2011 Social Media Forecast: Digging deeper
Dec 28th
It’s traditional to make predictions for the upcoming year but I hate being traditional. Yet … it’s just too irresistible — so much happening! Most of the forecasts I’ve seen have missed some important ideas. Here are a few things to watch in my humble estimation!
First let’s get the obvious trends off the table: Mobile, integration, location, group buying, privacy, tablets. Yes, those are big ideas for 2011. But we already know that. Let’s dig a little deeper on some of the market forces that may be less obvious but perhaps no less important …
Apps gone mad. Of course everybody has “mobile” on their list but more important is the breakthrough creativity in the apps we’re going to see. This is the new front-line of online marketing. Breathtaking stuff coming down the pike.
Augmented reality debuts. In fact it already has. Perhaps Word lens is the first real shot across the bow. This is going to explode. I think it’s going to leap-frog QR codes.
Social Media “re-set” – Some time next summer as the 2012 budget planning process commences, many marketing executives are going to look over their budgets and figure out they’re not getting any traction from their social media efforts. I think there is going to be a re-set button hit because
- Companies leaped in simply because they were afraid of being left behind;
- They assigned ineffective resources to the task;
- The hyped expectations cannot possibly align with reality.
Overall the momentum for social media marketing will continue because the best companies get it, are seeing results, and new apps and mash-ups will drive a new round of creativity and investments.
Social scoring takes center stage – Ask any of your friends about Klout and you’re likely to get a blank stare. That’s going to change as social influence scoring goes mainstream. Whether you like it or not, people love to rate and grade other people and this is going to be an extremely hot trend. Think how large the market is for SEO gurus. Social scoring is basically personal SEO. How is the world going to change when every teenager on the planet is trying to figure out how to improve the social influence score showing up next to their Facebook profile?
The social SEO snowball — In a related development, search engines are now considering social influence in organic results. So companies have a new reason to participate in the social web. But unlike keywords and content which can be liberally sprinkled through a website, there is no shortcut for social validation. Will this give B2B’s a new incentive to get serious about social?
Social for the enterprise – What if we applied social software to people working within a company? If employees in a far-flung global company could harvest these networking, collaboration and ideation benefits internally, couldn’t this create a significant competitive advantage? The technology is there, employees love to use these tools, and the time is right for this trend.
Micro payments – finally? Facebook have been dipping its toe into micro payments in 2010 by giving out free credits to help condition customers use the new credit system. I saw a Facebook “gift card” in the stores for the first time this month. This is significant because micro-payments have been the long-time dream of musicians, writers and every other artist getting their work ripped off on the Internet. Yes, it might aimed at virtual Farmville crops but I’m hoping this will finally catch on and introduce a new much-needed monetization system on the social web.
So those are some of the developments on the horizon that fascinate me. What is energizing you about 2011?
Social scoring and the business case for blocking Twitter spammers
Dec 27th
Judging by her school-issue personal photo, Twana Florance appears to be a mild-mannered, middle-aged matron from Twin Falls, Idaho. But there is no Twana Florance. Twana is probably some teenager in a Third World country hired to propagate and populate fake Twitter accounts that will later be sold on eBay.
Twitter has done a good job clearing out most of the porn stars and MLM hacks who almost brought the service to its knees by mid-2009. But the new breed of spammer is hiding behind a tender smile like Twana.
For the time being, it’s the stupid tweets that give it away but the spammers will probably get around that soon too. What does it hurt? What does it matter if spammers trick you into following them? Believe it or not, blocking spammers like “Twana” might actually lead to important business benefits in the future. Here’s why.
Social influence and spam
A few months ago my friend Steve Dodd made an interesting observation. Chris Brogan, one of the top five social media bloggers in the world who currently carries enough Twitter followers to form a small nation, tweeted out about a specific issue … and I did too. Steve — who has a great analytical mind — noticed that my message, sent out at the same time, was re-tweeted about the same number of times as Chris. However, the number of RT’s compared to my number of followers was a vastly larger ratio compared to Chris.
