What to Make of Klout’s Updated Interface

Klout recently updated their offering to incorporate a new level of content curation and guidance. Now, when you log in to Klout, you are taken to a new homepage titled ‘Create and share great content’, which lists blog posts sourced by Klout that match the topics you’ve chosen as your primary focus categories within your Klout profile. On each post, there is an option to share, along with buttons to ‘Show me more content like this’ and some basic stats on highly shared posts, which are noted as ‘On the rise’. On the left sidebar, there are now three pages – ‘Create’, ‘Schedule’ and ‘Measure’ (Measure being the former log-in homepage). ‘Schedule’ lets you see all the posts you’ve shared from the ‘Create’ listing, which you can then assign and schedule based on your preferences.

On Klout’s official blog, there’s an explanation on how the new system ‘intelligently recommends content that will strike a chord with your unique set of friends, fans, and followers’. The process is designed to help you share great content at the best times to maximise reach and engagement, whilst also highlighting topics that are resonating with your target audience, enabling you to create your own content around that subject. Whilst the endeavour is excellent and is a necessary expansion of Klout’s business model in order to secure future growth as a product offering, something about the new Klout doesn’t sit right. There seems to be a conflict in this approach, a counteractive element, like pushing two magnets of the same polarity together – no matter what you do, the two just won’t connect.

Vanity Metrics and the Criticism of Klout

Klout scores have long been criticised as a little more than a vanity metric. Many people are opposed to influence metrics like Klout due to the inevitably subjective nature in which they are calculated. The alternative to this is focussing on follower and friend /‘Like’ counts, which, as we know, can also be cheated, making it hard to determine the best measure of actual influence. Klout, of all the influence metrics, is the best known and (arguably) most widely accepted, with an increasing number of businesses taking Klout score into account when looking at ways to best reach their audiences. Whilst criticism of the metrics will continue, it’s safe to say Klout scores will be around for the long term, and with the fake profile industry on the rise, influence metrics will get more focus as social business further advances into the mainstream.

The Best Measurement of Influence

So what’s the best measurement of influence? You may have a million followers, but that’s useless if none of them are interacting with your content. Given time, most people would be able to gain a huge follower or friend count through reciprocal etiquette, so focussing on that number is not going to be the best measurement of influence. Real influence needs to take into account interactions and engagement with both your profile and your content, which can be difficult as not everyone who shares your content will include a link back to one of your social media identities. One of Klout’s strongest points is the amount of profiles that can be linked into it’s algorithm in order to make it most representative of a person’s social media activity. It’s not 100%, but nothing is. While some may argue it’s not the best measurement of influence, it is indicative enough for many users, and Klout is always looking to increase their data points and measurement to improve their system.

The Conflict of Insider Guidance

But here’s the conflict of Klout’s new offering. The idea of a Klout score is that it shows your influence in social media – an objective view, based on mathematical calculations of your activity, producing a single number representative of your influence. Many people trust that number and act on it accordingly, ensuring they connect with relevant influencers. But what if Klout told you how to be an influencer? Would that make you an expert? Sure, if you follow the advice offered on the new platform and share relevant content at the best times you’re likely to see increases in your Klout score – but is that how it should work? Should you be able to log-in and share 10 relevant posts per day – which requires no actual knowledge, or even reading, on your behalf – and increase your score to the point where you are moving into that influencer range, regardless of your personal understanding of that industry? I’m sure Klout’s counter-argument to this is that by sharing content alone you will not be able to generate high Klout scores, as it requires further interaction, but that that interaction could be relatively minor, and the biggest part of your influence building strategy could be just following the advice of Klout’s curation feed to increase your overall score. In most cases, this won’t happen, but it’s like becoming an artist via paint-by-numbers – you follow these steps and you will create art. That’s not how it should work, right?

Of course, Klout are really just incorporating functionality available to anyone via any other content curation application, of which there are quite a few, so it’s not like people couldn’t utilise this info to inflate their influence without Klout's new features, but as noted, there does seem to be a conflict in the arbitrator working as an advisor. There is also an inherent issue in social media platforms where the need to expand the business model requires change which, inevitably, won’t be universally popular (as you’re altering the functionality people have grown to love). Platforms need to build and incorporate new elements in order to prosper, and the key question, really, is ‘does this add value to Klout’s offering?’ You’d have to say it does. If people are going to take Klout scores into account when making a decision on how they address communications to or from that entity, and this process which clearly details how you can improve that variable, then yes, this is a valuable addition. But it does seem conflicted – the referee telling you tricks to beat the rules.

