It’s Potty Posting time! Need a refresher on the purpose of the Po

These monthly articles take a humorous, yet informative, approach to emerging cultural trends, new technologies, and innovative marketing tactics. And yes, they’re posted in the Upshot bathrooms, where we know we’ve got a captive audience. Click the image to the right for a PDF of the post and share with your network to build your Klout, duh.

You Know You Make Me Wanna Klout

To over 3500 brands, the world of online social networking is beginning to look a lot like a high school. Cliques are forming, popularity is becoming a tool, Lindsay Lohan is giving high-calorie nutrition bars to the Plastic Queen to sabotage her weight and status…

OK, maybe not that last part. But, when it comes to social media, brands are paying attention to the widening gap between those who matter online and those who don’t. By targeting the people who are most likely to influence others – the ones who inspire the most buzz with their tweets and posts – brands can maximize their reach while putting in minimal cost and effort. In essence, this online popularity contest could be the key to doing word-of-mouth marketing right, and Klout, a social metrics service, was made to do just that.

The aforementioned Plastic Queen, Regina George, owns a silver Lexus and allegedly does car commercials in Japan. She’s also teen royalty. So not only is she pretty popular, she’s also pretty influential. Now, if only there were quantifiable data to tell Mercedes how influential Regina George really is, especially on the topic of cars, so they can give her a free SL550 Roadster in the hopes that she ditches that Lexus and tweets about her new Mercedes.

“My Klout Score is so fetch, I haven’t paid for anything in months!”

Bingo. Klout is a website run by a team of digital engineers, marketers and analysts who have made it possible to quantify a person’s online influence, or ability to drive action on the internet. Taking data from a person’s social networking accounts, Klout measures True Reach (how many people someone influences), Amplification (how much that person influences them), and Network Impact (the influence of the people being influenced), with a single number between 1 and 100 as the result.

No longer is the internet democratic. No longer does everyone’s voice hold equal weight online. And far from being ashamed about being the harbinger of online social inequality, Klout is actually partnering up with thousands of brands to take advantage of it!

Brands have started using Klout to give away free stuff, “Klout Perks,” to the most popular influencers (or social networking users) in their fields and provide them with a good experience or a good product so they can tweet about it to their friends. For example, HP offered high-scoring film influencers an HP laptop pre-loaded with films from Cinequest film festival, and Audi invited top design, technology and luxury influencers to test drive their new 2011 Audi A8 at exclusive events.

Yeah, but does it work? Influencers who receive Perks aren’t required to post positive things about the brand. They’re not even required to post anything at all.

To ensure that giving away Perks will be worth a company’s expense, Klout has begun to up the demand and cool factor of a high Score and the Perks that come with it. When Spotify, a wildly popular music-streaming service, first came out in 2008, Klout gave free account access to only some of its high-scorers before Spotify was even released in the United States. In addition, some special events, like the annual after-hours shopping extravaganza, Fashion’s Night Out, require a Klout Score of over 40 points in order to attend. This not only ensures the exclusivity and coolness of the Perk, but the honor of having a high Score as well.

And it has definitely been working for a ton of brands. Like Virgin America, who offered only 120 free flights to top travel influencers, which generated over 4,600 tweets and, subsequently, led to over 7.4 million impressions and coverage in top blogs and news outlets. And, for a very small price, that’s good business.

But it hasn’t just been working for brands. While Klout’s expertise in generating buzz has been great for building brands’ reputations, it’s also been building their own. People have been putting their Score on their resume and many competitors and copycats have begun to emerge, like PeerIndex , Twitter Grader and, most recently, PeopleBrowsr’s Kred, which will up your Kred based on real-life achievements like degrees and awards.

“People have even started attaching it to their wardrobes. Ladies love it.”

And while there certainly are downsides for the people being judged on their Score, there are also downsides for brands. How does a brand do damage control when a top influencer receives a product, hates it, and blasts the company on Twitter? The best response is to turn it positive – using Klout, brands can decide which reviews they can ignore and which they need to address. 70% of companies ignore their customer complaints on Twitter, yet nearly half of Twitter complainants expect the company to read them. Plus, 83% of complainants on Twitter who have received a reply either liked or loved the fact that the company responded.  So, when a brand comes across a bad review from a top influencer, they should see it as a great PR opportunity.

