speed only, please, and that speed needs to be like a conveyor belt - a slow one.  (More delay, slow down....)
  5. Heaven help you if you have purchased any type of medication - or a bottle of wine - that requires some viewing of your identity credentials.  (More delay, wait for supervisor, dig out ID card, ponder why you bothered buying this stuff at Walmart.)
  6. Finally, just in case you're not annoyed enough by the gruesomeness of this entire experience of being squawked at and the supervisor having to come to your checkout space repeatedly (like you're the slow schoolchild), you're punished one more time:  IF you spend more than $100.00 and don't pay in cash, the supervisor has to come over and check your credit card and your identity card to ensure it's really you.  (More delay here....and deciding that one is never going to spend much $ here again.)

Here are my takeaways on the lack of customer care evidenced by this "quick self-checkout system" atrocity - shouldn't somebody at Walmart care?

  • Some people will become frustrated and resort to using an actual human being cashier for checking out.  I mean, it's just so not worth it dealing with a system like this.
  • Humans cost more than well-designed systems, but that's not my problem.  It will be Walmart's, especially if they have to raise their costs - or, worse, if more of us refuse to shop there because of this lack of care and concern.
  • I cannot be the only person who is seriously re-considering shopping there.  
    • Why should I be penalized if I spend more than $100.00?  
    • Why should I subject myself to some squawking system that abuses me?

And what about the employees who should be able to maintain some graciousness with customers?  Can you imagine the poor supervisors who are subjected to hours at a time of listening to multiple systems doing this incessant squawking?  (I've found the supervisors to be amazingly calm - an enviable feat.)  Recently one confided in me that she could only stand about 2 hours on duty there and rotated with a regular cashier spot.  Another one told me that the lines and system were really designed for people with just a handful of items and that's why the system was so awkward.

So what? So.... back to Target...maybe Costco.... is what I'm thinking.   And I'm not alone:  I see lots of references on the internet to customer ire with Walmart's self-checkout atrocity.

So You Buy a Tech Company....Watch out for the Swamp

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So you buy a software tech company who just happens to have an existing customer base.  They use the software to transact business each and every day – it’s important to their revenue generation. 

Great, right?  Existing customers!  So, what do you do next?

  1. Make a formal announcement, sending it out to the industry’s media and posting it to your website.
  2. Write to each of your existing customers and let them know how the acquisition fits into your future plans for your company and how you will take care of them and the technology…maybe share a bit of your vision for new enhancements.
  3.  Let your newly acquired customers know that you’re serious about maintaining the purchased technology and give them contact names and numbers for information and/or support.
  4. All the above.

Well, I’ll bet you agreed with all these, right?  How about this one?

  •  Go dark and don’t communicate with anybody.  Let the previous parent company’s announcement suffice.   Why worry about the customers or their concerns, you’re busy, right?   [And head directly into the swamp....]

No way, you say?  I’d agree, if I hadn’t just seen it myself.   No, I can’t tell you who this is, but any of you who know me well can probably guess.  J  And I’m sure they’ll find themselves getting mired in this swamp if they don’t reach out soon.

 

 

 

Take Care of Customers Before....

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So many companies ignore the first signs of customer dissatisfaction – or, worse, employ those with the poorest communication skills to the front-lines of dealing with customers.

While one would think that the latest tools and technologies – and ubiquitousness of the internet – would lend themselves to companies doing a better job of customer engagement and care, I’ve found that those that are poor at it continue to be poor.  And it just doesn’t seem to change.

Just in past few months, I’ve seen problems with AT&T, Continental Airlines, Cheaptickets.com, and Cigna, to name a few.  Who do you think is doing an outstanding job of customer care??