Aside from these concerns, the platform looks great and the interface is easy to use – functionally, it’s solid, and I’ve already noticed a lot of ‘klou.t’ shortened URLs in people’s tweets, so it’s obviously being put to use. And while there may be moral concerns with these additions, all this functionality is available elsewhere either way, so it’s not likely to fuel any long-term negative sentiment. But for me, that conflict just raises a flag. Maybe it waters down the authority of that two-digit influence number, just a little bit. Maybe it weakens their core offering. Just slightly.

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How to Find Your Online Reputation Score

As a prudent business owner, you’ve likely taken the time and necessary measures to build your credit rating as you understand that a high credit score provides your company with certain advantages such as better terms with your suppliers and a lower cost to borrow money. Well, there is another critical score that business owners need to pay attention to, and that is known as an online reputation score.

With more consumers than ever turning to the Internet to research products and services before making a purchase, your company’s online reputation can either help or hurt the opportunity to earn more business. For this reason, several online reputation management tools have evolved to not only help businesses build their image online, but also to maintain it in a positive light and recover any issues that may occur. In the past, online reputation management was something that only larger companies had the budgets to accommodate; however, since it has become increasingly affordable, many small businesses are also now monitoring how public perceives their brands on the internet.

There are several great resources out there that your business can take advantage of to determine its online reputation score and learn about areas that it could improve upon. Business Insider recently highlighted a few of these resources, and I recommend that you check them out to see how your own business matches up:

• Klout: This score uses a scale of 1 to 100 and is primarily based off of how influential your business is on the internet. The more influential you are and the more online reach you have, the higher your Klout score will be. For example, a public figure like President Barack Obama has a Klout score of 99, and this score was determined based off of his active Facebook and Twitter accounts (and the number of fans and followers that he has on these sites) as well as having the most important Wikipedia page online. According to Klout, the average score is 40.
• PeerIndex: For many businesses, their primary goal of using social media is to define themselves as an authority figure in their industry. If this is your objective, knowing your PeerIndex online reputation score is important. This score, too, is based on a scale of 1 to 100 and essentially measures your online authority by determining how your audience values the content that you share.
• PeerREACH: This tool is unique from other online reputation management resources in that it rates your business based on the quality of followers that you have on various social media channels.

To truly manage your online reputation, business owners should take a proactive approach and actively monitor the online discussions taking place online.  Whether it’s social media, review sites, or blogging, being on top of the online discussion can help turn negative conversations into positive customers.

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5 Advanced Social Media Metrics for 2013

As any metrics-obsessed marketer can attest, a campaign is only as successful as you can prove it to be. But beyond flaunting your progress for the benefit of hovering clients and executives, social media reporting can lead to valuable insights to inform not just your social campaigns, but your marketing strategy as a whole.

Read on to learn five advanced tracking techniques that may be missing from your current reporting strategy and how they can serve to improve your overall campaign.

1. Define and Track Conversions

Although I always remind clients that social media is a way to connect with users first and score conversions second, it’s never long into our dialog before the conversation reroutes to the question decision-makers love to ask: “What’s the bottom line?”

So, let’s begin with the basics: What’s a conversion, and how do you track it?

A conversion occurs anytime a consumer or client does what you want them to do. This could be buying an item from your site, visiting your brick-and-mortar store, joining your mailing list, watching the video on your homepage, or calling your 800 number, among other possibilities.

Some conversions are easier to track than others; while it’s pretty easy to set up eCommerce and Goal Tracking on Google Analytics, finagling a brick-and-mortar customer into remembering where they heard about your deal on widgets is another story.

Some ideas to step up your tracking game:

A. Conversion Paths

Google Analytics’ Top Conversion Paths feature (found under Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels) makes it easy to see contributing sources to your tracked conversions, not the just the direct source they visited right before converting. This is a great way to appreciate the value of a strategy like social media, which can be an important component to the conversion process.

In the screenshot below, I searched “social” on analytics to bring all of the social networking results to the top of the list. Now, I can see that my website has received 156 conversions with social media components in the last month for a total profit of $380.

