Sheena Iyengar, author of The Art of Choosing, recently gave a presentation at the TED conference where she explained how people value either the individual or the group more depending on the culture to which they belong. Some of what Iyengar says has interesting implications for how [...]

    There has been a lot of debate about the merits and shortcomings of Klout and PeerIndex–two tools for assessing the influence of account holders on Twitter, Facebook, and now LinkedIn. Klout claims to be “The Standard for Influence” while PeerIndex’s slogan is “Understand Your Social Capital.” In a recent post, I have provided more insights about the [...]

    Having a clean reputation online is important in order to assert your influence and thought leadership. If you intend to become a social business, you need to be able to show a trail of positive comments by your customers. If you are looking for innovative ways to keep your online feedback in good standing, here are two [...]

    I love Klout. When I look at my score it reminds me to become more involved in meaningful conversations online. Also, the imperfections in Klout force me to ask myself questions about the true nature of influence, about whether Klout is flawed, and about what a better influence measurement would be–all questions which I otherwise may not [...]

  Photo by DonnaGrayson, on Flickr Customers now expect service where they are, at the time they choose, in the format they choose. And they want to have a say in what is offered to them. The tremendous potential that social networking offers to meet this challenge has become clear to most financial advisors. However regulatory hurdles in the financial [...]

Nicola Millard, customer experience futurologist for BT Global Services, shares some insights about what service providers in telecom have to do to beat out not only other telco brands, but all other brands of competitors, whether retail, banking, social networks, financial services, entertainment or any other verticals that touch customers day to day. Neuroscience, she says, shows that 90 percent [...]

According to Peter Krainik, forward-thinking CMOs are looking across their global digital branding and engagement platforms and applying the same traditional vs. community trends internally. Every marketer should look at their digital programs and platforms and take a hard look at all the “traditional content/push” approaches they have within these platforms and make them more engaging, etc. Having one-way web-based [...]

Conversations about military service invariably involve influencers and those they influence, positively or negatively, and the influence dynamics play a huge role in the outcome of the decision. This dynamics was the inspiration for LifeAsAMarine.com, a site created for the Marine Corps and the first site to leverage functionality used in social networks to engage visitors and encourage participation. The [...]

Britney Spears has more than six million followers however if you consider the influence of her fans on Twitter, most of them have zero influence. Such are the findings of a study by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics company which helps people locate key influencers in their areas of interest with its social media analytics tool. For more [...]

Brian Solis presents the findings of a recent study which he co-led with Vocus. Solis starts by providing his own definition of influence: ”Influence is the ability to cause desirable and measurable actions and outcomes.” Solis then reviews the findings from the Vocus Influencer poll. 90% of respondents saw a vast difference between popularity and influence. 84% saw a correlation [...]

Trisha Lynn, on her blog, provides a summary of a presentation given by Jacob Margan from ChessMedia Group, about Social CRM. Here are the highlights. The slides from the presentation are also included. • Email is just another marketing channel. • 43% of consumers say companies should use social media to solve customers problems. • Only 7% of organizations understand [...]

According to Esteban Kolsky – Principal and Founder of ThinkJar, “the success of Social CRM at this early stage “is not to replicate CRM deployments via Social Channels and prove that they can work (some of them have, some of them haven’t) but it is more about making Social CRM a recognized key system in the Social (r)evolution and the [...]

Influencers don’t always have mass followings on Twitter or lots of Facebook friends. They are not necessarily celebrities either. They are more often experts. A study in the UK found that “most “influential” users on Twitter were actually people with much lower profiles but who were experts in their own fields rather than celebrities with the most followers,” (see Popular [...]

A study conducted at Northwestern University determined that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with millions of Twitter followers are mostly ignored on the social media site, resulting in very little if any influence. When the researchers applied their mathematical algorithm to the countless s that appear on Twitter each day, they found that experts in certain fields were much more likely [...]

Nobodies are the new somebodies. That’s the advice from Guy Kawasaki, who says It’s no longer big business and media giants who determine whether or not a new service or product will succeed. It’s the unknowns, ordinary folks who have become the key influencers. And companies must remember that when they are trying to win people over to their ideas, [...]