“If a higher percentage of people re-tweet your message, wouldn’t this indicate that you are more influential than Chris?” Steve asked.
At first I dismissed this as a mildly-interesting aberration but the more I thought about it, the more I think Steve might be on to something.
One of the reasons Chris has so many followers is that he typically doesn’t block any one. Chris stated at a speech I attended last year that “half the people who follow me are spammers and porn stars.”
In the old days (six months ago) of social influence, having a large number of followers — no matter who they are — was a status symbol. But in this age of algorithms and Klout scores, simply having large numbers of non-human followers could work against you because that “conversation ratio” is going to be a measure of influence.
Here is what the new social scoring systems are reflecting: Spammers don’t engage. Spammer don’t re-tweet. Having spammers among your list of followers will drive your social influence score DOWN.
Ethics of blocking spam
From the beginning, I have done my best to look at the profile of every person who follows me to determine whether I should follow back, just let them follow me, or if I should nuke them. I probably block about 25 percent of the people who try to follow me because I attract a lot of crap I guess! Yes, this takes a little extra work, but the 18,000 people who follow me are legitimate, real people to the best of my knowledge.
When I adopted this strategy, I didn’t have social scoring systems like Klout in mind. Ejecting spammers was just the right thing to do (and still is) for four reasons:
- My Twitter Tribe matters. If I follow you, I choose to do so. No auto-follows, ever. Before I follow, I have read your bio, some of your tweets and probably clicked your link. I have a quality audience and it’s staying that way.
- I want an audience to be proud of. This probably sounds old-fashioned but I don’t want to do anything in my life that I wouldn’t be proud to disclose to my children. And if they examined my Twitter audience, I would not want them to see a bunch of nymphs peddling their videos. Anybody can see who you’re following. What does your audience say about you?
- I want to protect you. If I block the spamaholics I keep them from my tweets and I keep them, in a small way, from you. I see so many of these folks who copy “Follow Friday” lists trying to lure followers. No. Stay away from my friends dammit.
- Because I just do not want to play that game. I’m not going to be passive and imply that what they’re doing is OK.
The business case for blocking
Blocking sends a message and that’s important. But I increasingly believe that having a quality list of followers who actually exist and care about you is going to make a difference because measures of social scoring are going to be a big deal. I recently wrote about the importance of Klout scores and other systems that will emerge. If you missed it, please read it because it’s an important trend that is even having an impact on SEO strategies.
And by the way, Chris (with 167,350 followers) has a Klout score of 84.
Me? I currently have just 10 percent of the followers Chris has but have a Klout score of 76. My hypothesis is that the quality of my followers is one contributor since I do not pretend for a minute to have the reach or power of Chris Brogan.
I don’t want to turn this into a debate about Klout or its social scoring competitors. Whether you or I philosophically agree with what they do is irrelevant because these systems exist, are growing in importance, and we need to deal with this fact dispassionately.
My point is that there might be a legitimate business case to support a strategy of blocking spammers, as well as an ethical one. What’s your take on it? Does this make sense to you?
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Google and Bing reveal that social influence bumps search engine results
Dec 2nd
Last week I authored a post suggesting that social scoring – determining your influence based on numbers of followers and other criteria — may have a growing impact on your personal effectiveness, your career, and how companies treat you as a customer in the future. It seems that this development may now also be an emerging element in search engine results.
In a blog post at SEOmoz, both Bing and Google confirmed that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on search rankings — and that the social influence of those tweeting the links impacts the organic search results.
The blog posted excerpts an interview Danny Sullivan conducted with representatives of Google and Bing:
Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-followed links that may naturally result from it?
Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.
Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.
Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?
Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are.
Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life 
Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?
Bing: Yes.
Google:Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.
This is a substantive revelation and another indication that marketing professionals must take Klout and these other social scoring systems seriously — no matter what your personal bias may be.
