Klout is one of the few companies in the tech world right now where users are comfortable giving the usernames to all their social networks. This is VERY significant because most of these networks contain public information and once you know that this Twitter account and this Facebook account is the same person, you can get a complete profile picture of this person with knowledge of only one network.

So how does Klout make money from all of this? If Klout utilizes the same technology that enterprise listening tools are using (e.g. Sysomos, Radian6) and analyzes a person’s entire public profile to fully understand who they are, what they are interested in and what their true influence is, Klout can have a better understanding of a particular person than any other company on the web.

Here is where the money comes in. Media companies are spending billions of dollars a year marketing to you via banner and text ads around the web. Major ad management companies (e.g. Doubleclick) have cookies on every site and are tracking you across the web. They already know where you visit and what you click on but they don’t know anything about what you’re interested in and who you interact with. See where I’m going?

Klout can add a layer of social data (no personal info such as name and contact info but more like interests and influential reach) that can help better target costumers across the web. CTRs (click-through-rates) will soar based on this Advanced Contextual Targeting. Advertisers will be happier. Consumers will get more targeted ads. Klout will be worth billions.

Photo by neoporcupine on Flickr

Gary Vaynerchuk recently said on Techcrunch TV that “99.5% of social media experts are clowns.” His comments were quickly rebuked by many from the social media expert community including Dani Klein with his tweet “@garyvee I’m a big fan, but your comments re: “social media experts = clowns” do nothing to help grow our industry & are somewhat insulting.” Gary then responded with a video on his own site clarifying his remarks about how there isn’t enough business intelligence in most social media expert’s experience to justify their positions and decisions.

The reason I bring this up is that Gary points out the lack of industry standards in measuring expertise in the field and Dani points out the frustration by real experts in trying to get noticed above the hacks. Both Gary and Dani, however, fail to lay any blame for these issues. So I thought I’d have some fun with that. The real culprit here, to some degree, are people like me. Well not me exactly but the agency I work for and the rest of the agency world. Let me explain.

Social media is hot. More and more television dollars are going towards digital and more and more digital dollars are going towards social. Unlike when digital exploded onto the scene 5-10 years ago and both television and print agencies ignored the opportunity hoping to let it pass, they’re not planning on missing the social media ride.

Every type of agency wants in on the action but all have different measures of success. PR agencies attack social as an extension of outreach that they do in the print and media world. You get an article on HuffPo, you win. Creative agencies have lots of impressive visual content and out-of-the-box ideas but most campaigns don’t blow up like Old Spice. There is more to social than a big splash and that, typically, is what creative agencies are looking for. Media buying agencies focus on just that, media buying. Social media to them are ads on Facebook, Twitter promotions and YouTube takeovers.

Then there is the social media agency, a new crop of agencies that try to juggle all the other agencies in the air and show them how working together and weaving in some social strategy and execution can actually generate that earned media we’re all looking for. I am a Senior Director at one of these agencies (M80) and trust me, it’s a delicate balancing act every day. Everyone wants to cut you out because they think they can do social and don’t need you.

Until the clients (i.e. brands) out there help define who controls social, you won’t have consensus on relevant experience and standards of excellence to measure experts against. Secondly, unless enough real experts out there start providing the proper education to clients about social strategy, execution and ROI, they won’t be able to weed out those who claim to understand the business without any real business experience.

This was mainly done to help marketers understand social media and how it fits in with the current model of traditional advertising (both digital and non-digital). Well, this model will be disappearing in the near future.

All these sections are combining and the dividing line between them is becoming more gray. Where does a Sponsored Post from Facebook fall? How about a paid media campaign that is executing a social strategy? Things are getting to hard to categorize and that’s a good thing. The end of the day this chart and many like it were made to help us transition to the future. The fact is that social is weaved into all other marketing channels and in the future we won’t call it social media marketing or require a plan to generate earned media. We’ll just call it marketing because earned media is the ultimate goal from all of the channels.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

At best case scenario, Apple is saying that they’ve been lying to us about the quality signal that the iPhone receives. If that were the case, then why would people’s calls get dropped when they hold a phone a certain way? If the problem was simply a visual representation of signal, then how come the signal (i.e. dropped calls) is actually affected by holding the phone in this way?

