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The Only Way To Do Social Media Right

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Yeah, Yeah… I know what you’re thinking. Here’s another social media “expert” that’s going to say “this is how you do it”. Actually, I’m not. (As an aside: What does it mean and can anyone really be an “expert” in a field that’s relatively new.)

I, like any other social media person, have my opinions, methods and strategies that I believe work well. I believe these methods work well through many tests and practical implementation. These are, obviously, what I teach and advise. That being said, there are many other social media “experts” that have different opinions, different methods, and different strategies. Whether I agree with them or not is irrelevant. In most cases, when I hear other social media people say “this is how it should be done”, I cringe inside.

Because of the ambiguousness of what it means to be an expert in combination with the fact that this field is constantly changing and new, many dealers (or clients) don’t really know how to judge/evaluate whether a social media consultant/company is “good” at what they do. The easiest way (and how many dealers do it) is to judge a person or company by their own social media presence: How many “likes” do they have? How many followers? Etc.

I personally, don’t believe that either one of these things constitutes a valid assessment point when considering who to partner with in your social media efforts. “Likes” and “followers” can be bought. Does that mean they’re good at what they do? No. It just means they have money to spend. The same philosophy I have in regards to using “likes” to determine the success (or not) for a client’s social media identities applies. You can have a million followers but if none of them would ever do business with you, you’re wasting your breath and your efforts are worthless and a waste of time. If you are a dealer (or business) in Florida, would you pay for traditional advertising in California? Why not? Exactly.

I’m not going to go into what my philosophies are as that’s not the point of this blog post. The point is that there IS no single way to do it right. Numbers of likes and followers or a consultant’s/company’s Klout score don’t mean anything. If you’re looking for a social media partner, for the love of God, please do not use these factors in your decision-making process.

Find a partner who fits well into your company’s strategy, is willing to integrate with your existing marketing, collaborates with you and, most importantly, is willing to make a personalized plan and strategy geared towards your specific audience, not one who fits YOU into THEIR cookie-cutter template process.

If their sales pitch centers around how many “likes” they’ll get you and how many more followers they’ll get you and the reasons they give you for hiring them in any way involves how many likes or followers they have, run away. As fast as you can.

Keep in mind, this person/company is you in the online space. There is no differentiation from a customer’s perspective.

You better be sure that the voice they use is YOURS, not THEIRS.

Bacon + Klout = Winning!

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Wait, bacon? What does yummy bacon have to do with Klout?

For those who don’t know, Klout is a service which supposedly measure a person’s influence on social media. Some have equated it to a social media “credit score”, if you will. Klout has this super-secret, if-we-told-you-we’d-have-to-kill-you algorithm which they use to monitor a person’s connected social media accounts (or public one’s if they don’t have any connected, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) Klout seems to be an increasingly polarizing topic amongst both people I know and blog articles I read.

Take for example, this one which was re-published by CNNMoney and written by John Scalzi who asserts why “Klout scores are possibly evil”, in which he states that “Klout exists to turn the entire Internet into a high school cafeteria, in which everyone is defined by the table at which they sit. And there you are, standing in the middle of the room with your lunch tray, looking for a seat, hoping to ingratiate yourself with the cool kids, trying desperately not to get funneled to the table in the corner where the kids with scoliosis braces and D&D manuals sit.” (It really is a hilarious read.)

Or this one, by Sharon Hayes, titles “10 Reasons Why I Opted Out of Klout”, In which she lists out the many reasons she chose to opt-out of their database…

I have friends who obsess about their Klout scores and I have friends who think Klout is a crock and a complete waste of time.

Here’s my take. I look at, and use Klout in 3 ways. Two of the ways are simple amusement and one is a business tool.

1. The primary way in which I use Klout is as a game, of sorts. When you give someone a +K on a topic (which is saying they influence you on that topic), it gives you the opportunity to tweet out the gift. The fun part comes in where you can alter the tweet so that instead of saying, “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K about the Auto Industry on @klout..”, you can modify it to say “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K about being the super-awesome guy that he is on @klout..” (which I am, thank you). I use this “modifying tweets” in 2 ways. The first is acknowledging people in a positive, reinforcing way (as shown above) and then there is a group of us that like to modify them in a…well, more fun way.. like “I gave @arnoldtijerina a +K for knowing when to hold them and when to fold them on @klout..” Either way, it’s fun and funny.

2. Klout Perks. This is a program in which Klout teams up with companies to offer freebies to influencers. I’ve received some cool freebies through this program so, if for no other reason, free stuff is a good reason in my book to keep your Klout score high.

3. Now, here is where people get polarized. Do I think Klout accurately measures a person’s influence? Sort of. While I know that there are topics in which I am not influential (uh.. like “bacon”.. yes, this is a REAL topic on Klout that I, apparently have some influence in, according to them. The real scoop is that it’s fun to give your friends +K in oddball topics.), I do believe that you can utilize Klout to assist in identifying influencers. Basically, if I were a business and I was looking to leverage my influencers to help spread the word about my service/product and if I were to take all of my Twitter followers and try to figure out which ones are active and influential in social media, it would take 1) time I don’t have and 2) the odds of actually pegging a true influencer would be low. Now, same scenario but I take all my Twitter followers with Klout scores above 50 and target them. While not everyone I target will be an influencer, I have a much higher probability of actually identifying influencers and it took me way less time.