This new information is going to create a ripple through all content marketing strategies. It is no longer enough to create targeted content rich in keywords to attract the attention of search bots. The information’s presence on the social web — and the influence of those who notice it — is going to be a factor in your web traffic.
Do you think it is fair and/or wise to have people with large numbers of followers acting as a de facto filter to what you read?
Doesn’t this just invite more abuse and corruption? Let’s say a group of of individuals with high social scores get together and decide to monetize their power. They could offer a paid service to “tweet” out product information and news in a way that could conceivably influence search engine results. The implications of this are vast.
In our free society, where corruption can occur, corruption will occur. These developments make me nervous. How about you?
Get ready. Social scoring will change your life.
Nov 22nd
There is an interesting, and perhaps alarming, trend brewing on the social media scene. Take a look at a couple items in the news last week:
- The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas is providing perks to guests based on their Klout score (an assessment of social media influence)**
- By the end of the year, Twitter said their new analytics will provide influence scores for every user.
- People are now curating lists of the most influential bloggers by Klout score.
- Virgin Airlines offered free flights on a new route to people with high influence scores on Twitter.
- Hoot Suite allows you to sort Twitter results by the influence of the people in the list.
I’m guessing that within a 12 to 18 months, you will be able to use new augmented reality technology to scan a room of people with your smartphone and get a numerical social rating for every person in sight. I constructed the graphic above as an example, but the technology is already there to make this happen.
OK, first I need to get this out of my system. This CREEPS ME OUT.
Good. I feel much better now. On with the show.
While it may be a sad and disturbing reality that we’re about to create a new social media caste system, the business benefits are obvious and powerful. This system can provide highly-targeted marketing and PR opportunities.
Advertising Age reported that the Virgin promotion generated 4,600 tweets about the new route. This led to more than 7.4 million impressions and coverage in top blogs and news outlets like the L.A. Times and CNN Money.
This week, Klout began pulling in Facebook data to get a fuller picture of an individual’s social media footprint and they also have their sights set on LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, and even Youtube, for future integration.
And this is just the beginning. Forget about Klout scores, there will be competitive rating systems for everything and it will be available to anybody at a push of a button. Wouldn’t it make sense to assign numbers for single people on the dating scene based on “user ratings”?
It seems inevitable that you and “your number” are going to be compared, analyzed and dissected by everyone you meet.
Think about the implications of this.
1) Social influence is the new black. Your social score may ultimately be more important than your resume when getting a marketing job, especially at an entry-level position. Your information is going to follow you around and be available to every person you date, every potential employer, every waiter at your favorite restaurant.
2) Take this seriously. You know how some people whine that so-and-so blogger is only big because they got there first? Well guess what — the folks reading this blog today are probably already way ahead of the curve on social media sophistication. When it comes to social scoring, you have a chance to “get there first” too. Once these scores go mainstream — and it’s already happening — everybody is going to want a number … a high number. You have a head start. Do something about it.
3) Personal branding starts with social influence. Don’t take my word for it. The Harvard Business Review said that creating a robust online presence is the first step toward building a C-suite personal brand.
4) Prepare for the gamers. If you think all those people selling lists of Twitter followers is annoying, wait until people figure out how to game Klout scores.
5) Do you have a Klout coach? Here’s the business opportunity of the year. Become a personal Klout coach. Basically this is “personal branding SEO” right? Social scoring is going to become so important that people will certainly pay money to pave the way to a high influence score.
I hate the fact that we are on the brink of creating social media caste systems. However, we can’t live in a world we wish for. We have to live in the world that is. So let’s deal with it. Go figure out how to improve your Klout score. Watch for new scoring systems that are emerging. Participate. Dominate. It’s going to be important.
This is a new perspective on technology and personal branding that is more than a little icky. What do you think about this concept and its implications?
**If you are unfamiliar with Klout scores, here is a definition from the company:
The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.
True Reach is the size of your engaged audience and is based on those of your followers and friends who actively listen and react to your messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that your messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential your engage audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.
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