While the concept of Klout is certainly proving to be integral to brand marketing, its underlying foundation is nothing new. They’ve recognized social group behaviors and separated the popular from the ordinary, but by mathematically proving the amount of a person’s popularity, Klout is able to help brands single out the people who will, hopefully, inspire action and do a good chunk of their marketing for them. And therein lies the innovation:  realizing the marketing potential of good ol’ fashioned cliquishness brought into the modern, digital age.

Want another good Klout read? Take a gander at OMG! Your Klout is Showing! posted earlier this year by Jaclyn Gordyan.

Many hotels are already offering experience-based rewards in their loyalty programs and enhanced concierge services to assist guests with discovering the world outside of the hotel. Instead of stockpiling points for a free night’s stay, members of these programs can earn cultural activities, like going backstage before a performance at the Peking Opera or spending the day with a professional bullfighter. Some loyalty programs even offer express experiences specifically designed for business travelers who may only have an hour or two to spare but who still want to go home with at least one memorable insight into the destination they visited.

Additionally, several startups have recently emerged to meet the wanderlusty needs of travelers by offering trip curation tools, local knowledge and a much-needed dose of personalization to the online trip planning process.

Launched in April, Vayable connects travelers with tour guides offering unique and intimate local experiences, like scouting Montmartre street art in Paris or visiting sample sales in NYC with a fashion insider. By allowing these independent guides to sell their local knowledge, Vayable is redefining the tour and activity segment of the travel market.

And then there’s Fortnighter, also launched this year, which provides (for a fee) made-to-order itineraries from professional travel writers based on the user’s dates of travel, interests and budget. Fortnighter brings currency, personalization and expert knowledge to the travel planning table and allows users to steer clear of the unreliability of algorithms and user reviews.

A slew of other services have also cropped up recently. All of this suggests that the travel experience marketplace is heating up, and there appears to be room for more. When looking across the dreaming, researching, booking, experiencing and sharing travel cycle, what kind of product or service can you offer that will assist travelers with collecting those sought-after experiences? How do you evoke the moments that inspire us when we travel? How do you help deliver more authentic travel experiences?

We love cheat sheets at Upshot, and make a point of creating them whenever possible. At my recent “Content Marketing Lunch-n-Learn” I closed with the following best practices. Planning a campaign, promotion, or marketing vehicle where content plays a role? The following will help keep you on course and hopefully provide some food for thought:

1. Think Long Term. How can we use this opportunity to create a marketing platform we can leverage ongoing?
2. Be Resourceful. What assets do we already own that can be repurposed, revamped or redone? Is there public data or an API (social networks, etc.) we can use? What media partnerships could be forged with brands that already have content our consumers want?
3. Stay Relevant. What can we create that consumers will find of value? What will put a smile on their face or change their lives for the better?
4. Treat it like an Investment. Marketing-related content we create or generate via our users is an investment in assets we can reuse and repurpose as our marketing efforts evolve.
5. Be Patient! Payoffs are not always immediate.
6. Fill Gaps in the Niche. What’s missing and what are people demanding?
7. Be Clever and get More Play. Appear non-competitive and offer something the big guys don’t have—done right, the competitors will link to your content!
8. Don’t half-ass it. Content marketing works—that’s why 6 out of 10 marketers increased their content marketing budgets last year. It’s only going to get more crowded and cream rises to the top.
9. Understand Your Targets. If you’re creating content for specific types of consumers, then you better understand their lifestyles. If not, hire someone who does to create the strategy.
10. Have Fun, be Creative! Content marketing is fun and an opportunity to be creative in countless ways. Embrace it!

Want this list in portable format? Download it here.

Earned media often comes in the form of content being created by consumers about a brand, frequently through platforms the brand creates or maintains. Likely sources include social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, but often can be in the form or promotions where a brand has asked for an opinion, expression or point-of-view (like voting in a poll for example).

Once a promotion has ended, such promotional content is often left by the wayside, occasionally only being leveraged if the promotion gets repeated. This is unfortunate as often such assets could be culled and repurposed for ongoing content marketing efforts.

Recently we helped execute a promotion here at Upshot where we asked consumers for tips & tricks related to the use of the brand’s products. We had tens of thousands of entries and of course not all the tips we received were gems. However, there were scores of interesting and noteworthy entries.

