As a relatively new element of marketing, social media represents a bit of a quandary for marketers, namely trying to answer the question “How much social media do I need for my business?”

Asking the question in the first place is actually a very important first step, as statistics show that there are still businesses that do not utilize any form of social media as part of their marketing efforts.  Part of the problem comes from trying to figure out what role social media should play. Many marketers are in a state of near-paralysis regarding social media, as they don’t know where to start and are overwhelmed with the amount of information that exists telling them what they should be doing.

Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? Pinterest? LinkedIn? Tumblr?

All of the above, and more, have been promoted as “essential” social media platforms for businesses, with many somewhat vague and generic online articles written by so-called social media “experts” that utilize fear tactics to suggest that avoiding Pinterest or Tumblr or any of the other current “hot” social media platforms, is tantamount to signing your business’ death warrant.

A Step Back: What Is the Role of Social Media?
A lot of this hysteria is being caused by relative novices to the business world who have amassed a good deal of social media expertise in a very short period of time, and who do not have a broader base of experience when it comes to marketing as a discipline that takes time and experience to understand. In the past, a relative newcomer with limited experience mostly likely would not have dared to write an article suggesting how to use television, magazines, or out-of-home to create a marketing campaign. The intricacies of putting together a plan utilizing this media types are complex and require years of experience to develop and nurture.

However, the democratization caused by social media has created a veritable litany of “social media experts” who claim their title based almost solely on their use of social media in their personal lives. With its perceived “low cost of entry” to engage in social media, people are confusing personal uses of, for example, Facebook, with business use and making very generic statements regarding how, and even why, social media should be part of the marketing mix.

This type of misinformation is actually counterproductive, as it results in businesses that attempt to put a social media plan in place based on the wrong criteria (“we need a Pinterest page”) or the wrong goals (“we need to achieve 5,000 ‘Likes’ in two weeks”). Statements such as these are too broad in their implications, and do not really address the underlying issues of how these social media tactics, not an objective) are solving an overall marketing objective.

What Social Media Is Good At… and What It’s Not
When utilizing social media, we need to understand its strengths. Social media promotes two-way conversations with your consumers, so you can learn from them and use that learning to transform your product or service offerings.

It’s also great for helping amplify your communications messaging via creating conversations. To do so, you need to know why your consumers might want to talk about the idea, how to get them involved, and how to keep the conversations going once they’ve become engaged.

Oftentimes, these strengths are go unnoticed by overzealous marketers who are looking to immediately generate buzz and develop communities in order to create brand evangelists in order to affect their sales. Those are long-term goals that need to come a long time after the initial stages of listening, participating, and facilitating sharing of content.

So, How Much Social Media Do You Need?
Where does that leave us? Ultimately, how much social media is the right amount? Should it be 100%? Should it be 15%, as stated in this article by Social Media Agency, Simply Zesty?

The true answer is neither.

Social media is not a solution to your marketing woes. By itself, with no other support, it’s not going to double your store traffic, increase your sales, or improve your low brand awareness. As noted in Social Media Today’s article, “Three Little-Known Social Media Misconceptions That Can Destroy Your Marketing Strategy,” social media is a slow building process that is not intended for fast, easy, direct conversions. Social media is about trust and relationships, and those take a long time to pay off.

As firmly as our belief that social media should never be 100% of your marketing strategy, we also do not subscribe to assigning arbitrary percentages, such as the 15% number quoted by Simply Zesty.

Our Two Cents
We look at it this way: a marketing plan is like a golf bag being carried onto the course by a professional golfer (a marketer). No matter how good the golfer is, and how much he thinks he knows about the game, there’s no way that he would ever go onto the course with a golf bag container only a putter and nothing else. He might have the best putter in the entire world, but without a few drivers in the bag, it’s going to take him forever to get to the green, and he’s going to be passed up by all of the other golfers on the course.

Only the professional, based on his experience with the game, can decide how many clubs (marketing tools, such as advertising, PR, promotions, etc.) he needs and when, and how often, to use them to achieve the best results.

