How to Find Your Brand’s Influencers

Last week I wrote about how Hootsuite had recently integrated Klout scores into their dashboard, and went on to explain how Klout scores work. I got an interesting comment from Laurent Pfertzel saying:

I think those influencer scores are okay, but lack one very important factor when considering influence: Context. You can’t be an influencer on everything. An influencer in computer security will likely not be an influencer in fashion (well, I should say low probability). So a flat influence score is very meaningless in my view.

I completely agree with this, except that I believe Hootsuite has solved this problem, because now you can search by keyword (context) and Klout score (influence.)

In the example below, I created a keyword search column in Hootsuite for Chick-fil-A, which is a really popular brand on Twitter. Then I used the “Filter By…” feature to sort the people that mentioned Chick-fil-A by Klout Score. Chick-fil-A was mentioned hundreds of times, so if I only had enough time to respond to 20 people I could adjust the “Klout score bar” and set a lower limit. Meaning that I could focus my time on responding to the most influential people talking about Chick-fil-A.

Posted on July 19, 2010 at 3:44 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: , ,

Old Spice: Raising the Bar

I know it’s been over 24 hours since the Old Spice campaign ended, so in the digital world that makes it ancient history, but I still want to write about how genius the team was that created it.

In case you missed it Wednesday, the Old Spice man, Isaiah Mustafa, filmed dozens of short personalized YouTube video responses to comments about Old Spice across networks like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and more. The campaign team had a search engine pulling in comments from all over the Internet and looked for one’s that either:

1. Were written by an influential celebrities or bloggers; and/or…   2. We’re something that the creative team thought they could have fun with…

The result was 87 YouTube videos, of Isaiah Mustafa standing in front of a shower in a towel, on the OldSpice YoutTube Channel giving the most ridiculously hilarious answers you have ever heard.

Responses went to everyone from Allissa Milano, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Peter Shankman, Twitter, Gillette, George Stephanopoulos, Guy Kawasaki, Perez Hilton, Starbucks, Gawker, Pete Rose and dozens of regular people across the Internet. Choosing a favorite is tough, but I really liked his response to Ashton Kutcher – who was responding to the Pete Rose video that preceded his.

Everyone has been talking about the bar this has set for social marketing campaigns. Obviously I agree, Wieden + Kennedy has always produced fantastic campaigns, but I have to give Proctor & Gamble props for stepping back and giving W+K the breathing room they needed to let a rapid viral campaign like this take place. Most companies put up so much red tape that something like this would never be able to happen, but when it comes to the social space agencies everywhere are trying to impress upon their clients the importance of responding in real time. It will be interesting to see what other campaigns will spawn from this.

What did you think of the Old Spice campaign? Do you have a favorite video? Do you think other agencies may have tried this before but got caught up in the red tape?

Posted on July 16, 2010 at 9:48 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: ,

How Klout Scores Work

Hootsuite released new social CRM tools this morning that allow you to filter your keyword and search columns for Twitter by keywords – and even more importantly by influencer. Recently Hootsuite also integrated Klout Scores, a score that measures your influence across the web, into their dashboard metrics. So now, for instance, if you manage a Twitter account for an ice cream brand you can do a search across Twitter for people talking about ice cream and sort these people by their Klout score or influence. This is extremely helpful because community managers no longer have to spend half their time searching for influencers – now audiences can easily be sorted by Klout score and more time can be spent reaching out to people most likely to help you spread your message.

Determining who your brand’s influencers are in the social space has become an increasingly difficult task. The company Klout has come up with one of the most popular ways to measure the influence of users on Twitter with what they call the Klout score. They have a great post to help you better understand the Klout Score, but basically they explain:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score. We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link.

So How Does Your Klout Score Stack Up? The majority of Twitter users have relatively low Klout scores (0-20.) I tweet everyday and share information with my 1,500 followers on a regular basis and only have a Klout score of 32. So I thought it would be interesting to see where the big Twitter celebrities ranked:

I thought it was interesting that Lebron James had such a high score (85) seeing as he created his account a week ago, has only 11 updates and is only following one person. Justin Bieber is dominating with a perfect Klout score of 100. Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian are not too far behind him although they have always been major players on Twitter.

What do you think of the Klout Score formula? Do you think it is a good judge of influence or do you use another process to determine who will best share you information?

Posted on July 13, 2010 at 7:11 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: ,

2 Helpful Things to Know About Hootsuite 5

Woke up this morning to a new and improved Hootsuite 5! I’ve been playing with it all day and love the new features. Although I had trouble with a few things at first – I think I have it all figured out now. Noticed a lot of others having the same issues, so save yourself some time by checking them out below.

1. “RT” vs. Native RT: Hootsuite added the Native “Auto” RT functionality (in addition to the original “RT @username”) to their platform. However as of this morning the RT button defaults to Auto RT instead of the original ”RT @username.” Hootsuite addressed the RT Settings issues. The screen shot below pretty much sums it up though. So just make sure to uncheck the box marked below in red if you want to go back to the original settings.

2. How to Add Links to Your Facebook Page Posts: One of Hootsuite’s most requested features was finally added. Now you can schedule AND add images to your Facebook page posts. I love this feature, but it was a little difficult to figure out how to get the images in the post at first.

There are lots of new features available thanks to the new HTML5 user interface, including:

Posted on June 24, 2010 at 7:29 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Blogging, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: 

NASCAR Drivers on Twitter

If you work with brands in social media you are going to have to get involved with NASCAR at some point. NASCAR is all over Twitter – the drivers, driver’s girlfriends, teams, sponsors, races, tracks, NASCAR pundits and fans make up thousands of influnetial accounts and Tweet millions of Tweets each day. Here is a list I put together of all the different accounts, starting with the drivers. If the account below is not verified it is the most legit account I could find for the driver – otherwise I didn’t list one. As always let me know if you see anything missing or outdated.