Archive for year 2012
Kred tries to one-up Klout by taking influence to the masses
Aug 21st
Kred, a platform to measure social influence similar to Klout, just introduced a new interface called “Story” with several very interesting new features. It is so graphically-intensive that I wanted to provide a video (below) so you can experience the changes first-hand. In my view the overhaul provides some valuable new tools for marketers interested in influencer marketing (and you should be).
Click here if you can’t see the video of Kred Story.
So what does this mean to you? I see at least two interesting business applications of the new “Story” format.
First, this puts some useful, free tools into the hands of small businesses and brands. So far Klout has really been the domain of big brands fortunate enough to be able to experiment with Klout Perks. One of the questions I am often asked is, “OK we understand this marketing trend, but we’re a small business. How do we find these influencers?”
Kred has come up with some very nice free or inexpensive features so that many businesses can find topical influencers by geographic location.
A second benefit I see (which may not be even be apparent to Kred) is the usefulness of seeing the most shared content by category and the influencers behind the sharing. This could be an extraordinary tool for curating top content.
When I previewed the new Kred offering, there were still a few pretty strange bugs in the system, but honestly that doesn’t bother me as much as other people. We are watching an entirely new marketing channel unfold and iterate in public — a pretty extraordinary business model. So I am more focused on the trend and the opportunities than short-term things that look might appear silly.
I had an opportunity to ask a few questions of Kred CEO Andrew Grill about this latest round of social influence innovation:
Andrew Grill
Mark: I imagine that it is difficult creating sustainable points of differentiation in a field where there really is no intellectual property protection. In other words, you are probably in a cycle where competitors simply continually copy each other. How do you compete in an industry like that?
Andrew Grill: When we gained access to the Twitter firehose back in 2008, we developed our architecture to be able to handle the masses of data that come from sources like Twitter, Facebook, and the ever-growing social networks. We’ve developed IP (Intellectual Property) and know-how around receiving and ingesting big data.
We are the only influence provider that is generating scores in real time. We also took the decision to be open and transparent from day one, by not only publishing exactly how we derive the Kred scores, but also showing on every one of the 120 million Kred profiles the effect of interactions on the scores in real time. No-one else has decided to be this transparent – something that sets Kred apart from other platforms.
Mark: What is Kred’s R&D cycle? How often can we expect to see major updates like this?
Andrew Grill: We iterate fast. Kred was built in just three months, and the build time for Kred Story was even faster. Small enhancements to the site based on our valuable community feedback are added into the development cycle on a weekly basis. Customers also benefit from our quick R&D cycle as we can build custom versions of Kred elements extremely quickly.
Mark: One of the things many people don’t understand is that you have no choice but to iterate in public. There is no way to test enough ahead of time to be able to predict everything that might happen when you flip the switch and a million people hit your servers. From a business standpoint, how do you gear up for the inevitable fire-fighting when you make a major change like this?
Andrew Grill: Having an amazing technical team who work around the world in multiple time zones means that we’re ready for anything. You are right that we have to iterate in public, and we are always listening to what people are saying about us and the product – feeding things back to the development team as we receive it. We love being in such an agile environment and industry – it makes us work harder to build the best possible platform we can.
We also utilize our network of Kred Leaders to seek feedback on new deployments. In addition, we have a round the clock community management team looking out for any issues and feeding them back to the team. As social media is real time, if something is not working, we hear about it pretty quickly through Twitter.
Mark: How do you project the Twitter API change will affect Kred and its new format?
Andrew Grill: We don’t expect any material changes to the Kred Story format to be compliant with the new API. We have been working with Twitter for four years now since we gained access to the full Twitter firehose and we have a great partnership.
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Take a look at the demonstration video and let the {grow} community know what you think about it. Other than the features I’ve named here, what else do you like about this new interface?
Disclosure: Kred has named me a “Kred Leader” but I have not been active and maintain a neutral position in the industry. Andrew Grill bought me dinner earlier this year during a business trip.
How the physics of social media could kill your marketing strategy
Aug 19th
There is a fundamental reality of the social web that is slowly killing your marketing strategy, whether you know it or not: The Physics of Social Media.
Now, don’t freak out. It’s not complicated or boring, and it makes no mention of black holes or the Higgs Boson. It’s a pretty simple but important idea about the increasing demands on your content and marketing messages. Let’s look at the two colliding factors that will dramatically impact your marketing initiatives.
1) The amount of available information is accelerating. I recently saw an infographic reporting that all of the information created in the past two years equals the amount of recorded information for all of human history. Is that true? I don’t know. I make up most of my statistics any way, but it sounds about right. The point is, we are in a permanent state of information overload and it’s going to get much, much worse.
2) Our processing capability is the same. We only have one brain that evolved to process basic threats, physical needs, and verbal communication. The physics of the human brain is woefully unprepared for this information onslaught. We cannot add processing speed to that limited capacity (at least yet).
In the physical world, this is what happens when you try to push too much stuff though a finite pipeline — catastrophic failure. A flood. Wires bursting into flame. Server crashes.