Google recently announced that they were instituting a “new” metric called “Viewable Impressions” and “Online GRPs”, designed to allow ad buyers to credit only the impressions that are visible to an end user.

A lot of people hailed these new metrics, and they quickly gained traction among a lot of brand advertisers.  We also think this is a great step forward, but, as we talked about almost a year ago, we are left wondering “Why did this take so long?”

Media planners have been after this for years – an easy way to put all media on the same footing to create a truly integrated mixed media plan rather than having digital media as a separate component that doesn’t add into the overall reach and frequency of the plan.

Somehow the industry decided at the dawn of the digital era to treat digital media as a totally separate entity and keep it apart from other media types, even going so far as to have separate planners doing digital media buys while other planners did everything else that was offline.  And, you’d be surprised how many ad agencies in 2012 are still set up this way – several of the “big” global agencies here in Los Angeles are still set up in this manner, with the “traditional” planners sitting in one part of the building, and then in a completely other part of the building are all of the digital planners.  Half a building away, the broadcast media buyers set up their offices.  And in yet an entirely different area of the building might sit the newspaper buyers.  For companies in the communication business, it sometimes seem that they go out of their way to separate everybody into neat little silos where they aren’t supposed to talk to each other.

Given that most ad agencies over the past 20 or so years have been set up this way, it’s really no wonder that it’s taken us so long to get consistent measurements across media types.

Now that Google (and last year, Facebook) have finally made the move to this direction and we’re one step closer to having an overall unified metric for measuring the effectiveness of a multi-media campaign across all media types equally, hopefully the ad agency business can also get in the game and change the way they’ve been doing business in order to integrate the planning for all media types.

Image Courtesy of LSU

Measuring the effectiveness of media, and all marketing, campaigns has over the past few years become the main priority of chief marketing officers.  Being able to report that a particular program generated a positive ROI has much more impact than saying, “Our sales gone up since our marketing program started, but we’re not sure which part of the marketing campaign is responsible.”

The prevailing theory has been that proving the ROI (or more correctly, the ROAS or “Return on Ad Spending”) was only possible for very specific media buys, such as Direct Response and most online media programs.  As a result, many marketers began to shift funds toward these more trackable forms of media in order to justify their media expenditures.

Measuring the effectiveness of non-DR and non-digital media has traditionally been quite expensive and usually required the services of third party firms that specialized in this type of measurement.  We’ve worked with some of these firms before, and they were quite thorough.  Even though they were expensive, the cost was worth it, as they were able to scientifically determine that we could increase our advertising spending by 25% before we started to see diminishing returns, leading to the client getting a bigger advertising budget and a larger market share.

However, not every advertiser has the resources to pay for high-cost ROI studies, but the marketing teams are still held to the same high standards – namely, how can they prove that their advertising is effective?

Obviously part of the equation has to do with the definition of “effectiveness.”  Although the bottom line for most marketers is increased sales, for many marketers, the goal of advertising is to generate brand awareness and keep the brand top-of-mind in consumers’ consideration sets when they are shopping for products.  Others look for measurements like increased trial or higher purchase intent scores.

Another key measurement that many marketers look at these days is increased web traffic.  While web traffic is an important indicator of the success of an advertising campaign, part of the reason looking at this measurement has become so important is because it’s a lot easier to track via the use of online media.  With a variety of online measurement tools available, it’s quite easy to see the number of click-thrus from a digital display or paid search advertisement, and then correlate that to increase web traffic via web tracking measurement tools.

One thing that’s been missing is a better correlation between increased web traffic and offline media.  Nearly every advertiser includes a URL to their website or Facebook Company page in their TV and print ads these days, but we’ve never been able to accurately track conversions from offline ad exposure to increased web traffic.  We read over on TechCrunch about a company named Converto that’s aiming to change that via a new product that they claim can track the effectiveness (i.e., “ability to increase web traffic”) of TV advertising based on time – that is, after a TV ad airs at a certain time in a certain area, if there’s an increase in web traffic from that same area, then the ad was effective.