The thing that seems to irk the most people is that Klout is an opt-out service. What that means is that if you have public social media accounts (like Twitter), Klout will have a profile on you whether you’ve signed up for their service or not. If you don’t want one, until recently, you were SOL but now they have created an option in which you can delete your profile. Do I agree with this? Meh. I don’t care. I kind of look at it like if you put it out there publicly, you can’t really get mad when someone monetizes that information. C’mon folks, Klout is a business. They make money by finding and selling lists of influencers to other companies.

However, the one thing that I do know, as Sharon Hayes pointed out in the blog article I referenced earlier in this post, is that as employers give a person’s Klout score more weight and use it in hiring decisions, you better start paying attention. Whether that’s by making sure you have a good score or deleting your profile altogether, you need to act.

As stupid as you may believe it to be I’m fairly confident that you don’t want it to affect your ability to get hired. You may not care what your credit score is either, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t.

How Social Media Campaigns Can Fall Apart

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(originally published on Dealer magazine)

Social Media marketing isn’t just about “doing it.” If you want to succeed, all of the pieces must fit together. You must be committed to doing it.. all of it.. not just some of it.

In this real-life example, I’ll be referring to a few things that I want to define for those unfamiliar with them.

1.       Klout – Klout is a company that measures a person’s social media influence by monitoring their usage and actions from others in relation to it. Think of it like a credit score. The highest score is 100. My Klout is currently 61, which is very good. Klout stated that the average users Klout score is 11.

2.       Klout Perks – Klout Perks is a service offered by Klout to companies that want to target influential social media users. These companies make offers, through Klout Perks, to these users in the hopes that they will talk about it via social media (ie. passes to movie screenings, etc.)

3.       SCVNGR – SCVNGR is a location-based marketing service businesses use to create engagement and drive traffic to their location. Campaigns can be as small or as elaborate as the company wants to make it. Consumers check-in at the business locations and complete specific tasks to earn points towards rewards and/or badges (Think: 20% off your purchase or a free soda, etc)

Now, onto the story…

Subway restaurants recently ran a cross promotion with Warner Brothers for their new movie “The Green Lantern” through SCVNGR. The promotion involved using the SCVNGR mobile app to visit Subway restaurants and complete tasks to earn a free movie ticket to see The Green Lantern. They were only giving out 1,200 tickets so I jumped on it and visited my nearest Subway restaurant two days in a row to complete the tasks necessary to unlock this reward. I did so and SCVNGR delivered to me a free movie ticket (Hey, who doesn’t like free stuff?). Life was good. I liked Subway and appreciated the free movie ticket.

At the same time, Subway was also apparently running a campaign with Klout through their Klout Perks program to offer selected influential social media users a free $10 Subway gift card to try out their newest sub sandwich. That offer was extended to me and I accepted it.I liked Subway even more.

It goes downhill from here…

So, the Subway gift card comes in the mail. I’m not sure who actually sends these gift cards out (whether it’s Klout or Subway), but it comes with postage due of .63 cents. OK, some people make mistakes and I still got $9.37 free food at Subway. No big deal but I tweeted this:

Got offered a $10 @Subway gift card from @KloutPerks and when I got it, it came with $1 in postage due. Still appreciated but funny.

So, I take my wife to see The Green Lantern and, afterwards, decide to visit Subway to use the gift card offer Subway extended to me. I arrive at Subway at 9:50pm and it closes at 10pm. I don’t know off the top of my head what time they close, but I see lights on and I see people inside. As I approach the door, I see the store’s posted hours inform me that they are open until 10pm. When I go to open the door, it’s locked. I get the attention of an employee who comes to the door and informs me that they are closed. I bring it to her attention that it’s not yet 10pm and she tells me that the owner called her and told her to close early. Now remember, there are still people in the store and a couple is even at the counter ordering and, frankly, I don’t believe her.

Frustrated, I go to my car and tweet this:

Went to @Subway before 10pm and they were inside but decided to close early. Said the owner told them to. #fail #lazy #badliars

Frustrated, but still hungry, I left Subway and went to Little Caesars Pizza.

As a social media person, I wanted to see if anyone was paying attention at all, or cared, so I tweeted this:

@Subway @kloutperks Tried to use $10 gift card last night but the employees wouldn’t let me in even though it was 10 minutes b4 closing #fail

Did I ever get a response from either Klout Perks (who was paid to run the promotion) or Subway (who paid to run it)?

No. Not even a peep.

So instead of me tweeting and raving about The Green Lantern movie, the Klout Perks offer from Subway, or their new sandwich which was the whole point of these promotions, what they did was take a customer who engaged them and started happy and turned me into a customer tweeting negative comments. I certainly didn’t hold Subway corporate responsible for the local franchise’s failure, but I did assume that they were active on Twitter so when I heard nothing in response to my concerns, that further frustrated me and left me with the impression that they didn’t care.

The point of this article is to illustrate that merely running a social media campaign in and of itself is not sufficient. If you’re going to enter the social media space at all, you better be prepared to monitor and support the campaign. Failing to do this will result in accomplishing the opposite of what you intended.

The bottom line is that Subway spent money on a social media marketing campaign and Little Caesars Pizza got my money.

(Note: While writing this article, I discovered by chance that while Subway does own the @Subway twitter account, they are not active on it at all. Instead, for whatever stupid reason, they re-direct people from that account to a @subwayfreshbuzz account, which they seem very active on. Why on earth they wouldn’t monitor the other account or, at the very least, monitor mentions of their restaurants is beyond me and a big fail.)

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