There are good ideas. There are bad ideas. Any campaign that involves Facebook likes, Twitter followers or the Internet as an advertising medium falls firmly into the latter of the two. While it was unknown at the time, the gold of ad revenue is only found in context of the platform. If your platform is the go to index for content on the internet, you have rich veins of ad revenue ready for you to mine because people are intentionally looking for unknown content and only want the best content to enter their mind space. If your platform, in contrast to Google, is a social networking website or dependent on the opinions of a few online, you will be wasting your time and money on a resource that can be bought for next to nothing and has been demonstrated to have no correlation to one's market share. The Pepsi Refresh Project is a prime example.
Pepsi sank 40 million USD into a social networking campaign, asking people to help Pepsi donate money. The campaign was a sounding success in demonstrating how responsive a social network can be, generating 3.5 million likes and 70,000 followers on Twitter, but this was at the cost of a 5% market share drop in the US. Coca-Cola also lost a share of the market with a campaign centered around three people chosen to represent Coca-Cola in 206 countries and some world events. The lesson? While it may make for great TV and generate some attention, it will not move a product off the shelf.
Enter services like Klout.com and Kred. Both promise to rate individuals in a social network depending on how social they are and how social the people who interact with them are. It assumes followers on Twitter, along with mentions, retweets and likes on Facebook represents a valuable resource. The central problem however is, it has been shown these data points do not indicate the true impact of an individual in a social network, which I define as the ability to change the behavior of a recipient away from the computer. To assign a quantified data to an individual on such metrics will give a false impression of ability to influence behavior of an audience. While it may seem all fun and games, no one is getting hurt, companies are putting extra resources aside to charm people with high scores with these services. The idea is, if these people have a high score on Klout or Kred, then if they talk about a bad impression at a hotel or diner, they potentially will drive customers away. In response to these fears, hotels will upgrade customers with a high score and some places will offer you free swag.
My response to this is a little more direct. I will be working on my Klout score to grab free stuff by gaming the system a little while it lasts. I benefit from the free stuff a high Klout score gives me. Klout benefits from my returned services. The hotel gets to spend a little money on little ol' me. Almost everybody wins!
- Servus
Pepsi sank 40 million USD into a social networking campaign, asking people to help Pepsi donate money. The campaign was a sounding success in demonstrating how responsive a social network can be, generating 3.5 million likes and 70,000 followers on Twitter, but this was at the cost of a 5% market share drop in the US. Coca-Cola also lost a share of the market with a campaign centered around three people chosen to represent Coca-Cola in 206 countries and some world events. The lesson? While it may make for great TV and generate some attention, it will not move a product off the shelf.
Enter services like Klout.com and Kred. Both promise to rate individuals in a social network depending on how social they are and how social the people who interact with them are. It assumes followers on Twitter, along with mentions, retweets and likes on Facebook represents a valuable resource. The central problem however is, it has been shown these data points do not indicate the true impact of an individual in a social network, which I define as the ability to change the behavior of a recipient away from the computer. To assign a quantified data to an individual on such metrics will give a false impression of ability to influence behavior of an audience. While it may seem all fun and games, no one is getting hurt, companies are putting extra resources aside to charm people with high scores with these services. The idea is, if these people have a high score on Klout or Kred, then if they talk about a bad impression at a hotel or diner, they potentially will drive customers away. In response to these fears, hotels will upgrade customers with a high score and some places will offer you free swag.
My response to this is a little more direct. I will be working on my Klout score to grab free stuff by gaming the system a little while it lasts. I benefit from the free stuff a high Klout score gives me. Klout benefits from my returned services. The hotel gets to spend a little money on little ol' me. Almost everybody wins!
- Servus
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