If this seems pretty basic to you, you’re not alone.  We were a little underwhelmed when we first read that description.  However, Converto goes on to note that they can also measure the effectiveness of direct response TV on website traffic, the “halo effect” of TV advertising, and the effect of various creative executions during a campaign.

It’s an interesting concept, and although we haven’t yet seen it in action, it’s a good step in the right direction toward trying to apply the same measurements of effectiveness across different media types.  Online media should not be held to a different standard of effectiveness versus offline media.  However, while this is a good start, we aren’t necessarily sold that an increase in web traffic is necessarily the best metric to use for determining media effectiveness.  It’s an indicator, as we mentioned, but at the end of the day, does the CEO of the company want increased web traffic, or does he want increased sales?

Image © Facebook 2012

There has been a lot of Facebook news this past week, from reports on their premium plan for advertisers to an announcement that ESPN plans to stream NCAA basketball games live on the social network this spring.

Probably the biggest news, however, was Facebook’s announcement on leap day that it was unveiling its Timeline feature, previously only available to profiles and groups, for businesses.  Back in October when we first wrote about the Facebook Timeline, we, along with many industry experts, had predicted that Facebook would eventually make the Timeline feature available for businesses.

In an interesting twist, unlike the process when Timeline was offered to profiles, the change for business pages becomes automatic at the end of March.  So, business owners with business pages have 30 days to figure out how to make the changes they want.  While we can assume that most people who are managing business pages also have their own personal profiles on Facebook and therefore have seen the Timeline before, it’s still a good idea to review what will change.

There’s a great article over at Inside Facebook that breaks down the changes, and of course Mashable is in on the act as well.  Both articles do an excellent job of walking through what’s different with Timeline for business pages, namely:

• Cover Photo
  • Pages will no longer have a unique landing tab and will now instead use a cover photo.  Note that the article on Inside Facebook lists the incorrect dimensions – it’s actually 851 x 315 (not 851 x 351).
  • Your cover photo image cannot include pricing, purchase or contact information, any type of call-to-action, or references to Facebook features such as “Like” or “Share” – in short, it can’t be the equivalent of a banner ad

• Timeline
  • Timeline adds the functionality to allow you to “pin” an important post to the top of your page, where it will stay for seven days
  • As a page owner, you can now choose to make certain posts larger than others to make them stand out
  • You may also choose to hide individual posts without actually deleting them, enabling you to focus only on your most engaging posts but still retain your data

• Admin Panel
  • The new admin panel tool provides a quick glimpse at insights, people who have recently Liked your page, fan activity notifications, and a message inbox
    • The message inbox is tied to another new feature which now allows direct messages from users, which could be used for customer service issues
    • Pages cannot initiate direct messaging with fans
  • Also included is a Help Center for page administrators

• Activity Log
  • Similar to its use for personal profiles, the activity log enables you to find and edit older posts, with sorting features by year or by type of content

• Applications
  • Page tab apps will now be listed on the right, under the cover photo, rather than down the left side of the page, and all apps will now have larger thumbnails (111 x 74 pixels, versus the 16 x 16 size used previously)
  • Default landing tabs are no longer allowed, so Facebook recommends that pages pin a post that links to a specific tab.  As a reminder, Facebook guidelines do not allow you to put a “call to action” in your cover photo to direct people to visit a particular tab, so don’t try to get around the restriction by using this technique.

That’s a great summary of the changes, but it ignores really what the changes mean – what are the pros and cons?  Over on Entrepreneur’s website, author Mikal Belicove has covered this for us.  His pros and cons break down into three main categories:

• Cover Photo
  • Pro: Simple – you can use this to help develop your brand’s personality and avoid appearing so corporate.
  • Con: Since the cover photo is so large, it by necessity bumps all of the more “useful” content that you want visitors to see down “below the fold” where they have to search for it.

