1.       From Bolt-on to Business as Usual

The advent of social media saw marketers attach themselves to channels such as Twitter, Weibo and Facebook with palpable glee. Many felt they were low-cost ways of pushing more marketing messages at a receptive public, and gleefully measured success per 1,000 likes in the same way they’d previously lapped up media coverage measured by the pound. Social networking activity was rather clumsily ‘bolted’ on to existing marketing and communications programs, and often left to its own devices.

The lessons of 2011 told us that social isn’t a ‘bolt’ on. For many consumers, Facebook is the Internet. Facebook traffic is going up and web traffic is in decline. 1-800 numbers are passé – customer support is 24×7 and on your social network. The mission for 2012 is to create a seamless experience across a range of historically disparate social media, digital and offline properties. Wishful thinking? For many, perhaps. But in the social consumer’s mind, the change has happened. Better interaction across business functions isn’t just management dreaming, it’s social consumer demand.

2.       Social goes mobile

More than 300 million people are accessing Facebook via mobile apps as the smart phone becomes the primary internet access device. The users have spoken and in 2012

marketers must be ready for them. The brand relationship is increasingly dependent on smaller screens.

Variables such as geolocation, NFC, mobile search and augmented reality need to be ns which need to offer compelling – and directive – experiences. We’ll need to start marketing through mobile channels first, making better use of images, video, and less text.

factored in as time and location become critical for brands wanting to capture greater mobile wallet share. For those that haven’t considered this, take a look at your website on a smart phone. Hope you’ll like what you see…or more crucially I hope your consumers like what they see.

3.       Influence is currency

2011 saw the influence debate really take off. Google and Facebook are fighting tooth and nail for your social credentials. Klout and Peer Index both have gained greater recognition over the year but with their success has come controversy. The fact that

Klout’s changes caused uproar indicates that reputation measurement is here so stay. 2012 will see even greater use of influence scores as the industry seeks a better standard.

Better algorithms will dictate greater use of scores in shaping PR tactics. Our focus will increasingly be on understanding how the influential and vocal minority can help us shape our client’s brands. Customers and employees will play larger roles in marketing programs as social currency becomes easier to measure. The ability of Klout and its ilk to keep innovating and providing more specific data will change the way we look at PR forever.

4.       Changing channels?

In 2011 the social network wars exploded. The emergence of Google+ saw Facebook and Twitter make significant changes to their UIs. Niche social networks like Instagram and Pinterest found a home on many desktops and mobile devices. In 2012 we’ll see Facebook, Google+ and Twitter continuing to innovate and greater ability to focus conversations

for more specialized groups. Will social consumers remain loyal or will new networks emerge to challenge?

Outside of the social networks, traditional broadcasters aren’t standing still. The entertainment

and social media industries are colliding, with Twitter in particular helping create a new discipline called social TV. Second screen apps such as Umami

and Gracenote are also blurring the lines further.

In 2012, stories will increasingly have to be told across networks to keep consumer attention. There will only be greater attempts at integration while simultaneously the big networks will do more to keep consumers within their ‘walls’. The challenge for brands will be to keep on top of the niche and large social networks and traditional broadcasters. It will be critical to keep an open mind and be willing to experiment as the channels jostle for position.

5.       PR’s future

My final prediction is a big call but that’s the pleasure of forecasting. From my perspective PR will go through a required change in 2012. The shift will reflect the other nine trends I’ve talked to. Our ability to react to changes in channels, consumer behaviors, tools and technologies will cement our future as an industry.

Images sourced under Creative Commons license from flickr users midgley, jcarlosn, Jeff Hester and Moyan Brenn, respectively.

in•flu•ence

[in-floo-uh ns] noun, verb, -enced, -enc•ing.

1. The capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce efforts on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc, of others.

At the PRSA Northeast District Conference, I attended a session called “Beyond First Impressions: Getting to Real Online Authority, Trust and Influence” led by Jen Zingsheim, vice president, products and services, CustomScoop. Jill reminded us that influence is not defined by celebrity status, level of popularity, or the number of followers you have on Twitter. By definition, it’s about the power that a person or thing has to incite action, behavior, or opinions. In her presentation, Jen called out a handful of free and paid tools that have recently sprung up in attempt to help us quantify online influence. But remember, no matter how many tools are out there, additional research is usually always needed to supplement and refine your search for that perfect online influencer that will genuinely impact your target audience.

Klout - Klout is a simple and free tool that most of us are probably already using, but it’s one that we’ve grown to realize cannot be a sole form of influence measurement. Now, users have the ability to give others a “+K” on any topic they are listed as influential about – basically making your topics a popularity contest. An example that Jen shared about Klout had to do with Justin Bieber, who comes in with a Klout score of 99. With his influential topics including family, South America, and umm…himself, one would need to look past the numbers and take a deeper-dive to determine if he is actually the appropriate influencer for their topic or if his “popularity” is a result of him tweeting upwards of 20 times per day and all those +K’s.