B. Outside the Box

Just because a conversion cannot be monitored on Google Analytics does not mean it cannot be monitored at all. For brick-and-mortar scenarios, consider providing a printable coupon that can be tracked in the store, or simply imploring shoppers to say “Facebook” at checkout for a small discount. You can also try marketing for one location at a time so your other locations can serve as control cases.

2. Segment Your Ad Data

When my company was just getting started with Facebook advertising, the barrage of data was understandably overwhelming and we tended to cling to certain critical stats, which are indications of success: Cost Per Fan (CPF), Cost Per Click (CPC), Click-Through Rate (CTR), etc. However, each campaign has its own distinct challenges, variables, and success rates, and lumping them together into net data points can lead to some deceiving results.

For example, assume you have a CPF of $.35 for your current ads. This is a pretty good rate, but when you look further, you realize that your ads targeting women in their twenties rake in a CPF of $.05, while your campaign for middle-aged men has a CPF for $.70. In this scenario, it would make sense to put more of your budget to the $.05 CPF ads (assuming you’re OK with an influx of chicks) while continuing to experiment with your $.70 CPF ads on a smaller budget.

You can segment your ads by many different factors, including age, gender, location, interest, product line, and landing page/app.

3. Harness Your Email Service Provider (ESP)

One of my favorite things to do with a social media campaign is to collect email addresses through a promoted giveaway. It works like this:

Step 1: Pick a prize at least $200 in value of interest to your target demographic.

Step 2: Create targeted ads that promote said giveaway.

Step 3: Ads lead users to a custom application (example pictured) requesting their name and email. The app should include a checkbox where users can indicate that they would like to sign up for email marketing updates.*

At the end of your giveaway, which I recommend you run for about a month, you should have a collection of targeted email addresses for your marketing pleasure. If you’re new to email marketing, try out MailChimp, which is free for up to 2,000 email addresses.

Why email? Email marketing continues to have the highest ROI in online marketing, because when a user opts in to your email list, they are giving you a major vote of confidence. Store your social media campaigns as distinct lists on your ESP to compare your return from various demographics, while benefiting from additional data points such as open rates and clicks.

This same method can be used on social networks beyond Facebook as well, as long as you are leading users to an email opt-in entry form.

*This last part is important! It’s better to have a smaller list of prospects interested in your email blasts than a sprawling array of people who only wanted to win a free whatever.

4. Leverage Advanced Tracking Tools

Share of Voice (SOV) and Influence are two of the newest — and most important — metrics in social media.

A. Share of Voice

SOV calculates your company’s slice of your industry’s social media pie. This metric concerns brand mentions, so it incorporates content authored by you and your competitors, along with content by the general public. To calculate your SOV, take the quotient of your brand’s total mentions over the total mentions of all the brands in your industry.

Browsing your general SOV across social channels can be a good way to get a sense how you’re stacking up against competitor groups. For even more telling results, partition your SOV by network to review missed opportunities on a site-by-site basis. As an example, you might have a 20% SOV in general, but only 5% on YouTube, which would mean you need to step up your video game.

To monitor your SOV, consider paid solutions such as Radian6, Spiral16, or Scoutlabs, or get started with SocialMention, which is free.

B. Influence

Influence is essentially the PageRank of the social media world, and it serves as an important statistic, especially in the context of the bottom line. Measured for both users and brands, Influence quantifies the extent to which an entity’s shared content can affect the behavior of other users.

There are a couple major players in the Influence world, each of which measures things a bit differently. Compare yourself and your brand with competitors on Kred, Klout, and PeerIndex to see what insights can be gained.

Other potential metrics in the Influence vein include community sentiment (are your fans and followers happy? sad? neutral?), community size, and level of engagement.

5. Invest in PPC Remarketing

Remarketing — or as I like to call it, legal stalking — is one of Google AdWords’ coolest innovations to date, but a lot of marketers forget to incorporate it into their social media strategies. In case you are unfamiliar, remarketing is a way to reach out to users that have previously visited your website using visual ads on the Google Display Network. This is accomplished by embedding Google’s Remarketing tag on the pages of your site; you can have one general tag for your whole site, or correlate specific ads with specific pages — so people who visit your digital camera page can see more ads about digital cameras, for example, rather than ads cover all of your products.

Since Facebook applications are just iFrames (i.e., external pages coded and designed by you), these can also be used to house Remarketing code, allowing you to turn visitors to your Facebook page into visitors to your site.