• Pinning Posts
  • Pro: Obviously this is very useful for important information that you want to make sure your site’s fans see.  Examples could be as mundane as reminding people that your office is going to be closed for the holidays.
  • Con: Belicove mentions that consumers won’t be as likely to continue visiting a site that always has the same content pinned to the top of the page.  But, he does note that, as we know, most people get their Facebook news from their News Feed, not from specific pages.

• Direct Messaging
  • Pro: The main advantage of allowing consumers to direct message business pages is that it could be a way for someone who wants to write an angry rant to avoid posting it on the page itself and instead direct it privately to the page owner via a direct message
  • Con: The con, of course, is that, depending on the popularity of your business page on Facebook, there is the potential for you to start receiving dozens, if not hundreds, of direct messages, which can be a drain on resources as you would need to find people in your organization to be able to answer each message

These are all good things to be aware of when updating (or creating) your business page for Facebook.  It’s also important to note, as Sam Laird from Mashable writes, that businesses that are not used to creating their own content, or businesses with segmented operations, may find the switch to Timeline more difficult. There is a lot of help out there available – seek out social media professionals to assist you, particularly in terms of the type of content you should be posting.

Over the coming week, we’ll be updating our Facebook page to the new Timeline, so you can see the changes we’ve made.

Image © 2011 Technorati, Inc / Technorati Media / Technorati.com / Blogcritics

Last summer we wrote a post about “Exciting News in the World of Television Advertising” and commented on how television advertising will constantly be changing as we move into the future.

A few days ago, three totally separate articles about television caught our eye and made us want to revisit the Future of Television Media.

First up was an article in USA Today about how YouTube is partnering with established, traditional television executives to create original online video content.

As the article notes, “YouTube believes it is laying groundwork for the future.”  Many of the names that YouTube has secured for their new content are familiar: Anthony Zuiker (the creator of “CSI”), Nancy Tellem (former president of CBS Entertainment), and “Fast Five” director Jason Lin are just three of the high-profile executives YouTube recruited.

The content is being directly aimed at a young male 18-34 audience, a demographic that is notoriously difficult to reach through mainstream television.   Zuiker, in fact, became involved after seeing his own pre-teen sons spending more of their time on their smartphones, tablet computers, and desktops than watching traditional television.

YouTube plans to create 96 additional channels of programming, each one dedicated to a particular artist where viewers can see existing video clips and subscribe to be notified when new content is posted.  These will join a few channels that YouTube has already launched, including the extreme sports-focused Network A and the Spanish-language Tutele.

The online video giant isn’t the only company that’s committing to original video content.  Both Netflix and Hulu have recently launched new series, but their programs stick with the more traditional half-hour of hour-long TV formats.  YouTube’s programming is oftentimes shorter than 10 minutes.

YouTube expects to have all of their new channels up and running by this summer, and we fully expect that Netflix, Hulu, and others will be hot on their heels with new content as well.

The second television-related article was shared by MediaPost regarding an online video technology that has developed a way to deliver dynamic and personalized video ads “for the 99% of us who aren’t clickers.”  The ads can be customized with different creative to reflect the region of the country in which the ads are served, and can even be tailored on a geo-local basis, such as with local TV tune-in information (day, time, and channel).

While geo-targeted and customized creative content has been around online for a while, this is one of the first reports we’ve seen that provided actual advertiser data in the form of percentage lifts in brand awareness, purchase intent, and sales lift.  These are the measurements that marketers really care about – they’re more important and actionable than click-thru rates, and we applaud this new trend to put online marketing measurements on the same playing field as traditional marketing.

The third article we came across was on the Wall Street Journal’s Media & Marketing page, discussing how “it’s cool to have rabbit ears again.”  In the wake of all of the online programming available now via providers such as Hulu and Netflix, old-fashioned antennas for viewing over-the-air television broadcasts are making a comeback.  One of my close friends has actually done this recently, canceling all of his cable and satellite services and moving to free over-the-air television combined with premium Hulu and Netflix services.  Since my friend is a little quirky and notoriously “frugal”, I didn’t pay much attention when he told me about this last summer.  But it appears he may have been ahead of the curve.  The article mentions just one TV-antenna seller in St. Louis who sold 600,000 antennas in 2011 and expects to double that number this year.