PeerIndex – PeerIndex is another free and easy-to-use measurement tool that helps users “understand their social capital” by giving a glimpse at the users’ “topic fingerprint,” or rank in a topic community. This fingerprint is measured using three separate components – audience, activity and authority – among the following eight benchmark topics:

• AME – arts, media & entertainment
• TEC – technology & internet
• SCI – science & environment
• MED – health & medical
• LIF – leisure and lifestyle
• SPO – sports
• POL – news, politics & society
• BIZ – finance, business & economics

PeerIndex also shows a list of top content sources and allows you to click on any topic to bring up a list of additional users that are influential about that same topic – along with their PeerIndex score, Twitter handle and other valuable data.

TRAACKR – TRAACKR is a keyword-based monitoring service that can help users determine influencers in a sophisticated and automated manner. The tool combines three qualities when finding and ranking influencers:

• Reach – How many people does this person reach when they write something online?
• Resonance – How often are their posts repeated, linked to, retweeted, and shared? Do they get amplified by his or her network?
• Relevance – TRAACKR measures relevance based on the keywords the user is targeting in their search lists and how recent, often and important they are in the influencer’s content.

These high-quality influencer lists come at a cost with TRAACKR – upwards of $8,500 per year when you factor in that a single search that yields one top-25 influencers list can cost $499 per month and a one-time set-up, training and lifetime support fee will cost $2,500.

The Journey to Digital - Tips & Tricks for Social Media Newbies

As the newest member of the Text 100 digital team, the past month has been filled with forays into trying out new social media tools, attending and holding training sessions, and keeping an ear to the constantly shifting digital ground (Google+ anyone?).  What I’ve learned? Social media is no longer a ‘distraction’ or a ‘nuisance’ – it is a significant medium that can be used by companies or individuals to cut through the millions of messages that exist in the digital world to get their content to the right people.

In public relations, we’re faced with several realities that have increased our perception and emphasis around social media – one being that our industry used to rely on third parties (media) to generate visibility and reach our audiences. Those days are gone. Don’t get me wrong – media is still a very important, if not crucial piece of a successful PR program, but with the interactive nature of Web 2.0 and numerous possibilities for reaching audiences through social media, companies now also have the power to replicate and convey information, while maintaining their own voice and identities. The same is true of individuals or smaller organizations that may not have the operations budgets that large companies have to tell their stories.

In early June, I participated in an IBM Centennial Day of Service project at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education that was focused on sharing tips and tricks about social media with Boston area non-profit organizations (read more about this event here).  During the event, I had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with many non-profit representatives, and found that many of them had the same thing in common when it came to getting social media off the ground – they didn’t even know where to begin. I have to say, I totally understand where they’re coming from, and find their challenges to be in common with all of the people I’ve talked to who are working to bring social media into their companies or just their own daily activities. Social media is daunting. There are websites upon websites, widgets upon widgets and tools upon tools that can help us accomplish a number of things when it comes to social media.

So, how do you get started in social media? First things first:

• Before you begin – Remember that social media is not a strategy within itself. Your social media program should align closely with the objectives of your overall business and communications plan. The interactions you have with your audiences in the digital world should be consistent with your overall brand identity – and an easy way to begin is to have your social media goals align with your overarching business goals, messaging and communications/PR program.
• Start small – Cut through the clutter and begin from square one. If you haven’t already, sign up for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and start navigating around these sites. Find the groups, pages and people that are influential in your area of interest or your company. Listen to what they’re saying, and when appropriate, engage in conversation. Don’t forget that not every social media platform might be appropriate for your goals. Experiment with different sites to see where your conversations catch on the best.
• Get committed – The key to effective participation in social media is consistency. Be prepared to invest time into your social media tools – it takes time, patience and valuable contributions to build an audience in the digital world.
• Gauge your influence and digital style – After you become active in social media, measure your digital influence and style with a tool such as Klout. Klout is a tool that evaluates your overall online influence by evaluating your activity on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and rates you on a scale of 1 – 100, with higher scores representing the highest level of influence. Klout also gives you insight into your social media patterns so you can evaluate what level you’re at now, and see what you need to do to become the social media user you want to be. Though it’s not 100 percent scientific, it’s a great way to understand the size of your engaged audience, the likelihood your content will be acted upon and the influence level of your content. By understanding this, you will then know what you need to do to get further along in your digital journey and ways to increase your “Klout.” It’s as easy as going to the website and logging in with your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn user information.  For the record, my Klout score is currently 38, and I’m influential about blogging, Jersey Shore (what can I say, my penchant for bad reality TV also translates into the digital world) and Boston.