As we’re now planning a website relaunch for this same brand, we’re considering that content a valued asset. Through a promotion where the tips served a specific purpose, we now have the secondary benefit of assets we can reuse in our relaunch, this time positioned as expert tips from peers. This will help bolster the brand’s credibility and perfectly complements the product data we intend to publish on the site. Not to mention the added content will undoubtedly help our SEO efforts.

Have you executed recent promotions where you collected user-generated content? Ask yourself: how can we repurpose? Can we distill it down into interesting trends we can share with our consumers? Can we pair it with our product data on our website?

If you’re gearing up for future promotions, think past the promotion and what types of content your most valued consumers can contribute. With the holidays drawing near (gulp), now is a great time to think about how year end marketing efforts can create valuable marketing content you can reap the benefits from in 2012.

Pros. The high demand created exponential word of mouth for the promotion. Created new news for the brand. Most likely, brought in new consumers that might not already shop there. And, sold out in record time. All great for a return on investment.

Cons. Frustrated shoppers that didn’t get the offer or product. Loss of other (non-promotion) sales during the downtime. Possible negative brand image impact.

In these two promotions (Missoni at Target and Whole Foods on LivingSocial), I’m convinced the pros outweighed the cons. The offers were compelling. They created high consumer demand and the site overloads made consumers want it even more. The offers alone gave consumers a reason to care about it, and more importantly, a reason to share it with others (Facebook posts were flooded with people bragging what they scored). Ultimately, it built equity for both the Target and Living Social brands. And, most importantly, doing what promotions do best—motivate behavior.

Social media is hyperactive word of mouth, only there are so many mouths talking you need a way to know how your brand is influencing and who it is reaching. It’s not new news that brands want to connect with consumers. What is new to the speed at which they can track and affect their influence digitally. This media channel is a main conduit for brands to express their voice, promote new products and even tell a larger brand story. It’s not hard to see why and how social media efforts have become the most valuable back-channel way to communicate and build a following. (If your brand isn’t into it, work on that.)

So how do you track all your social media efforts? Who’s talking? How do we keep them talking? With Klout, the current leader in the “social analytics” provider, it all boils down to engagement based on click-throughs, comments, likes, retweets or how often your message is passed along. The number of services they track for you is growing (it now includes the top 10 digital forums, with 3 more coming soon).

Recently celebrities have been using Klout for PR pushes and testing. Brands are also reaching into the system to understand how their audience is listening or if they’re listening at all. They’re taking notes on what topics resonate and using that information to build a stronger brand presence and gaining followers as well as traction in the marketplace as a resource, leader or otherwise. Klout’s easy-to-digest “social analytics” has potential to build smarter partnerships, promotions and more believable categories of influence. Plus, you’ve got to love the dynamic nature of the data. In my opinion, “instant” is the new “ASAP.”

Don’t forget the perks for having influence. Klout Perks are great place for brands to highlight and use those influential talkers directly. It’s kinda like a social media pat on the back from brands to their fans. I’m on board—are you?

Who’s Talking?

Someone needs to spread the message. Called connectors, accelerators and influencers, they have deep and wide social networks and pass along information they care about to others. The key is to tap into the right people for your specific product or service. Here are three types of “go-to” people:

Enthusiast. The stereotypical brand advocate who serves as a passionate brand ambassador.
Local Expert. The know-all about a specific category—car or gadget nut, knows about new restaurants or TV shows.
Jack-of-All-Interest. An interesting know-a-lot vs. an annoying know-it-all.

What Are They Talking About?

First of all, forget everything you learned about traditional brand management. If this process starts by trying to convert a well-crafted brand statement into a word-of-mouth campaign, it won’t be successful. The product or service must be looked at through a different lens.

It’s not what you want to say about your product or service, but what consumers find talkable about it. Finding the relevance in a product or service is crucial. If it’s relevant, the more likely it will be deemed worth sharing. Once something is worth sharing, it has value. High-involvement categories tend to increase information value. The collision of talkability and relevancy becomes the social currency in the message.

Dig deep to understand the consumer. Think about what people like to talk about, why they like to talk, and how an actual conversation might transpire. Remember the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray? It’s quite appropriate when creating word-of-mouth messages.

When developing word-of-mouth messages directed toward men, think in terms of Guysmanship. Male word-of-mouth triggers tend to be competitive, fact-based and opinionated. Men talk to “show that they know” or “be first.” Look at ESPN or read the sports page—facts and opinions are expressed in sound bites.