All of these articles add up to an exciting time for television, while also making things complicated for advertisers and the agencies that service them.  Television audiences have long been fragmenting, but that fragmentation had, in the past, mainly been limited to the increase in the number of “traditional” cable networks.  As time moves forward, in order to capture those eyeballs, we’ll need to look past the more conventional television outlets and adopt new venues such as YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix to maintain audience reach.

Image Copyright © 2012 Acura

Of course we all know that the Super Bowl is this Sunday.  Even the 50% of people who aren’t going to be watching the “big game” know of its existence and will be running into issues if they are trying to plan any social events with their friends this weekend that don’t involve football, beer, and chips.

The Super Bowl is big business, with advertising rates climbing to $3.5 million for a single :30 spot during the game, and that’s just the cost of the media.  The cost of producing a spot that gets you noticed can be staggering as well.  Given the insanely high out-of-pocket cost for just one spot during the Super Bowl (which is actually higher than many advertisers’ entire annual budget), it’s natural to ask the question of whether it’s worth it to spend such a huge amount of money on one commercial – the equivalent of “putting all of your eggs into one basket.”

The experts say, “yes”, according to CNN, who reported on this very same question a year ago.  Despite the astonishing cost, the attention levels to the commercials during the game are among the absolute highest for any televised program throughout the year.   Stephen Master, Vice President of Nielsen Sports media research notes that nearly “50% of viewers tune in to actually watch the commercials, more than they watch the game.”  The level of engagement in watching the ads is quite high, which leads to higher recall.

Interestingly, brands that have never advertised during the game have a lot more to gain versus companies with near-universal recognition, such as Coca-Cola or Budweiser.   Examples include GoDaddy and ETrade, both of which advertised for the first time several years ago and have garnered massive brand awareness based in no small part on their initial Super Bowl advertisements.

As noted in the article, the “ultimate goal for Super Bowl advertisers is to generate buzz before, during and after the game.”  Advertising in the Super Bowl isn’t just a one-time event with a one-time cost.  It’s become an entire industry surrounding the game, as people go online after the game to watch the spots they really liked, and increasingly, are going online even before the spots have aired to watch so-called “leaked” versions of the spots.

This seems to be the Year of the Leaked Super Bowl Spots, with many major companies debuting their spots online days or even a full week prior to the game itself.  The automotive industry seems to be owning the idea of the leaked teaser this year, with companies such as Acura, Audi, Chevrolet, Honda, Kia, Lexus, Toyota, and Volkswagen all releasing their spots on YouTube earlier this week.  Other companies, such as H&M, Doritos, Priceline, and Coca-Cola have also already debuted their spots online, prior to showcasing them during the game itself.  As David Thier at Forbes says, “The competition is fierce enough that they’re advertising their ads.”

It’s an interesting trend to utilize digital and social media to gain early buzz for commercials that used to be kept highly secrets, only to be revealed during the actual game itself.  Those days are gone and will likely never come back.  The investment in a Super Bowl commercial is so costly, and expectations for it to increase brand awareness, purchase intent, and sales are so high that agencies and advertisers need to do all they can to amortize the cost and utilize the game not as the end point itself, but merely as the tent pole around which to create an entire marketing platform.

While the teaser campaigns prior to the game itself don’t quite yet reach the audience levels that are reached during the game – both Honda and Volkswagen’s teasers have over 10 million views so far, compared to an audience of 111 million during the game itself – we can look historically to see their impact.  Volkswagen’s Super Bowl spot from last year (the one with the young boy pretending to be Darth Vader) has over 50 million views so far, “easily more than the number of Super Bowl viewers that saw it and paid attention.”

We disagree with Thier’s supposition that because Honda, Volkswagen, and the other advertisers can have a successful social media campaign that “stands on its own” a full week prior to the Super Bowl it decreases the value of airing in the Super Bowl itself.  We believe these campaigns are successful specifically because they are able to use the Super Bowl as a unifying element to create buzz and excitement.  There have not been, to date, any stand-alone social media campaigns that have generated this same amount of media attention and consumer interest.

