It may seem hard to believe but its true; being monotonous helps your influence score. The more you keep talking about the same topic over and over and over again, the better your score. The last thing you want to do is pepper your dialog with some variety since your overall influence score gets diluted by these secondary topics. So having multiple interests is bad, and being one dimensional is good…

Please, someone shoot me now!

This weakness inherent in influence scoring isn’t anything new and there has been a lot written about this. In most cases, unless your job is related in some way social media, most people just don’t have the volume of interactions required to calculate scores with any level of granularity. Therefore the aggregate of your interactions (volume being king) have to be used in the overall set of calculations. This difference between “overall influence” vs. “transmission or interaction rates for discrete topics” became obvious when I was playing with one of the better freemium tools out there. They thankfully don’t expose an influence number, preferring to use it as part of their internal analysis and only exposing levels. They were also very honest about “what can be accurately calculated and what cannot” which was refreshing.

So influence scoring is inherently flawed, and yet despite this fact scoring engines are still being positioned to the general public as the most important measurement of a person. And folks wonder why I have such a pathological hatred for assigning influence scores to people :-) If you really want to see how truly insane it can get, then check out Seth Stevenson‘s recent article, entitled “What Your Klout Score Really Means“. Aside from scaring the heck out of you, its an excellent read particularly the last couple of paragraphs where he talks about the real problem with influence scoring; namely that it results in social media personas that are not interesting (or believable). Being one dimensional is not something we reward in the real world, so why would we do that in social media?

But let me end on one final question, and I don’t need to say where I stand on this question…

Is influence score the best measure of social media effectiveness?

My reason for making such a statement isn’t really a reflection on marketers per sei, but rather on the types of discussions that I believe companies are now (or will be) having with customers, and the people best positioned within the organization to have those conversations.

“To have access, or not to have access, that is the question”, or is at least the question that most companies are asking themselves with respect to broad employee access to the dangerous medium of social media. What’s going to happen to our brand if every employee is out there totally unfettered? How are we going to control what they say? Well firstly we aren’t, and secondly we don’t want to, or at least not in a very prescriptive way.

No-one trusts marketing messages, and the only people who really read these messages and interact with the people generating them are other marketers. If I am a security specialist or an IT Director, I am much more likely to trust someone within the development organization that has worked on the latest security enhancements. For those companies that eat their own dog food (always a good practice), then the line of business folks on the client side would be much more interested in getting the skinny from their counterparts within the company. If I am a product manager then I would like to talk with other product managers, and so on. The subject matter experts are the people I want to hear from and the people I want to interact with. This is the same across every profession in the company.

So if we accept the hypothesis that people would rather talk with non-marketers, then what does this say about the role of the marketer? Are they a dying breed? I don’t believe so. The need to manage brand perception and messaging is never going to go away and marketing play an invaluable role in building the strategy and crafting that message. But moving forward, instead of being the sole mouthpiece that delivers that message into the market, perhaps they will become facilitators for empowering the delivery of that brand message from across the organization. And I don’t mean crafting messages that employees regurgitate, thats disingenuous and will not be believable. I mean by creating an environment which helps employees understand how they can talk about whatever they want to talk about without damaging the brand. If we want broad (and diverse) engagement with our customers, across all levels of their organizations (decisions don’t just come from the top down), then we need broad engagement from the enterprise.

Employee communication has the potential to be more honest (no-one is going to risk their reputation with their peers), less polished (which is more believable), and more interactive (which drives deeper relationships). Making such a broad engagement model work for the enterprise is not without its challenges, and will demand a new breed of marketer. However I would like to think that in the longer-term it builds stronger and more credible links between the company and the client. At least that’s my story and I am sticking to it!

I have some theories around the role of analytics in helping to facilitate this new engagement model, but I will leave that for the next blog post :-)

Wednesday June 5th… is all about “Content Providers”

On Wednesday a broad spectrum of industries are talking about their experiences of working with semantic technologies; real-life stories that I expect to be incredibly valuable in terms of identifying strategies that work, with lots of practical hints & tips. However, my shortlist has ended up looking increasingly content-centric. Now this is hardly surprising since social business is all about people actions and interactions. And what do people do a lot of? Yep, they create & consume content!

• Dynamic Semantic Publishing Empowering the BBC Sports Site and the 2012 Olympics, BBC/Ontotext/fluid Operations @ 08:45 – 09:30, Yosemite A
  An early start, but I antiticipate it will be worth the while. The folks at the BBC are visionaries when it comes to the application of semantic technologies for content delivery. Having worked with them on the 2010 Winter Olympics and World Cup projects I know from personal experience that these guys totally rock. So if you haven’t heard about their work, and I suspect most of you have, then I would seriously recommend attending this talk.
   
• Future Directions in Social Search and Analytics at IBM, IBM @ 11:15 – 11:45
  As you will hear at my talk on Thursday, I strongly believe that the future of search & analytics is going to be all about semantics and social, so this is a call-out to my colleagues from IBM Content Analytics who are doing some very cool stuff with social semantic graphs in order to transform the search & discovery process.
   
• Big Data and Content Enrichment, LexisNexis @ 13:45 – 14:15, Plaza B
  I have been fortunate enough to work with LexisNexis in the past and I’ve always been hugely impressed with their vision and commitment to the application of semantic technologies for improved content delivery. They have a very mature content enrichment environment with some great approaches to modelling their data, and therefore I have high expectations for this presentation. I have no doubt that it will be interesting.
   
• Semantics at the Tribune Company, Tribune @ 14:30 – 15:00, Yosemite A
  I am not personally familiar with their work, but they appear to have a long history of applying semantic technlogies to address publishing challenges. This session promises to share their successes, future plans, and lessons learned, so I feel its definitely worth attending. Folks that have actually walked the walk are always interesting.
   
• Linked Data at Pearson: The Proof is in the Putting, Pearson @ 16:30 – 17:15, Yosemite A
  The abstract for this session ticks every box, touching on the key challenges facing the whole content delivery space, and therefore leads me to believe these guys know their stuff. For that reason this is a must-attend session for me. Really looking forward to hearing their story.

Thursday June 4th… is all about “Social”

Being the last day of the event, and the day I present my own session, its going to be a short one for me. Therefore I have picked out just two presentations that I absolutely plan to attend.

• Scale, Structure, and Semantics, LinkedIn @ 08:30 – 09:30, Grand Ballroom A
  LinkedIn has one of the largest and richest social semantic networks out there, something that any analytics person would give their right hand to get access to. Its a veritable candy store for the lucky analytics folks at LinkedIn. In this session they promise to describe how they use this huge graph of relationship data to build their products and share lessons that will no doubt apply more broadly for anyone building social semantic applications. Should be an interesting session.
   
• Deriving Social Insight from Existing Business Applications, IBM @ 09:45 – 10:30, Yosemite B
  I kept the best until last… my session :-) In short I am planning to share my personal journey over the last ten years @ IBM, where I started building text analytics solutions, layered on semantic technologies, and finally added social networks to the mix. Throughout the presentation I will touch on the projects I worked on, finishing up with a Social CRM solution that I believe really demonstrates the value of combined text, semantic, and social analytics.