Social Media

Vocanic added another account to its portfolio in 2013  after it was awarded Social Media Agency of Record by MINI Asia despite facing intense competition from 3 other agencies who were present at the pitch session in late 2012.

In line with MINI’s new brand campaign NOT NORMAL that champions MINI owners and enthusiasts’ individualism to stand out and be unique, Vocanic has launch a Facebook app, called The Not Normal Confession. It aims to encourage MINI owners to come clean and ‘confess’ their quirky habits via the app and have their friends vote in support of their initiative.

The application was launched on 4th March 2013 and can be viewed at http://www.facebook.com/MINI.Singapore

OVER the years, various studies have sought to gauge how closely connected people are to one another via their friends. The commonly held view has been that any two people are on average separated by no more than six intermediate connections—the notion of “six degrees of separation” made popular by experiments such as those conducted in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist. Now Facebook has thrown some fresh data into the debate. A new study conducted by the social network’s data boffins and researchers at the University of Milan suggests that people are separated from one another by an average of less than five connections (friends, friends of friends etc.)—and by even fewer links if they happen to live in the same country.

The new research is based on an analysis of the friend networks of 721m people, or slightly more than a tenth of the world’s population, who use the social network regularly. This yielded a total of 69 billion connections. After crunching the data using powerful computers, the researchers concluded that people were separated from one another by an average of just 4.74 connections (down from an average of 5.28 in a study the network conducted in 2008). To bring this to life, they cite the example of a person living in a remote part of Siberia and explain that “a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend”. Looking only at links between people within the same country, the researchers conclude that folk are separated from one another by an average of just three connections.

Some observers, including people posting comments on the study’s own Facebook page, point out that some of the “friends” they have added online are complete strangers that they have linked to on Facebook simply to boost their standing in one of the many online games that the social network is perpetually touting. Yet in theory they could use the networks of these folk to reach out to other strangers around the world that they would not have met otherwise. Most, though, do not seem to bother. The researchers found that while Facebook makes it easier to connect with people anywhere on the planet, the vast majority of its users’ connections are to folk within a short distance of them. In that sense, it is still a very small world.

One of the prerequisites of effective marketing — or really, any strategic activity — is that the company’s left hand should know what its right hand is doing: any effort which isn’t coordinated with other disciplines and day-to-day operations risks being a wasted effort or, worse, making the company look frivolous, insensitive, or just plain ol’ incompetent.

Qantas, Australia’s iconic airline, has illustrated this in exemplary fashion with a Twitter campaign which invited the public to heap praise on the airline’s luxury offerings in their Tweets: “Tell us what is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!) Answer must include the hashtag QantasLuxury.” The winning flattery would be rewarded with prizes including Qantas pajamas and a “luxury amenity kit.”

There are a couple points about the Qantas campaign which invite criticism, including the (debatable) advisability of luxury branding during an economic downturn, the appearance of poor taste in inviting consumers to tell you how great you are, and the paltry prizes for doing so, which one social media commentator described as “asinine.”

But the main error — indeed, catastrophic failing — of the campaign was that it came less than a month after a union strike which Qantas management countered with a total shutdown of the company, grounding flights and hugely inconveniencing thousands of customers who had to re-book on competing airlines.

As rivals like Virgin Australia swooped in to pick up Qantas’ business, analysts pondered whether Qantas would ever be able to recover from the strike and the high-handed management response; marketers and brand experts agreed that it would take a long time to win back the public’s trust — not to mention some fancy PR footwork, probably including advertising addressing the disruption and highlighting the airline’s renewed commitment to reliability.

However the public has yet to see any of these subtle, difficult-to-craft messages, which probably haven’t even been produced yet; instead (a day after management-union talks fell apart again) they were invited to tweet about how awesome Qantas is.

By Erik Sass

Why Klout Should Measure Distribution Over The Amorphous ‘Influence’

Wake up and smell the perks.

Recently, Klout, a startup that measures “influence” in social media, and purveyor of “perks,” declared a “new era” because they were adjusting their scoring algorithm. (In case you live under a rock – Klout measures your “influence score” from 0 – 100 based on your social graph data).

Here’s now they explained the change, what they called the “biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology”: Today we’re releasing a new scoring model with insights to help you understand changes in your influence. When someone engages with your content, we assess that action in the context of the person’s own activity. These principles form the basis of our PeopleRank algorithm which determines your Score…

Confused? You were not alone but when the dust settled many folks lost 10 or 20 points in their Klout score. The reaction to this new scoring model was mixed. There was the “nonplussed” camp – those who were too cool to admit they knew/cared what their score was – much less if it dropped. Not surprisingly, this camp is populated with folks who have day jobs unrelated to content creation, audience building or Twitter.

Then there was the “other camp”- those who felt the new scoring model was not a good thing – not good at all. Unlike the first camp, this group cared very much about their Klout score not out of vanity but for the very practical reason that Klout has a direct impact on their livelihood. This group, largely made up of bloggers, authors and Indies with scores in the 40s to 60s, got clobbered and it didn’t go unnoticed because social credibility for these folks equals brand sponsorships, PR outreach, audition opportunities etc.

And almost immediately following the change, we saw tweets from authors who saw a softening of book sales or artists who saw a reduction of downloads. So it’s no surprise this is the group that cried “foul” made worse by the fact that most unfortunately, the outer edges of the Klout distribution curve seemed barely to feel any difference. High scoring content distribution machines like Wired and CNET (80+) saw little impact in their scores. Similarly, those at the lower end of the scale also were not much impacted either.

The whole episode seemed to cause one to wonder what was behind Klout’s change.

The answer, on a surface level, is actually pretty simple. Klout had to fix the mechanism that allowed too many people (like Twitter monkeys who have 170,000 followers/ followees) to rise way too fast within the Klout scoring system. Clearly that’s not good as any scoring system needs a proper distribution of population sustainable over time. In effect, they had to “reset the dial”.

But this re-setting of the scoring dial and the fall out, really underscores the fundamental flaw in any attempt to measure “influence” so dependent on subjective context (a problem I noted back in May.)

In fact, now I am beginning to wonder if ANY externally driven Influence scoring methodology is useful given the complexity in determining who has influence and in what areas, (more than once I was amused at how Klout thought I was expert on “Russia” or “Warfare” – maybe because my blog is called “Trenchwars”).

So I also can’t help but question whether Klout would do well to not to recalibrate their “Influence” scoring model (which then disqualifies it as a “standard” by any measure) but to recalibrate exactly what they are REALLY measuring. Stripping away techno-buzz, isn’t it more accurate to say that Klout is really measuring a person’s content distribution capabilities – not their influence at all?

And if you are willing to consider this approach, then it’s much easier to see how Klout becomes a far more effective tool for everyone. Using a content syndication model takes this amorphous Influence score and re-expresses it as standardized and actionable media channel m with useful CPM and effective reach metrics.

Personally, this makes so much more sense all around even though it lacks the techno-cool buzz that media loves to talk about.

In the end, its useful to remind ourselves that, as marketers, even if we can measure influence, this still leaves us miles from real prize which is to create trust to drive a sale. I ended my post in May with this observation that’s worth repeating: “In understanding influence – it’s the fundamentals of trust that marketers really need to think about. Everything else is noise.”

With all this noise – I think I’m getting a headache.

By: Judy Shapiro