For women, it’s all about Fempathy. Female triggers are more empathetic or deal with community building and emotional outreach. They talk “to help” and “to be heard.” And far from sound bites, their conversations are centered on shared experiences and expressed as complete stories. It’s Oprah and Lifetime and their stories of women facing their challenges, from the life-changing to the day-to-day.

So Get to It.

Find the right people to spread the word. Craft the right message that’s talkable and relevant. Activate it using the tactics most appropriate for the topic. There’s a world of technological options; be sure to find the tools that will best seed or spark the conversation. And remember, the true magic lies in the social currency of the idea—it’s what keeps the idea moving to others.

The video above is the latest installment in our Upshot Smartshot webinar series, and complements our recent Potty Posting that introduced the concept of marketers with Twitterphobia. This 15-minute episode goes a step further, assuaging marketers’ three biggest fears about the service:

• What should you say?
• What should you do?
• What should you make?

If you’ve missed any of our previous Smartshots, scoot on over to our YouTube playlist for the whole series. Of course, you wouldn’t have missed those if you’d just follow us on Twitter already, at twitter.com/upshotblog. Since you’ve now vanquished your Twitterphobia, you’ve got no excuse!

Twitterphobia affects over 83.72% of marketers* in the US every year.

We’ve seen the devastation it causes. We’ve heard your cries for a cure. And, we’ve found the vaccine in… our latest Potty Posting!

Twitterphobics Anonymous

Click the link above for the PDF version, or continue reading below for the online version. As always, please feel free to share this post with colleagues, clients, or anyone who may be suffering from this absolutely-curable condition.

*No it doesn’t. We made that up. But it definitely exists.

Twitterphobics Anonymous

The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem

We’ve noticed something funny happening in recent meetings. While we’re thumping our chests about Driven by Data Twitter visualizations and using the Twitter API for Life in the OOC applications, we’re often met with nodding approval…along with some shifting eyes and simmering discomfort. We wondered: was there something in our teeth? Did we have bad breath? Probably, and possibly, but neither was the real problem. Eventually, we got people both inside and outside the agency to admit (in shamed whispers) that they’d previously dismissed Twitter as a fad, or thought their consumers weren’t using it, or were (understandably) confused by conflicting reports about Twitter’s dominance / irrelevance / significance / shallowness / growth / stagnation / obsession with why #youdeservetobesingle. Realizing their mistake, they asked us to take it back to step one. Luckily, they’ve found a safe place.

First things first. You’ll never understand the nuances of this service if you don’t set up a Twitter account… like, right now. (Being on the throne is no excuse – Google already told us how often you surf in the bathroom. Eww.) If you’re in marketing and you don’t have a Twitter account, you are #FAILing. We’re not saying you have to tweet. But, we are saying you have to follow a handful of marketers, brands, and industry smarties to see how they’re using the service (a good place to start: Upshot’s own The Awesome Blog.) In fact, having an account would’ve clarified why there’s a pound sign in front of “FAILing” above. On Twitter, any phrase preceded by the pound sign is called a hashtag, and its purpose is to organize disparate tweets into a single conversation stream. (Oh yeah, we’d already put the cart before the horse with a blog post describing how brands can advertise via those hashtags.) For instance, let’s say I wanted to have a wine tasting with some friends who are spread out across the globe. Option one: everyone flies out just to sit in my too-cramped living room and resent having to pick cat hair out of their wine glasses. A better idea: tell anyone who’s interested to grab a bottle of this week’s selection and tweet their comments, including a predetermined hashtag in each tweet. Without that tag, our comments would get lost in the stream of other tweets, but the hashtag allows anyone to track or contribute to this particular conversation, regardless of geographical (or shedding feline) obstacles. We’ll even give you a chance to sample some hashtags yourselves – read or contribute any tweets about this posting using the hashtag #twitterphobia. Unfortunately, #pottytweet was already taken because… well, see that aforementioned Google study.