This is a pathetic attempt to calm people down and I’m not buying it.

The truth is, messaging is all about context. The audience is ready to laugh. The judges are ready to laugh. Me? Meh. I could go either way. Same goes for marketing. Messaging only works when and where people are ready to listen.

User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail of social media marketing. That is what every company wants. They want their customers (potential and current) to get involved with the brand enough to create content (status updates, pictures, videos, etc) in relation with that brand. Haven’t you noticed that every Facebook fan page for a major brand has sort sort of photo uploading contest?

The key to a successful UGC campaign is the incentive. Why should any user get involved? The more you’re asking of them, the bigger the incentive needs to be. The rest of this post will be talking directly to those companies running these UGC campaigns. I’d like to go over some of the misconceptions that some companies have out there. This will save your company a lot of money in market “testing”.

People want to talk about our brand

Unless you’re Apple coming out with your latest “magical” device, no one, including people who own your products, want to talk about your new product/feature/sale. They don’t care. They might enjoy talking about your product if started on a conversation. They might even love your company. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to take time away from playing Farmville or watching Futurama to go write something on your Wall or even, dare I say it, microsite. People won’t get involved without a reason.

Your definition of value is correct

“You have to add value!” You probably hear that line a lot from social media consultants or agencies. It’s true. You should always be adding value to any engagement/conversation. Who’s definition of value? That’s an easy one. Not yours. You think anyone cares about your latest capabilities deck? You think the average user wants an invite to a free webinar where they could hear you talk about your product some more? They don’t. Think of your target audience. If they saw what your pitching on a billboard on their way home from work, would they go to the website or call the number on that billboard? If not, then it’s not valuable enough to draw anyone in, even if it would draw you in.

Blogger outreach is a cheap and easy way to gain awareness

Wrong. Blogger outreach can potentially be a really good way to piss off a lot of influential people. Think of it this way. You’ve got a contact at the NY Times. You can call any time with a really hot tip. Do you call every time you come out with a new feature? Do you call every time you want to push your product because of low sales? Do you EVER call with information that is already public? You see where I’m going?

Blogger outreach can be so useful when the proper relationships are built between the blogger and the company/agency. This only happens with consistent information sharing that is unique (not out elsewhere), fresh and valuable to readers. Anything else will be ignored and remembered thereby hurting your future outreach efforts. It’s a powerful tool. Use it wisely.

High quality content will be spread

Wrong again. Do you realize how many videos are uploaded every day? Do you realize how every company out there is trying to do exactly what you’re doing? Putting up a great video on YouTube or a funny microsite with all the sharing features won’t change the fact that you need eyeballs and lots of them if you want to hit the point where your snowball can get over the top of the mountain and start rolling on its own. The videos and sites that go viral have LOTS of media behind them. Don’t be fooled. Social media is not cheaper than traditional media. It’s just much more interactive and efficient. You still need to put the $$$ behind getting that initial traffic/reach.

That’s all for now. I’m sure there will be future posts with more of these.

Jump to the present and we’ve got Facebook Connect, Google Connect, and a required mandate for every company to have APIs that give access to their users’ info off their site. Information between services is starting to be shared.

The question with all this is where are we going? What will the web look like in five years and how and where will we manage our digital identities? Is there a model we can look at to give us a sneak peek into the future? I’m glad you asked because there is. It’s called Instant Messaging.

While people had been chatting on IRC and dial-up message boards for years, instant messaging only became mainstream with AOL. For those who can remember, at the time AOL was a closed network for those who paid the cost-per-minute charges. All the cool people were on AOL. Sure you can chat on IRC, or via ICQ, but if you wanted to chat with all your friends, you paid for AOL. AOL eventually opened up their chat to everyone but the worlds of chat were still separate. The big players, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all had their own networks and weren’t willing to collaborate. The way the instant messaging networks used to be set up should look familiar to you.