All of this year’s pre-Super Bowl activity is going to be hard to beat next year, but we’re sure someone will come up with a creative, powerful way to do it.

By now we all know that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) House of Representatives bill, as well as its Senatorial counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) have been delayed in Congress after a public outcry last week and a “blackout” by sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, and Google.

While many are happy about the bills being delayed (with the notable exceptions of organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America), one aspect of SOPA and PIPA that did not receive much media attention are how the two bills would affect marketers and advertisers.

The most immediate impact would of course be for Internet marketing firms, but there would be a definite trickle effect over to pretty much any type of online marketing firms.  What exactly are the implications?

For starters, the bills as written would require websites to supervise their users to a significantly higher level than they presently do.  Currently most sites implement a form of “self-policing”, wherein users are asked to supervise themselves, but a website can shut down an individual’s access to their site and delete his or her profile if there is a violation of the website’s policy.  Based on the language included in the SOPA and PIPA bills, an entire website could be shut down due to the actions of one individual on the site.

As Tim Greening notes in his article on The Gentleman Marketer:

“Especially for an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia, this poses various problems. In keeping with its encyclopedic background, the site tries to remain neutral in any information that is created on the site. If SOPA and PIPA were passed through Congress then Wikipedia would need to censor any information posted and start acting as an advocate for social and political issues; which goes against the very nature of the website.”

Besides large content sites such as Wikipedia, the two bills do have sweeping implications for small and mid-sized businesses as well.  An in-depth look at these implications can be found over at Optimum7.com, but include a decrease in the interlinking between sites as content generators become fearful of accidentally violating SOPA regulations simply from linking to another source.  This has huge implications for search engine marketing.  Google indexing could also be affected as Google would need to verify every single site they index to ensure that none of them somehow violate any copyright laws.

People who share images, videos, clips, TV ads and any other type of content on their social media sites (so, basically, anyone who uses social media in some form) would also be affected as individuals would run the risk of being sued.

Before you think this might be small potatoes, note that industry executives has said that “It will cost ad networks, payment processors, hosting services, search engines and others in the online advertising supply chain estimated billions to monitor content and links embedded on Web pages to comply with proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) U.S. legislation.”

As an example of how things could play out, Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost writes:

“If Amazon refuses to shut down a Web site hosted through its cloud services after a client is accused of copyright infringement that business unit could be in jeopardy of being sued or shut down too. Amazon becomes liable for damages through the legal court process if they choose not to take down the site.”

Online piracy is definitely a huge problem and needs to be dealt with.  We are strongly against online piracy, but, as Duran Inci points out, the “biggest concern is that SOPA is just so very broad in scope. In the name of limiting software piracy…it sets up all kinds of obstacles and traps to online publishing.”  Those obstacles and traps don’t just punish people who are illegally obtaining content, but they affect marketers both large and small who are trying to run legitimate businesses.

Are you using Klout?  Based on the profiles of our readership, we suspect that many of you actually aren’t.  The question is – is that a good thing, or a bad thing?  The jury is still out on this question.

Firstly, what exactly is “Klout?”  According to their website,

The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:

• True Reach: How many people you influence
• Amplification: How much you influence them
• Network Impact: The influence of your network

Klout purports to take all of your social media networks and create a score of how influential you are with social media, and then compare yourself to other people online to see if you are more or less influential than they are.

Many people are skeptical about this process, and we are among them.  However, let’s start by looking at the positive side of Klout and some of its supporters.