What are your experiences in your journey to becoming digital? Share your thoughts and ideas with us on Twitter or Facebook! – By Alison Thompson, Senior Account Executive, Text 100 Boston

—-

Have an idea for a post? Leave us a comment on the blog, tweet us @text100, post on our Facebook Page, or email Text 100′s Global Community Manager, Amber Rinehard. We love your feedback!

Yet, at the end of the day I was left wondering about how I may apply my learnings to my own clients, who all reside in that underground world of B2B (business-to-business). Sure, when you have millions of customers touching and feeling your  products on a daily basis, a customer care and engagement strategy via platforms like Twitter and Facebook is practically essential in today’s landscape. However, what about those companies whose customers reside not in the millions, but in the thousands or even hundreds, and not among the general populace, but among other brands? Do the same social media principals apply?

The simple answer is both yes and no. You didn’t really expect one or the other did you?

In the session titled, “Social Media for Business Engagement” speakers Dave Evans and Jake McKee discussed the transformation of consumers into brand advocates via the social Web. One of the best practices discussed here was to get customers involved in the decision-making process, whether its collecting suggestions via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and then using them; or creating a more formal process of collaboration with customers to engage, crowd source ideas, etc. Will this concept fly in B2B? Yes, with some potential tweaks…

B2B companies are already collaborating often with customers outside of social media. However, although platforms like Twitter and Facebook may be the first choices one thinks of to seek customer involvement, there may be better options for the B2B community. Networks like LinkedIn for example go beyond the casual nature of other social networks as a place where business-minded individuals tend to congregate and discuss industry topics, as well as employment opportunities. In addition, we may want to urge our B2B clients to think about existing developer and resource communities, such as Google Groups or other more specialized online forums where discussions about their products and services may already be brewing. While not as high profile as Twitter or Facebook, these alternative platforms could be highly effective in helping a B2B company directly target the audience it cares most about – key decision-makers at other businesses.

In “Kicking Community Ass,” a town hall-like discussion moderated by Sudha Jamthe of PayPal and Dave Peck of Bullfrog Media, the group discussed the meaning of the term “influencer.” The moderators noted that influence cannot merely be boiled down to number of Twitter followers. Several audience members argued that every customer – not just the Chris Brogans of the world –matters on social media platforms. Does this translate effectively to B2B?

There are indeed many levels of influence, and all companies, including B2B, must spend time listening to clearly identify who their key audience is and where this audience is talking on the Web. However, the same level of engagement required by say PepsiCo with customers vs. a B2B company is quite different. B2B companies should prioritize engagement with their audience as a way to move the needle in the right direction. For most B2B companies, the end goal is not to build brand recognition to ‘household’ status, but to reach a more narrow, specialized list of people within a given industry. That said, Chris Brogan may not be a shoe-in on this list either.

These are just a few of countless social media best practices discussed this week at SXSWi. What others do you know about that could have particular relevance and impact on the B2B industry?

Image via Technorati.

People care more about how their social network views products and services than how they’re ranked by Google or portrayed in an advertisement – according to the Neilsen Company, 90 percent of consumers say they trust peer recommendations over anything else. As peer influence becomes more important, a handful of companies are trying to come up with a formula which would accurately measure the social reach and influence of users.

Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Research recently took a deeper look at Klout – arguably the most-heavily used for obtaining social media influence metrics. Klout looks at a user’s Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and, using a specific algorithm, comes up with a score from 1-100 that explains how effective a user is in his or her network. Many brands are using these companies to “prioritize the elite,” as Owyang explains, but warns that relying on a single metric is dangerous.

For example, following the Kenneth Cole debacle, the company’s Klout Score increased nearly 30 points. This indicates that the Klout score takes into consideration reactions such as @ replies and the overall growth of a network, rather than measuring sentiment of the tweets being generated. This makes it relatively simple for users to cheat the system by posting an excessive number of tweets to raise their Klout scores.

While Klout and other influence measurement tools can be useful, brands should keep in mind that influence is all relative. A well-known technology journalist may have a high Klout score and seem influential, but may not be relevant for a brand focused on fashion or food, for example. Consider the end audience for your client’s product or service – are the “influencers” you’re working with reaching those communities – or something else? Brands should not rely on one single measure of influence, but instead come up with their own algorithm for determining influence in their markets.

This smaller group of social informants is comprised of people who visit news sites all day long, have a large online social network, and have influence on what those people see, think and do. They spend 200% more time online than the average Internet user and are 56% more likely than online news readers to have more than 100 people in their social networks.

And with a mean age of 34 and mean income of $100,000, they spend significantly more on premium products and are therefore magnets for advice on those products and services.