So this presents the fundamental dilemma for you and me. How do we get our marketing message to cut through the infinite information and make it through to a consumer brain — without going broke or having a catastrophic strategic failure?
We’ve never faced this before
This is a relatively new problem. Even in the early days of mass broadcasting, getting your message through was easy. You simply bought advertisements on the most popular radio and television programs. Those days are coming to an end. Nielsen reported that in 2011, the number of hours that Americans viewed TV declined for the first time in the history of television. Newspaper advertising, adjusted for inflation, is down to 1950s levels. Even website visitors are down. In the past two years, 68% of the Fortune 500 companies had a drop in unique visitors to their company websites.
So we have no choice. Day by day, every single company in the world is realizing that it must join this social media battle for consumer mindshare. And that war is raging though web-based content.
If you are comfortable with your content marketing strategy, don’t be. The game is about to become vastly more difficult and if you just keep on doing what you’re doing, you are slowly going to get wiped out.
Three ways to maintain content mindshare
How do you fend for your piece of your customer’s mindshare in the face of this information tsunami? There are only three possible strategies:
1) Maintain mindshare through increasingly spectacular content. This is the classic — but theoretically unsustainable — content marketing strategy: Offer amazing content that will make people want to spend time with you. But the cost of maintaining this quality level is inexorably going up. So this approach will inevitably stall as costs rise and companies discover the finite economic value of loyalty.
2) Maintain “mindshare” with less pipeline. If the cost of maintaining mindshare is going to keep going up (and it will), another idea is to find a way to push out the same amount of value through less time with your content. This would explain the meteoric rise of content aggregation, infographics, and visually-oriented sites like Pinterest and Instagram. People don’t have to read. They are capturing information quickly and moving on to the next item in the pipeline. I think it is safe to predict that we are just at the beginning of this trend. Free advice: Invent social media platforms to expose more information in less time and you will become rich.
3) Infiltrate other content with your message. This is like a Trojan Horse. When a consumer opens up somebody else’s content they find you. The idea is that you let other content providers bear the huge cost of maintaining mindshare and you sneak in. Examples:
- Guest posts on popular sites
- Influencer outreach — Nurturing relationships with high-impact influencers willing to share and validate your content
- News-jacking — Establishing a voice of authority so that the news channels come to you.
- Brandscaping — Sharing space with other, related brands
- PR — Methodically finding opportunities to place content in big “pipelines”
I would suggest that a successful long-term social media marketing strategy must have at least parts of all three of these, in addition to an aggressive network building strategy.
If you made it this far, thank you. I know this is heavy stuff and I appreciate your patience with the explanation. What do you think? Are you starting to feel the crunch? What are your ideas on how a marketer can prepare for this next phase of competition? Or, do you think I’m wrong?
Illustration: BigStock.com
Why Twitter needs to learn a lesson from Apple. And FAST.
Aug 17th
Yesterday Twitter announced that it will be making some dramatic changes to how it allows developers to use its “fire hose” of tweets in their Third Party applications. There seems to be vast implications for everybody building — and using — content aggregating and social media services, including Klout, Storify and many other popular services.
An excellent summary from eConsultancy called “The Twitter API as we Know it is Dead,” reports that one of the biggest pieces of bad news is that Twitter is changing the rule on how applications showing tweets should display them. If you want to use the Twitter API to display tweets, you will, for instance, always have to display the author’s avatar and the text of the tweet below the author’s name and @username.
Building an awesome mashup that displays tweets alongside content from other services? As ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell observes, one of the new requirements is that “Tweets that are grouped together in a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks.”
Nearly every aggregating service, including the new Klout “Moments” feature displays feeds from multiple sources. According to Twitter, “If your application displays Tweets to users, and it doesn’t adhere to our Display Requirements, we reserve the right to revoke your application key.” In other words, developers will have far less ability to create unique experiences around content pulled from Twitter.
This represents a dramatic land-grab by Twitter, who wants to control the market for consumer-oriented Twitter clients and syndication. Twitter wants to own the Twitter stream — wherever it is.
At a minimum, these new guidelines are going to throw the Twitterverse into turmoil and it may cripple what used to be a thriving developer ecosystem.
I am not somebody who is walking the halls of Twitter, and I don’t know the inside view of Twitter’s long-term monetization schemes, but it seems that Twitter might learn a lesson from Apple. Apple’s dominance is not just because they make great products. They also have an enormous application eco-system that was developed not by Apple, but by thousands of innovators everywhere. This open market approach drove breath-taking and rapid innovation and Apple figured out a way to take their cut, too.
It appears that with this move Twitter is saying that THEY want to control the app development. This seems like a short-sighted and risky move. Yes, they control the mother lode of information but I would suggest that anything that destroys the vibrant innovation around your product is probably a bad thing.
I love you Twitter, but isn’t there another way to monetize other than killing a thousand small companies after they have been working with you for years?
The New Purple Cow. A {growtoon}.
Aug 17th
Join the growtoonists each Friday for a humorous take on marketing, social media, and current business events.
Mars Dorian describes himself as a creative marketeer with a moon-melting passion for human potential and technology. You can follow his adventures at www.marsdorian.com/
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-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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