Google AdWords offers a host of its own metrics; you can try out different Remarketing lists with different apps and demographics, and compare your results and conversions to shape your strategy moving forward.

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5 Tips for Integrating Social Media Into Your Next Business Event

As more and more brands look to socialize their events, marketers need to integrate social media into the fabric of the event from the very beginning of the planning process. An integrated, holistic approach will trigger the best results — where social is the thread that touches all elements of the event, from beginning to end.

1. The #hashtag is your BFF. What seems like the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind is also the easiest to do wrong. The hashtag is the connecting thread in the social strategy to amplify your event. It works across most social networks, and consumers know how it works. If you’re clever enough not to automatically do #BrandName or #EventName, then it can grow some legs above and beyond your event staff.

Live on-site tweeting works well for entertainment and music events and is a great tool to handle customer service, answer questions and provide updates in real-time. Twitter wall? It’s not 2010 anymore, but it can still valuable if it works with your overall activation. Foursquare is an amazing asset to provide the socially aggressive attendee a special perk for checking in at your event, but don’t promote it if there’s no benefit. Instagram allows pictures to tell the story for you.

2. Online interaction affects event setup. Whether it’s consumer-driven or B2B, every event has a group of people who are invited and a smaller group of people who actually attend. Social media is the one tool that allows us to cultivate both groups simultaneously and individually. In the time leading up to the event, wouldn’t it be cool if attendees could choose the cocktail selection? Or how about the DJ lineup for the night? Run simple promotions on Facebook and Twitter and give your social communities the power to control their event experiences.

For those at home, let them see what’s happening with real-time updates, but also take it one step further and give them the power to affect the on-site activities. Concert promoters have been smart about this by letting consumers pick song orders and even which artists they should add to the concert lineup.

3. Social influence provides VIP rewards. Most events have the general audience and a VIP section — VIP can mean a lot of different things to different people, but for our purposes, we’ll define VIP as someone who has social value and brings a certain level of clout. Enter Klout, an online tool that uses an algorithm to measure a person’s influence on the social graph. The higher the Klout score, the more likely that person is influencing the people in their social network. Reward your high-scoring attendees with VIP perks like cut-the-line privileges, open bar, and preferred seating, and watch how quickly your event becomes positively viral.

4. Product trials provide social currency. Sure, you can hire attractive brand ambassadors to serve sample sizes on-site, but that method alone isn’t enough anymore. Reward consumers who are willing to take a leap of faith and try something new with special event access, music downloads, free refreshments, etc. Allow them to walk away with a level of social currency that encourages them to bring your event — and more importantly, your brand — into their online conversation and network of connections, even after the event is over.

5. Social validation is fun! Events are meant to be fun — that’s why consumers attend them and it’s why most of us got into the event business. Your event should be socially friendly across all relevant social networks in a way that works for your event. Give your attendees the social authority and tools to broadcast across their social graph, and just watch how quickly your event’s social marketing grows.

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Where Are These Influencers, Anyway?

Influencer marketing. Influencer targeting. Influencer outreach. Influencers, influencers, influencers. We keep hearing about how important they are to our brand and why we need them. But, where do we find them?

Don’t panic yet, the first thing to grasp is that influencers almost always operate a blog and searching for bloggers is the easiest way to find influencers. And, the nice thing about bloggers is that they also tend to be very active on various forms of social media so aligning with them gets your positive mention spouted across many channels. Score.

Another thing to grasp is that an influencer is a contextual fit for your brand, not something that can be quantified by Twitter followers of Klout. Numbers cannot tell us what their audience looks to them for. Your judgment can tell you this however. So, influencers our found by searching for a genre and niche that you want to expose your brand to. Of course you want your influencer to have “reach,” but should just be a starting point, not the defining factor.

Once you’ve honed in on the genre and niche to target, it’s time to pick which blogger outreach tool you are going to use to locate your influencers.

Google blog search is the best free option but if you are going to be doing a lot of influencer targeting then you want to check out a tool like GroupHigh (Full Disclosure: I work with GroupHigh). GroupHigh allows you to customize your influencer targeting by filtering your results by keywords, Twitter followers, MozRank and 20 other options.

One of the most obvious places to look is to the customers who are already advocating for your brand. Incentivize them or at least thank them for their efforts and recommendations. A shout out will make them a lot more likely to keep up the good work!

