As the information age continues to evolve, the role of social media is seeking status.
Marketing professionals now need to be completely OCD on their “Klout Score” if they ever hope to find work in their field, no matter how much experience or success they may have in their portfolio. Mine is currently 45 – totally unworthy by many accounts, by the way. Social media savvy pros are waxing poetic about “influence” in social media. But what exactly is this influence they speak of?
The idea seems pretty straight forward – we listen to our friends on important topics. As a marketer, if I can get you to publicly say something positive about the product I’m promoting, then people in your social sphere will likely be inclined to like the product, too. It’s a well documented concept called “social proof”. It’s also one of the reasons there are so many random products being “Shared” on Facebook.
But how influential is it, really?
Klout was much maligned early on for rating Justin Bieber as more influential than the US President.
They’ve updated their scoring process at least once since then, but I’m not convinced that this Klout score is all it’s cracked up to be.
Mine about doubled when I linked a couple of social media accounts to my profile on their web site. Coincidence, I think not.
In any event, I had an occasion to be discussing “web nonsense” with some colleagues and it came out that Sheryl, Dean of Academics at the University where I run the College of Graphic Design has a twitter account, but never uses it. She’s not kidding. I looked – she has only issued 1 tweet so far, just to tell someone to “get back to work”. I’m pretty sure it was tongue-in-cheek, but who knows.
Just for fun, I decided that someone should engage her in social media (to her credit, she is an avid on line gamer and is simply disinterested in Twitter).
As I was randomly tweeting her nonsense thinking it would be cool to rack up a bunch of messages before she noticed and had a chance to respond, it occurred to me that it might be more interesting to see how many followers she could get without doing anything. With 1 tweet she had 4 (including me). So I posted a request on my Facebook wall asking people to follow @sridens.
I figure it goes 1 of 2 ways. Either people need an actual reason to follow someone on Twitter and won’t go for it, or they’re into random nonsense and will play along by following Sheryl.
Given that we live in a world where people can be famous for being famous, I figure it’s an even money bet.
Just for grins, I added a hash tag, #sheryldontweet to my tweet asking for followers for @sridens.
It’s an experiment, we’ll see where the outcomes take it.
If you’re reading this,
1.) Why? Why are you reading this? This is nonsense.
2.) Please go to your twitter account and follow @sridens