Nearly a year ago, social media personality Trey Pennington wrote an article entitled “Klout is Necessary.”  In his article, Mr. Pennington listed three main reasons why he felt Klout is necessary:

1)      Too much confusion (companies want to do social media correctly but there’s too much happening that it’s difficult to know where to start)

2)      Too many voices (Klout helps companies sort through the nearly limitless number of voices that might be talking to them so they can concentrate on the more important ones)

3)      Too much complexity (the social media landscape is far from settled, so Klout helps companies by creating a “standard” by developing a two-digit number that companies can understand and be comfortable with)

Those are all lofty goals and would seem to be excellent reasons for using Klout.  We signed up with Klout for many of these reasons above, but our main reason for getting a Klout score was because, somehow, having Klout has not just become necessary, but as Jim Dougherty over at Leaders West noted just this past December, it’s a necessary evil.  Klout, for better or worse, has become the standard of influence online.

Jim deals with one of the main problems we have with Klout – that it’s “tantamount to an ego trip.”  While all social media involves a sort of mild bragging, Klout’s model exists to put weight behind the bragging.  Someone we know has even told us that she’s proud that her Klout score is actually higher than the Klout score of the Director of Social Media at her office.  It’s become a kind of contest at best, or even a form of old-school sandbox bullying.  “My Klout score is better than yours!”

Rohn Jay Miller over at Social Media Today addresses this side of Klout head-on in his post “Delete Your Klout Profile Now!”  He notes, “Measuring ‘social influence’ tries to sell the lie that such things as ‘social influence’ and ‘connected-ness’ can be measured quantitatively, then acquired, packaged and sold to the highest bidder.”  He goes on to say, “What happens a year from now when you try to get a job in marketing and you’re rejected because your Klout score is only in the 30s?  Or when a bunch of black hat rats figure out how to game the Klout system and make their small fortunes selling you robot apps that will juice up your Klout score?”

While it may sound like Miller is acting like a sore loser (was his Klout score really low, so he decided to delete it?), we don’t believe that’s the case.

We have noticed many inconsistencies with Klout’s scoring system, including very simple things such as:

• Not tracking Company Pages on LinkedIn (they only track personal pages)
• Not tracking Company Pages on Google+ (again, they only track personal Google+ profiles)
• The inability to track blogs that are hosted on a company’s own server (they can only track blogs that are hosted directly on WordPress or Blogger).
• Inconsistent scoring – our own Klout score went from 17 to 15 to 45 to 30 in the space of less than two weeks.

For now, we’re going to keep our Klout profile in the hopes that eventually Klout cleans up its scoring algorithms and because we do feel that there is a place for some kind of standard to help companies navigate the extremely complicated world of social media.  Until something better comes along, it looks like we’re stuck with Klout, for better or worse.

Image ©2011 Desktop Nexus

A few months ago, we wrote about the so-called “new” online measurement from Nielsen, which is really just the same old Target Rating Points that “traditional” planners have been using for decades.

While planning and buying using TRPs is an important step in helping planners be able to combine and compare ratings across online and offline media, there is of course the flip-side of the measurement coin: with the wealth of data that is available from online media, we shouldn’t simply limit ourselves to demographic audiences based on age and sex.

As Richard Frankel points out in his article on Ad Age a few weeks ago, there is technology currently available that enables a planner to target consumers down to very minute levels of detail.  Currently, planners have access to behavioral, contextual, and sales data to craft rich and meaningful target audience descriptions.  We can go well beyond “Women Aged 25-54 with Household Incomes of $75,000+.”  Particularly online, planners can target audiences such as “SUV shoppers” or “refrigerated pasta buyers.”

Frankel’s position, though, is that this level of targeting is not enough.  He describes consumers as “finicky, highly adept at searching for products, brand-disloyal and impervious to all but the most target advertising messages.”  The solution, posits Frankel, is called “artificial-intelligence targeting” and it’s already available for use.  Using this kind of targeting technology, Frankel suggests we could create a target of “men aged 35-44 with two kids who live in the Buffalo, New York, area, read car-enthusiast websites, are in-market to buy a car, and love the Audi brand – but could be tempted to buy a Lexus in the next 2 months.” He then goes on to say that we don’t need to be limited to a only a “handful” of attributes, such as the explanation above, but can instead use the tens of thousands of attributes that exist about consumers.