Lastly, research is showing that the most influential people for brands are actually the midlevel bloggers. Because these people have a smaller audience, they can nurture their relationships a little more which makes their audience tend to be very loyal.

Bloggers, contextually aligned writers, advocates and midlevel bloggers! Where have you found influencers for your brand?

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• Klout Launches New Business Tools
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• Social Media Management Tool: A Review of Sprout Social in 2013
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Building Social Media Communities

So many people ask me what my secret is: to my Klout score (77), to my followers (43.5k), and to my acknowledged influence online, for what it's worth. They wonder how I gamed Klout, where I bought my followers, and what PR firm got me into Forbes. Well, there surely are shortcuts and you can, apparently, game Klout and buy followers, friends, and Like, and all of that -- and I have tried out many of them over time -- but I don't believe that growing and pruning Twitter followers or paying money for followers and Likes actually builds a social media community. Surely, all that buying and gaming does something, to be sure, but it's not community. Maybe bragging rights, maybe access to perks, or maybe just to establish to the people in your space that you're really a social media player and not someone who ignored social media as an essential aspect of your organization until last Thursday (I mean, how could you be this far into 2012 and not have over 10,000 followers? How can it almost be the end of the Mayan Calendar and you don't even have a Twitter account? How about we just open one and buy you 100,000 followers just to get you started. Right?)

Community is something different. And I believe that Google, in its charming Vulcan way, is finally starting to understand what virtual online community really is (and isn't) and how to bestow holy holy Google Juice on the denizens of the Internet that have committed to moving in, staying, taking up residency and then committing to citizenship. Those are the people, sites, companies, communities, and organizations that I believe Google is trying to hard to identify and then favor. But since Google has a tin ear when it comes to who's gold-digging, who's using, who's being an opportunist, who's being a fair-weather friend, and who's actually true blue, it has taken a while for everything to come together. And, thought it isn't yet perfect, they're getting closer and closer.

And, if your ears perked up when you started to read that Google is really starting to favor all those who are deeply committed to connecting, engaging, relating, sharing, commenting, helping, aiding, and responding online -- and all of their various and sundry blogs, sites, platforms, and social networking site profiles to boot -- then you're going to have a hard time. Why? Because you really shouldn't care at all about SEO or Google or your Klout or Kred right now, you should care, instead, only about your natural allies, your natural prospects, people in your vertical, the folks who already love you to death, the folks who don't get you at all, and also the folks who frigging hate you, for whatever reason. And then there's the next step, which is hard.

First, you have to acknowledge the fact that every single follower, friend, Like, and +1 you acquire represents a human soul who has committed to participating in your folly (and yes I understand how many spambots, fake accounts, Perlscripts, codeballs, and hectares of outsourced, unengaged, human clickfarms exist in the world, I am not naive. But these people will never and can never become anything akin to your online family, your online community).

What would I do if I were to do it again?

Well, what I would do is simple: I would first leverage the real relationships I already have. Every social media platform worth its salt allows you to shamelessly exploit all of your webmail contacts that you have collected over the last decade as well as all of the real friends that you, personally, may have already earned on Facebook. And you need to take it all the way, too: don't just follow all the folks who are already on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook; you need to invite all of your personal and professional friends to come to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ (and others) just for you. If you cannot do this then you're really not willing to put enough skin in the game -- you're not willing to put your own personal reputation at risk in order to move your professional brand forward. This means you're probably either a hypocrite or maybe know that you'll eventually do something shady or short-game on social media that you really don't want to be tracked back to you social media fingerprints -- shame on you.

Everyone you'll ever connect with in your online virtual community are indeed real people: with hopes, dreams, fears, skepticism, concern, trust issues, and the like. It's really best that you invite the people you really do know first so that you'll always think twice before you engage with your community in a way that suggests you consider them -- your followership and "friends" -- to be just a professional asset.

There are so many social media marketing articles online these days that are putting dollar numbers on what each friend, follower, Like, and +1 means -- similar to the valuation that direct mail marketers put on addresses and emails. Unlike this valuation that's based on conversion and past performance, the numbers that you have been and will be able to collect are on an equal playing field. I am not naive: yes, you can sometimes convert them to joining, buying, clicking, Liking, and +1ing; however, they're also just as likely to throw your Marketing Grenade right back over the wall back at you.