But, following a couple of Twitter conversations isn’t going to quiet your inner skeptic who continues to question the significance of Twitter. With countless social networks vying for consumers’ attention (and giving old-school ad-types heart palpitations), what makes the tweet so special? How about its ridiculous, lightning-quick, superpower-esque speed? You can argue about the ramifications of Twitter all you want, but there’s no debating that Twitter is the fastest system for information dispersal ever created. With a click of a button, users can re-broadcast another persons’ tweet to their own social network (called re-tweeting), enabling information to jump across social circles in a matter of seconds. Case in point: hours before the official announcement about the demise of one particularly evil Abbottabad resident, many Twitter users had already passed around a tweet from a Washington insider revealing this information. Still, the most widely-shared tweets generally include links to online content outside of Twitter; for instance, when the Bulls’ Taj Gibson dropped bombs on another embodiment of evil, the documenting images, videos, and commentaries were racing across Twitter mere moments after impact. Plus, unlike Facebook, Twitter tends to be radically public, meaning strangers can see (and respond to) tweets on any topic from anyone around the world. In fact, many tweets are written with the expectation that total strangers – including marketers like you! – will read them, share them, and respond to them.

And that’s the whole point here. Don’t get hung up on the insatiable efforts to build up or tear down this service. Instead, take it for what it’s worth – a chance for marketers to step into the conversation. Twitter isn’t just about tweeting on your brand’s behalf (although that’s a whole ‘nother topic – see this site for tons of great thought-starters). And while Twitter’s one of the most powerful PR tools ever created, even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Those who dismiss Twitter as a bunch of self-important narcissists who are just tweeting about their Nikon ads and their new TV shows with one and a half other men… well, okay, that does describe one user pretty well. But dismissing Twitter altogether because of a handful of twits is just undermining your own ability to keep up with what’s captivating the public, why those things are captivating the public, and the shifting ways in which the public digests, shares, evaluates, disbelieves, mocks, and mashes-up information in the modern world. In this case, the medium really is the message.

Still have questions we didn’t answer here? Of course you do. How do you generate followers? How often should you tweet? Did this post convince Dave Nigh to finally open a Twitter account? Tweet any additional questions with the hashtag #twitterphobia and we’ll keep the conversation going. In the meantime, Mashable’s Twitter guide book is a great introduction to the service’s component parts.

P.S. Thanks to historicaltweets.com for the images used in this posting.

the hotspot for haute thought is the pot at upshot

we admit we’re awesomeholics at theawesomeblog.net

• Part 1: Last Year’s Breakouts Level Up. The biggest stories coming out of this year’s SXSW were iterations and smarter applications of the services that broke out at past SXSWs, including those using gaming mechanics.
• Part 2: The (Sort-Of) Killer App. This year’s big story – the emergence of Group Texting apps – wasn’t a “killer app” per se, but these services are undoubtedly useful and have the potential to be even more widely adopted than Twitter or foursquare.
• Part 3: The Location Story. Location-based services like foursquare and Gowalla are focused on telling more compelling stories, offering more relevant services for users, and working to move beyond check-ins.
• Part 4: Can Net Promoter Scores measure how well you’re engaging your followers? With C-Suite executives clamoring for social media ROI, can Net Promoter Scores bridge the gap?
• Part 5: The Value of a Facebook Fan is Exactly… Zero. (Spoiler alert!) The value of a Facebook fan is completely relative, dependent on how each marketer engages with Facebook as a marketing channel. Even with clear correlations between social engagement and sales, it’s still going to be a while before even the smartest minds can indisputably calculate ROI for social media.
• Part 6: Stocking Up for the War on Whiners. Even we were surprised that, of all our 2011 trends, the War on Whiners was the most relevant at SXSW. We take a look at how brands are getting smarter about preparing for these (inevitable) conflicts.
• Part 7: New Weapons in the War on Whiners. Preparation is only half the battle. When marketers determine that it’s time to engage their critics, they’re finding themselves armed with a slew of smart new tactics and weapons.
• Part 8: Is Crowdsourcing the Problem or the Solution? Crowdsourcing is still a hotly debated topic, but the most effective implementations have managed to synthesize the knowledge of experts and the insights of the crowd.
• Part 9: Selling Yourself at SXSW. Some of the most useful lessons from SXSW weren’t learned at the panels. Rather, they came from seeing how brands were marketing themselves at the conference.
• Part 10: Deep Thoughts. In addition to all the deep dives linked above, we heard a ton of smart one-liners and random thoughts that are worth noting.

And that’s a wrap(up)! See you in Austin in 2012.