Eventually, based on start-ups pushing the boundaries and consumer demand, an integration of the chat networks was suddenly possible. The big three had opened up their networks to the world. While you may sign up for an AOL screen name now, or a Google talk screen name, you can talk to anyone on any network regardless of where you signed up.

In some ways, where you sign up doesn’t make a difference. What defines your personal chat experience is the software you use to chat, not the network that you used to be tethered to. Are you an Adium or an iChat mood today? Do you feel like the AIM, Gtalk, or Digsby interface today? The software, with it’s pros and cons, is what defines your chat experience. Because transitioning from one chat program to another takes minutes, developers are under constant pressure to provide the best product in the market. The power is now fully in the hands of the consumers.

If we apply this logic to our current situation, here is what we’re looking at in the coming years.

All our social identities will be accessible from any access point. With a click of a button, all our Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Twitter, Google, etc. info can be integrated into whatever interface or service we choose. The services that provide the best user experience will win the consumer’s pageviews. We already see that happening with twitter clients. Some people like Tweetdeck while others prefer Tweetie. It’s all a matter of preference. The winners of all this will be the consumers. We will get more personalized attention to our needs than ever before. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. So when someone tells you that the future of the web can’t be predicted, give them a history lesson.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the day-to-day and we forget why we do the things we do to begin with. This scenario is analogous to the online marketing world presented before us today. The daily evolving world of social media has taken over our lives. Everything we do, from getting food (find the menu on Menupages, order from Seamlessweb, review on Yelp) to walking the street (check Google maps for where that bar is, check-in with FourSquare, I’m the mayor!) has become a social web experience.

The marketing world, trying to keep up, has put most of its attention on getting their content in the social stream. Getting users to share their content is the ultimate goal of any current marketer. Is this the right approach?

I’ll be attending a unique conference this week created by well-known video blogger and web 2.0 personality Loren Feldman. The Audience Conference dares us to disconnect from our world of sharing and asks us to focus on the quality list of speakers and presentations at hand. Laptops are discouraged (if not banned). There won’t be any official live blogging. There won’t be a live feed. The goal is not to share this conference but to experience it like we used to experience things before the online social explosion.

Focusing on our audience is something that us marketers might have lost over the past few years (if we ever really had it to begin with). Going back to basics may be the best way to solve this problem. There are still a few seats left at The Audience Conference if you have an interest in going.

Over the years I have become more and more involved in the world of social media to the point where my entire career and much of my personal life revolves around the business of social media. I have also been lucky enough to have met and become friends with many amazing people in the industry including some very well known bloggers. Most of these people (well, some of them) are smart and deserve the attention they are getting. There is, however, a noticeable trend amongst these “celebrity” bloggers which I not only find annoying, but find to be antithetical to blogging as a whole.

The beautiful thing about blogging is the ability for anyone to get in the game. Anyone can be famous. Bloggers are supposed to represent the little people’s voice. So many bloggers made their name off the backs of the poor customer service and indifference to customer satisfaction of large corporations. The people finally had voices to back them. Bloggers are now recognized with having real influence. With influence and power, however, often comes greed.

Recently I’ve noticed many bloggers (I won’t point fingers) that seem to think they’re better than everyone. They think they deserve free passes to conferences. They think they deserve free cell phones or free software. They think they deserve to be treated as upper class citizens because they can wreak havoc with their dinky little site. They think their 50,000 unique visitors a month (if that) gives them some sort of clout.

Let’s be clear about this. Companies give freebies to small-time bloggers (which 99.9% are, and yes, that includes you) to flatter you. They know that almost all of what they’re providing you for free is a waste but they realize that the aggregate of this blogger outreach might have a real impact. The aggregate is where the value is. You, by yourself, and your dinky little site, aren’t worth anything by itself.

So next time you’re complaining that a hotel won’t give you a late checkout or that the airline won’t let you on the flight when you show up 30 minutes before the flight (when they clearly tell you to be there two hours beforehand), don’t complain and act like they did something wrong. Their customer service might suck but your attitude sucks. You’re not famous. You’re a blogger. You represent the people. Start acting like it.