When you're working on developing an online community, every social media action has an equal or greater reaction -- these are not just numbers, assets, chattel that you can collect and collect and collect until you decide to seize the moment -- carpe diem! -- activating them to do something awesome, buy all your stuff, and change your world -- and bank account -- forever.

Also, like real friends, you cannot just collect them, you need to befriend them. They need to ask you favors and then you need to ask them favors; they'll ask you for help and guidance and you'll do the same. Little things, big things, again and again, for different folks, the same folks. You need to build this community the same way you would a muscle at the gym. You cannot just collect all these folks in a box just awaiting the perfect moment when you can let them loose on whatever you've been planning forever. Tacit and weak connections are just that. Really becoming chums is something else. Don't worry, you don't need to become chums with everyone who follows and befriends you -- most of the folks you'll interact with online don't actually want to become your BFF.

Most folks who follow you don't want to get married

The majority of the interactions I have with brands on a daily basis is superficial. Most of the interaction that folks have had with my brand has been superficial too. When I reach out to @KLMof Twitter, it's to see what' going on with my flight out of Schiphol. I don't expect much, just timely information. When @KLM offers to spot me some time in their club or buy me a coffee or something, that's terrific (and I am always easily bought); however, getting my question answered in a timely manner and to my expectations is what I really want -- the rest if just garnish and appeasement (I love garnish).

Actively listening to your online community is way more important than sharing

80% of all of your interactions online should involve some sort of listening and that can indeed include commenting, retweeting, Liking, starring, Listing, +1ing, reblogging, and just thanking someone for including you in a #FollowFriday post or for retweeting something from the shameless and self-interested 20% of sharing and marketing and content-producing you do when you're not 80% listening. Being grateful is one of the best things one can be when nobody gets paid a livable wage to read your updates, to share your posts, or to include you in anything. No matter how rockstar you are, you need to go out of your way to search out, find, engage with, and thank all the folks who mention you, your space, your vertical, your products, company, or services.

Growing your sphere of influence, Olly Olly Oxen Free!

Once I have brought all the real people I know into the fold -- not just from my personal address books but also from my current client base (by letting everyone who comes to your store, reads your emails, sees and hears your commercials, receives a circular, or is on your email list) -- you need to go poaching.

What I mean by poaching is to say, you need to act like a honey bee or an ant and you need to go foraging, looking for new followers. Some of the popular ways is to find out what sort of hashtags your industry, vertical, product or service uses to communicate amongst themselves. Same thing with message boards, Lists, Groups, Listservs, Pages, and whatnot. The great thing about the Internet and all of these simple-to-use social media platforms is that folks tend to create their own ad hoc communities when they cannot find them, easily and quickly, ready-made.

So, spending some time exploring Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo and Google Groups, Email Lists, and the magic world of message boards and forums is an essential way of getting to know the context of the world you've just elbowed your way into. Beware: every single community I have mentioned behave a little like a very tight-knit family: always go in submissive and make a point of quickly identifying a Majordomo -- a tribal elder, high-poster, list or board owner, etc. If you would like to engage in conversations that are happening in a message board or an email list, engage the owner first and tell him or her what you're up to and ask for some advice. Jumping in, all jazz hands and spittle, without knowing their context, their history, etc -- and without them knowing you -- is even more dangerous than you can ever imagine.

Also, no matter how sarcastic and edgy you perceive the folks in that message board or list, it's certainly not an indication that you're allowed to be an ass. Come on, you already know that. You and your friends are allowed to call each other chowderheads -- because you're already madly in love with each other. If you're with your childhood bodies who already know you're the chowderhead they love and trust and some unknown comes walking in and joins the dozens game of taking the Mickey that you're playing on each other, the outcome is likely to include an ambulance and a carpet cleaning service that specializes in blood stains (OK, I will admit it: my friends and I are, indeed, feral and violent).

Well, when it comes to the online world, the outcome probably won't be as Shakespearian as it would be if it were in person but it could surely be even more tragic: folks who are done wrong by some git who disrespect their online community are generally the most sophisticated Internet users out there. While the bruises and the black eye that could happen in your real-life spanking will surely heal; the whipping you can get online may never go away in the form of negative search results, bad reviews, and "I Hate You" blogs that could very well be created and populated en masse by all of the savvy nerds you invaded without asking permission.