Really?

Now, we admit that we haven’t seen the artificial intelligence technology and the “super-advanced software” to crunch it, but it seems to us as though this is taking targeting to the extreme of analysis paralysis.  Just because tens of thousands of data points exist about a consumer doesn’t mean we need to use them all upon which to craft a target audience.

One question that comes to mind is how, for a particular brand, we would know tens of thousands of attributes that define our target audience.  No amount of focus groups, attitude and usage studies, or syndicated research databases could help a media or account planner come up with a target audience profile of that many attributes that apply to a brand’s potential consumers.

Developing a target audience is a skill that involves more than mere data analysis and number crunching by a computer.  It involves lots of experience and a deep understanding of how consumers think, how they shop, how they make decisions, and how they consume media, among other things.  As Frankel himself states, “Consumers don’t think of themselves as audiences, but as individuals with personal tastes and needs.”  Reducing the process to number-crunching, no matter how advanced the software is and how much data there is to be crunched, seems to miss a key element of target audience profiling – the human element.

The above does not mean that we aren’t intrigued by what Frankel and his firm can do with their software to look at consumers in a new way.  More insight into the methodology behind his A.I. targeting may even be more convincing.  However, we feel the amount of data we can look at must be tempered with a degree of realism to help craft a target audience profile that can be applied to the entire media plan (both online and offline).  There is no replacement for nuances of real-person, human analysis.

Image ©2005-2011 Mashable, Inc.

We’ve written about Google + before, firstly answering the question “What Is Google +?” and next up, only a month later, answering the question “Is Google + Dead Already?”

That second post was really more tongue-in-cheek, and was designed to ease people’s fears that Google + didn’t immediately overtake Facebook as the number one social network right out of the gate.  However, Mashable found some interesting statistics regarding Google +, specifically related to its use by Google’s management team.  As reported just a few weeks ago, the company co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have posted publicly a combined total of only 22 times since Google + was unveiled back in July.  The Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, reportedly did not even have a Google + account as of the date of the article back on October 4^th.  Other officers, including the Chief Business Officer and Chief Legal Officer, also either did not have accounts or had not posted on their accounts.

While you may be thinking to yourself, “Who cares if the Chief Legal Officer posts on Google +?” the reality is that Google’s company goals are tied to social media success.  As also reported on Mashable back in April 2011, “Even Googlers not involved in building… social media products are asked by Page [Google’s CEO] to test products, give feedback, and spread the word about these products with their families and friends.”

The real point here is that Google’s management – all of Google’s management – should be leading by example and using their social media products.  It would be akin to Takanobu Ito, the CEO of Honda, not owning or driving a Honda.

Of course, Google’s management’s use, or more specifically non-use, of Google + does not impact how the service is used by the public at large.  It is a perception problem, and potentially a PR disaster waiting to happen, but at the end of the day, what matters is how well the public is adopting the service.

While there have not been any official numbers released lately by Google +, according to one “reliable” source, Google + would have surpassed 43 million users on September 22^nd, making it one of the fastest growing sites ever.  However, even though the number of users continues to rise, over the past few months the number of daily public posts per user has fallen from 0.68 per day to 0.40 according to this graph from Eloqua.  Egan Cheung, the creator of the graph, posits that while Google Plus has “positioned itself in-between the social and conversational aspects of Facebook and the very public, mostly one-way newsfeed of Twitter” that users are tending to use the service more like Facebook, but more and more are adopting the “targeted sharing” capabilities of Google Plus (meaning that posts aren’t public, but instead only visible to a select group of people).

Where does all of this leave us?  We’re left with a huge, rapidly growing social networking site with a user-base that is continuing to play around with the variety of features offered by Google + in order to figure out where the service fits into their social networking “arsenal.”  While Facebook is, and will remain, the 800 pound gorilla of social media for the very foreseeable future, we all need to be paying attention to what’s happening on Google + and figuring out how best to use it to communicate with our targets.

And, we still think that Google’s management should do a better job of publicly posting on Google +.