A comparison of the three most popular influencer finding tools: Klout, Kred and Peerindex
As social networks continued to grow rapidly, so has interest in influence. Global companies are realising the importance of targeting high profile bloggers, journalists and celebrities, and have increasingly sought to reach out to these influencers for endorsement and to drive word-of-mouth about the brand.
While FMCG brands like Snickers can easily identify popular celebrity bloggers, businesses in other fields can have a harder task to find relevant influencers. To cater for this, a new wave of influencer scoring, based on social media analytics, has emerged, most notably Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.
Dan Purvis from the Meltwater Group, explains why these tools are growing in importance:
"Identifying who wields influence has lately become a hot topic of considerable proportions in marketing, PR and comms teams the world over. As…
Social Media is still a new and scary world to many people and companies. Its a relatively new tool to the marketing world which is, without doubt, changing the way we work and live.
For small businesses, in particular, social media can be a daunting place.
We have created this Digital / Social Media reference for our Expert members that helps summarise all the key paid-owned-earned media techniques for the main social networks.
This post originally featured a crib-sheet from FlowTown to help small business get to grips with the most popular social networks. Unfortunately this is no longer available. We liked the "learn the lingo" summary, as marketers today, we're often translating the labels and vocabularies of the tools and this gives a neat summary.
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There's more to social-email integration than share buttons
We know from what happens in 60 seconds in social media that we love to share on social networks. This amplification is what makes social media so powerful. We also know that with so many social updates, getting cut-through with social media can be difficult. Step forward email marketing which still offers reach and engagement. The obvious question; how can we integrate them - can they be "better together"? This was the topic for a recent presentation I gave at the eCircle Connect Europe 2012 event. The full presentation is available at the end of this post, but I thought I'd share some of the great examples of companies integrating social media into their email marketing. Thanks to Tim Watson for sharing some of these with me.
Start with who shares what?
Creating shareable content isn't quick, cheap or easy, you need to…
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March 14, 2012
How to control social media ‘bush fires’ to protect your brand
Prior to the digital social media era, brands could control most marketing and communications channels.
Marketers could determine which messages were conveyed, to whom, where and when, thus ensuring their precious brand image was preserved intact.
Enter social media - the tinder to set fire to a previously dry marketing environment.
Social media’s power and reach deliver real power to consumers
Social media lets consumers refer, recommend, vote, score and comment positively or negatively on anything they feel or experience about a product or service.
A particularly big dose of fuel is added to the 'brand communications bush fire' by social media’s interactive real-time capacity to broadcast messages. Reach is potentially unlimited, extending through compelling multi-media formats, such as pictures and videos ‘taken on the go’ with smartphones.
Brands must be…
Case study: KLM's 'Meet & Seat' initiative
In the latter part of 2011, international airline KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced its new 'Meet & Seat' programme. Participating passengers could view each other’s Facebook or LinkedIn profiles and use this information to choose who to sit next to during a flight. I always find it interesting to review how KLM are using social media since they're definitely an innovator rather than a laggard. These often aren't just campaigns, but integrate with KLM services.
Source: Wikipedia
This idea might be good for KLM's PR, but can it succeed? And what lessons can you take back to your business?
KLM's previous use of social media to personalise service
KLM is no stranger to social media. In November 2010 it launched 'KLM Surprise'. This test involved flight attendants searching passengers' social media profiles and meeting…
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March 1, 2012
A new adoption framework for social media strategy
There are now enough examples and evidence to know which social media marketing strategies and tactics work and which don’t. Enough for organisations to move beyond the baby steps of adoption that typify where about two thirds of the UK remain today.
The board of directors is usually culpable
The key issue in most organisations, particularly at board level, is they are still being held back by their failure to gain a fundamental understanding of the medium. Neither, perhaps as a result of this failure in understanding, are they recruiting the right calibre of skills into digital and new media roles.
I have interviewed and worked with scores of organisations concerning their plans for social media. Many say they now want to make social media strategic.
However, they put their hands up and say the issue is they don’t know what ‘strategic’ means when it comes to…
10 tactics for effective Facebook pages you can implement by 30th March
Value/Importance: [rating=10]
Recommended link: Facebook’s Pages intro
With just one month before switchover to a completely new page layout for companies on Facebook, we’ve rated the impact as 10 out of 5, although that depends on how important Facebook is for your business...
If you’re short on time, I recommend you go straight for the new Facebook pages FAQ for a succinct summary. What Facebook won’t tell you are the marketing tactics that you lose and gain through the new update, that’s what we’ll summarise here, using examples to illustrate the new features.
With an update to a web service, you usually start by looking at what’s new, but with Facebook’s new business pages, what’s most striking is what’s missing since…
4 Social Hub Examples
As the number of social networks increases, brands have started to look at ways in which they can bring all their social networks into their brand owned websites. Contrast this with the more common situation where the only reference to social media on the main site are the ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ share buttons. These don't give any impression of the type of interactions and communities developed on these networks or customers own networks.
Social hubs can give customers a snap shot preview of the activity on each of the chosen social networks. This is a growing trend among the bigger, global brands which have active social outposts, often country-specific and they clearly want to bring that conversation and activity to their own site.
What is a Social Hub?
Social hubs tend to be content aggregation pages on a brands own website. Pulling feeds from any or all…
Presentation downloads
The talks explain 7 Steps for creating an integrated social media strategy based around the Smart Insights Ebook of the same name.
You can also download the free social plan summary ebook featured in the talks.
7 Steps for creating an integrated social media strategy
(TFMA 2012 Keynote London and Manchester)
This talk features several examples from Smart Insights Expert commentators I'd like to thank and list here - a bit of a joint effort!
Dan Barker shows the importance of Google Plus
Pritesh Patel shows how to use Google Analytics to attribute value to social media
Marie Page explains how Vets Now use Facebook to engage prospects
Dan Bosomworth introduces the RACE content marketing approach
Paul Fennemore on the McDonalds Twitter promotion gaff
Dave Chaffey summarises the CIM social media benchmark research
Tim Watson on the secret weapon that social media experts never mention
Here is the presentation,…
Social media is about MUCH more than the tactics
This instagram has been doing the rounds during February, there's a fair chance you've seen it?
I like it! It has been shared tens of thousands of times and rightly so. Anything that simplifies our increasingly complex marketing approaches has to be a good thing. Or does it? It maybe oversimplifies, it it's applied to social media marketing?
Well for one thing - it perpetuates the myth that social updates from people or brands are just broadcast, rather than interactive. If I were to grab a marker to explain social media interactions it would look more like this:
From social tactics to social strategy
But a bigger issue I fear, it's yet another…