Simply put: if the hive doesn't recognize you, it's like poking it with a stick: don't be surprised that when you poke a hive you get stung. Poor form. The solution's easy and the analogy is easier.

How do you behave when you attend a party you weren't directly invited to?

What I do is this: I bring a nice bottle of wine or some beer. I dress as well as I think the nicest-dressed invitee will but no nicer. When I arrive, I ask around to find out who the host is and find him or her immediately. When I meet the host, I tell them why I am there: "Mike told me about the party and said it was OK to attend without him" or "Mike asked me to come and meet me here, but I just wanted to meet the host first" or "I live down the street and noticed there was a party going on and I thought I would stop by." I then offer the wine or beer. I then spend as much time with just the host as makes sense, just so the host feels comfortable having me in his or her home and around valuables and friends and family. Only then do I grab a drink or wink at pretty people or take to the schmooze. Thing is, there's really no reason to bullshit the host. If you are there because you're looking to meet the neighbors because you've got a dog-walking service, let the host know and see if it's OK to hit up his guests. If you're really honest and the host likes you, there's a pretty good chance that the host will take you by your elbow and walk you around to all the folks at the party who have dogs, introducing you to each of them, telling them your story on your behalf. That's the perfect scenario.

And I do exactly the same thing when it comes to infiltrating communities I have not been invited to. I used the word "infiltrate" intentionally instead of "join" because so many marketing douchebags have rudely and shamelessly crashed parties without any care or respect for the community -- turn on any teen movie and you'll see something quite similar in action (I am thinking about the party scene in Mean Girls). So, while you may very well be as well-intentioned as can be, folks are not going to trust you right way. By virtue of being in communications, marketing, sales, or in any way wanting to evangelize or promote you or your brand anywhere, you're immediately guilty, in the dog house -- in quarantine -- until you can prove yourself innocent.

I had every intention of geeking out and sharing some tools and step-by-step processes that one can use in order to engage online; however, I really think the first step has more to do with being willing to allow the folks with whom you're engaging in your brand new, bouncing baby social media empire to be human: hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, concerns, and issued with being treated like a honeydew aphid, farmed only for its sweet nectar by certain types of ants in some mutualistic relationship, where the aphid is the nameless, faceless follower and the ant is the opportunistic marketer.

In fact, communities are so used to being abused that you'll be surprised and insulted by the level of caution, dread, and mistrust you'll wander into, even if your intentions are pure and you're just looking for ways to discover, engage, and help folks online. Because of the people who came before you, it'll most likely always be an uphill battle.

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Bing Adds Klout As An Influencer and Vice Versa

Klout and Bing have teamed up to include Klout Scores and influential topics into the Social Sidebar. After performing a Bing search, the "People Who Know" section of the Social Sidebar will now include people Klout believes to be influential about the topic you searched.

Bing believes this will help people connect with the right experts. From the pop-up that appears, you can click through to the influencer's Klout Profile or directly to topics the person influences.

Conversely, over on Klout, some people will notice new items to their Klout profile, courtesy of Bing. Klout will measure two data points from Bing that will be showcased in the "Moments" area.

Influences who appear more often in the Social Sidebar as a result of Search will be recognized for it on Klout. According to the Klout blog, if you have linked your Wikipedia account on Klout, your "profile will also be rewarded for the frequency [you] are searched on Bing." Klout also announced they will continue to add signals generated from Bing searches.

All this year, Bing has slowly been integrating social into search. It started early in May when Bing introduced a Social Sidebar, adding Facebook friends to search results without directly interfering with the results. Bing expanded its Facebook reach in August adding Friend Tagging and Photo Searching to the Social Sidebar. Along the way, the question-asking social network Quora was also added to the Social Sidebar.

Quora, Facebook and Twitter profiles of "People Who Know" and "Friends Who Know" are still available as links from the pop-up. The addition of Klout profiles has not interfered with the unique layout.

According to an announcement on the Klout Blog, a meeting between the two companies a few months ago illustrated just how aligned their visions of online identity overlapped. This is only the first step of the two companies combining efforts.

According to both companies, this is a true partnership between the two companies. This partnership includes a strategic investment in Klout by Bing aimed at strengthening social influence data on both company's platforms. Usually quiet about strategic plans, both companies are announcing proudly there will be more information sharing coming.