The study concluded that social informants are a vibrant, identifiable, targetable population that drives online conversation about brands and that can be cultivated via social marketing to build brands bigger and faster.

But to me the most interesting part of the study was the insight that while social informants might be empowered by social networks and online tools, they are motivated by a basic human need: they want to be heard, they want to participate and they want to matter.

The report provided sound advice for reaching these social informants, but if these people are driven by the innate human need to matter, then aren’t we all? And if so, how could marketing and communications help to awaken the social informant in each of us? In other words, how can you activate those who are NOT part of the social informants elite population?

Brands can create ways to recognize members of their communities who are helping to drive conversation and information sharing – and they can demonstrate that they are not simply listening, but are taking real business action from the insights of the community. This visibility and recognition would drive additional participation, from social informants and potential social informants alike.

The bottom line is that brands certainly need to tap into the power of social informants – as The Huffington Post pointed out in its study – but they must not lose sight of the fact that there are more potential social informants out there waiting to be empowered.

Related articles by Zemanta

• HuffPost’s Hippeau: Social Informants Are The New ‘Influencers’ (paidcontent.org)

VentureBeat and TechCrunch topped our study of most frequently cited blogs in mainstream media for the Business and Technology categories respectively.

That’s the gist of a new study by Context Analytics, the research arm of Text 100, which we’ll be rolling out in a series of posts this month. We’d actually planned to announce the findings later this month but the blogosphere’s neither neat nor orderly. It’s only fitting that a related conversation happening over on TechCrunch (Survey Says: PR People Love Our No-Embargo Policy) would create a timely opening to share a relevant piece of our study.

The survey referenced on TechCrunch points to the most popular blogs as ranked by 246 tech PR pros. We took a different approach by analyzing which blogs were most frequently cited by mainstream media* and ranking the top 50 blogs across five categories: Business, Technology, Lifestyle/Entertainment, Gossip and Politics.

For the Technology category, we found that references to blogs in traditional media are concentrated on a few names, particularly TechCrunch, Engadget, and Gizmodo, which received 56% of all technology blog citations among the Power 50. References to the remaining tech blogs in the study were less frequent and more evenly distributed.

It’s interesting that most references to top technology blogs in traditional media featured bloggers’ opinions on an event or topic used in an article. Put another way, the findings tell us that tech bloggers are often treated as expert analysts in their field, something we found to be less common in other categories.

And while business blogs are less frequently cited in traditional media than technology blogs, the findings seem to embody the core of the study. Winning credibility and expertise in this category of blogs is a different and much tougher ball game for a few reasons.

1. Compared to many topics, traditional media tends to have relatively strong coverage of business and finance. The volume, quality, diversity of opinion, and real-time nature of business reporting is unparalleled in traditional media (e.g., does any other industry have anything close to Bloomberg Terminals?), so there may be less of an unmet need for greater amounts of information, delivered faster to consumers of business press.

2. Consumers of blogs and other forms of social media typically consists of a younger demographic than those that typically read the business sections of daily newspapers. Journalists may feel that the inclusion of blog content in their stories could alienate their audience.

3. Prominent business and financial media outlets generally operate under stricter editorial constraints than some publications in other categories due to the nature of the content. Tight parameters around information sourcing narrows the potential universe of citable blogs.

VentureBeat was the most frequently mentioned business blog in traditional media, and its author, Matt Marshall, has written occasional columns for The San Jose Mercury News (those columns were not included in the rankings). [Update: Matt Marshall comments on our study on Venturebeat.] When VentureBeat is mentioned in traditional media, it has usually been used as a source for facts and figures about VC funding of technology startups in San Francisco Bay Area newspapers. The second most often cited business blog, Seeking Alpha (actually an aggregator of blog content) was typically sourced for transcripts of earnings calls and investor meetings by traditional media; its bloggers were rarely quoted in traditional media stories.

While traditional journalists have begun to rely on blogs as sources of news, they’re still warming up to the idea. But still, we’ve come an incredibly long way since bloggers were dismissed as a fringe element or “basement jockeys.”

So what does all of this add up to? Influence can be sliced and diced in several ways, and measuring media prominence is just one angle for approaching the topic. In other cases, intimacy and personal connections via blogs mean more than media references ever could. Since there’s no magic formula, we wanted to kick off a conversation and learn what you think as we roll out the rest of the findings from the study.

Are your favorite technology or business blogs on this list? What do you think the rankings mean and what are the implications (and causes) in each category? Looking forward to your thoughts as we dig further into this discussion in the coming weeks.

Joseph Kingsbury

Text 100

josephk@text100.com

Nils Mork-Ulnes

Context Analytics

nmork-ulnes@context-analytics.com

*100 most circulated U.S. newspapers during a two year cycle between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2008