The Klout Fallacy from Its Marketing Manager Herself

I hit the Klout jackpot this week. No, my Klout score of 40 isn't suddenly up. Klout's Marketing Manager Megan Berry personally left an incredibly insightful comment on my blog. Her comment isn't gold to me because of the ego boost (O.K., maybe a little). It's gold because it plainly illustrates the fallacy of Klout's claim to be "the standard for influence." Here's how Berry summarized how Klout scores work: "1. Influence isn’t about you, it’s about your audience. … [Read more...]

Social Media & Measurement: Elusive But Not New

Microsoft Director of Corporate Communications for Citizenship Tom Murphy recently wrote a thought-provoking blog post on how social media is clearly important but not the end of public relations and marketing as we know it. "We should all embrace social media where it is useful, makes sense and has a practical use, but the baby needs to remain safely in the bath," he wrote. I am completely with him about embracing and mobilizing social media to support your … [Read more...]

HOW TO: Top 10 Social Media Tips for Online Success

Today’s reality is that your organization needs to be on social media. You can no longer rely on issuing press releases and keeping your website up to date to get your message out. You must proactively lead conversations and participate in stories using Internet- and mobile-based social platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. To successfully start and maintain your social media presence, however, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. … [Read more...]

Replacing Silos with Hives: Creating a Social Culture

This week I ran across a Geoff Livingston post with a brilliant bee metaphor explaining how organizations need to create a social culture to exploit social media's full potential (readers of my blog know I love social media bee metaphors): "The basic nest architecture for all honey bees is similar: 'Honey is stored in the upper part of the comb; beneath it are rows of pollen-storage cells, worker-brood cells, and drone-brood cells, in that order. The peanut-shaped … [Read more...]