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5 tips on how to improve your Klout score

You may or may not know about Klout, a San Francisco startup that identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence. The company is best known for its Klout score, a a number between one and 100 that represents an individual’s overall social media influence based on his or her ability to mobilize action on social networks.

In the past I’ve been critical regarding the validity of Klout scores. Too many highly influential people that I knew ranked lower than striving social media amateurs. There seemed to be too much emphasis on creating as much noise as possible rather than quality online content. And Justin Bieber was the only user to have a perfect score of 100, a score higher than even that of President Obama. Something wasn’t right in the Klout universe.

And just as I was ready to drop the service completely, the guys at Klout showed us all that they took our feedback to heart and officially announced some significant changes to their algorithm.

Klout increases its social & online signals by 400%

So what’s different about Klout today?

First, Klout now processes more than 2.7 billion pieces of information a day and its algorithm takes into account 400 different signals, unlike previously when it was about 100. In addition, signals which originally came only from Twitter, now come from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Wikipedia. Today the science behind the Klout score examines variables beyond your number of followers and friends. It looks at who is engaging with your content and who they are sharing it with.

Klout now takes a lot more into account, including Facebook mentions, likes, comments, Twitter

retweets, mentions, Google+ comments, +1’s, LinkedIn connections, recommenders, Foursquare tips you left, and of course +K’s given to users on Klout for specific categories of expertise, and many more factors.

Klout has more recently begun to incorporate “real-world” influence into their metrics by evaluating Wikipedia data to help determine the actual influence one person may have. They are also in the process of releasing a new version of their website and service which is going to include metrics like “Moments” which highlight your most successful social media posts.

Here’s why the score matters — and how to improve yours

So why should you care? Because:

• Klout is getting more and more widely used by others to measure your influence. If your score is 16, then people will think less of you. No matter how you feel about that. It’s a fact.
• Klout is already teaming up with brands to reward people based on their influence in certain categories.

Connect all your social media — and be active on your social media channels

And what can you do to improve your score?

1. Connect all your social media — and I mean all of them. The more influence you show you’ve got online, the better.
2. Be active on your social media channels – the more you engage, comment, tweet and respond, the better.
3. Make your engagement count – post interesting, relevant content that others will want to share with their network and discuss. No one wants to discuss what you had for lunch.
4. Don’t neglect any of your social media accounts – make sure you’re consistently active on the connected social networks and continue to stay somewhat influential in all of them.
5. Create online relationships. Hand a few +K’s to others, engage in discussion on others’ profiles and pages. These actions will serve you well both in increasing your online engagement levels and will also heighten your chance of receiving +K’s from others.

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Klout unveils updated scoring system

Have you checked your Klout Score lately? If not, now is the time to do it. Influence-measurement platform Klout rolled out major changes to its algorithm on Tuesday.

The new Score factors in more data points (12 billion vs. 1 million) and social signals than before (400 vs. 100), to include a user’s actions on Twitter, Google+, Foursquare, Facebook, and LinkedIn, the +K they have received (capped every 90-day measurement cycle), and real-world influence, with Wikipedia as a new primary data source.

This explains why Canadian Justin Bieber’s grade on the site has decreased by 8 points:

Although [he] is one of the most influential celebrities on Twitter, his Wikipedia page has lower importance than those of people like Barack Obama. Previously, Justin had the distinction of being the only person with a perfect 100 Klout Score. With this update, his Score drops from 100 to 92. (Source: Klout)

However, accuracy is not the only thing that matters. The Klout team has also been working towards making the scoring system more transparent by adding a new feature called “Moments”:

“This feature displays the content and ideas that have been most influential across all of your networks, all in one place,” says Joe Fernandez, the CEO and co-founder of Klout, on the company's blog. “Moments will also help you see interaction patterns emerge that can help you shape your influence and improve the quality of your ideas.”

Finally, the Klout website has been redesigned, but is currently only available to small number of users. Everyone should be able to access it within the next few weeks.

"This update marks the next phase of Klout’s evolution into the dynamic, engaging platform of understanding and insight that I envisioned,” Fernandez continues. “Our ongoing vision is to help everyone discover and be recognized for their influence. Your ideas are more powerful than you can imagine, and with these updates to Klout, we are taking a step towards helping you understand that influence and better create ideas that shape the world around you.”

San Francisco-based Klout’s previous major scoring system update had occurred in October 2011 and triggered a huge amount of public complaints.

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