My bottling days are over! My new keg shell came in the mail today; just in time to carbonate my pumpkin spice ale for Halloween. Now I just need a costume…
Klout’s Powerful New Upgrade
If you’re in marketing and haven’t heard of Klout yet, listen up. It’s one of the marketing game-changers of the past year and it just got a whole lot better.
Klout’s basic premise is that it distills all of a user’s social media activity down into a single measure of influence. To put it into perspective, my Klout score is a paltry 25 (out of 100) and marketing hotshot Seth Godin’s is up around 73.
It’s no longer news in today’s attention economy, that ROI of mass media buys is declining and word-of-mouth is the dominant channel of influence.
The problem was that until Klout, there wasn’t an accurate or objective way of identifying who these key influencers were (# of followers didn’t cut it).
Klout had gotten part of the way, but earlier this month it took a big leap forward in practicality.
With a new feature called “Topic Pages” Klout is enabling users to rank influencers by specific areas of influence. This means that marketers won’t have to waste time or money chasing the web’s biggest influencers, when all they want are the key influencers in their key category.
This feature is still in limited Beta, but keep an eye out and consider using it for your next social media / blogger outreach campaign.
For more information, here’s a great interview with Klout CEO/Founder Joe Fernandez on the Startup Success podcast.
We are in the twilight of a society based on data. As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place more value on the one human ability that cannot be automated: emotion. Imagination, myth, ritual - the language of emotion - will affect everything from our purchasing decisions to how we work with others. Companies will thrive on the basis of their stories and myths. Companies will need to understand that their products are less important than their stories.
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| — | Rolf Jensen, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies |
View more documents from David Carr.
Part 1 of an insightful presentation by David Carr, Head of Interactive at Chemistry, on the first two of four themes emerging from the interactive/digital environment.
1. (Real)time:
Now: Real relationships and relevant information at the speed of now.
Live: Real, live experiences and engagement beyond advertising.
2. Won’t Believe the Hype:
People need reasons to pay attention to brands and extra value to restore lost trust.
It’s not technology that’s exciting, it’s the real reasons why you do it.
In Part 2:
3. Good Cause. Cause Good.
Going beyond greenwashing and staying local.
4. Developing a Playful Side
The renewed spirit of playfulness and the developers who are awakening it.
ShareThis produced a nice little report on the value of sharing.
It’s a short read, but a quick summary is as follows:
- People are sharing more – as much as 200% more shares per page viewed
- Sharing is now accounting for as much as one-third of the amount of traffic driven by search (which is most often the top source of traffic for sites)
- Shared links are the keys to influencing engagement (undoubtedly, because they hold higher trust and relevancy among peers)
- Email is still the most popular method of sharing, with Facebook not incredibly far away, and Twitter suffering
- However, links shared on Twitter and Facebook are most likely to earn clicks
- How people view the web is continually being shaped by their social circles…a very social, highly influential web experience is inevitable
As an uplifting counterpart to the internet phenomenon fmylife.com, where users try and outdo each other for recognition as having the most miserable lives, befuckingawesome.com instead creates competition around doing awesome deeds. Brainchild of Evan Fry (Victors and Spoils), the site allows users to post short descriptions of their awesome deeds and collects votes from others to award an Awesome Quotient to each person.
A typical BFA post:
Rdubsy I opened the door for an old man who was alone struggling to get into a cafe. First thing in a long time that made me feel really good. Thanks BFA.
I’m really into the fact that this website focuses on the positive, spurring personal awesomeness and inspiration, rather than focusing on the negative and creating a situation like FML’s collective pity party.
There are going to be different social media sites for all the ways, good or bad, that people relate to each other, but if we deliberately design sites and seek out others that foster mutual inspiration and growth, perhaps we could start the New Year off with some personal improvement and get the ball rolling on this social change thing from the ground up.
