EARN ONLINE - HOT OFFERS: 2011

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

7 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Klout Score

Aim high. It’s a worthy goal for credit scores, SATs and now, Klout scores. These days, more and more social networkers are looking to boost their Klout rating and show others the power of their social influence.

Klout — which provides social media analytics to measure a user’s influence across social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – has received much criticism since its inception in 2009 not only for its business model but also for its operating principle. However, more people are turning to the service to see where their influence stacks up against others.

The analysis is executed using data taken from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and measures the size of a person’s network, the content created and how other people interact with that content. Those who sign up for Klout or are connected to those who do are each given a “Klout score” that ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater strength of their online influence.

“I wouldn’t say Klout is the ‘standard of influence’ as their tagline boldly proclaims, but they can measure one thing, and increasingly well: how content moves through an online network and how people react to it,” Mark W. Schaefer, the author of the upcoming book “Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing” (McGraw Hill 2012), told Mashable. “That may seem simple but it’s extremely complex and is an indicator of influence.”

Schaefer — a marketing professor at Rutgers University — also noted that Klout is even becoming a measurement for job performance and status: “If you’re in that situation, most consider a score over 30 to be pretty reputable and a score over 50 to be elite.”

Are you below your target Klout score? Schaefer reveals seven simple ways to climb up the ranks:

1. Build a network - The key to increasing a Klout score is similar to finding success on the social web in general: Build a targeted, engaged network of people who would be legitimately interested in you and your content.
2. Create meaningful content - Adopt a strategy to create or aggregate meaningful content that your network loves to share with others. Provide links!
3. Engage - Actively engage with others in a helpful and authentic way. Ask questions, answer questions and create a dialogue with your followers.
4. Don’t scheme - Any gaming behaviors that fall outside the basic strategies will eventually catch up to you. For example, specifically targeting conversations with high Klout influencers will probably be more annoying than successful. If you keep focused on your network strategy and your content strategy, you’ll succeed.
5. Interact with everyone - Don’t be afraid to interact with Klout users with lower scores – it won’t hurt your own score. In fact, it helps build their score and in turn makes you more of an influencer.
6. Publish. Remember - you don’t have to make a movie or be elected to office to have power now. All you need to do is publish. Access to free publishing tools such as blogs, video and Twitter have provided users with an opportunity to have a real voice, so take advantage of these many platforms.
7. Keep at it - Don’t be discouraged by your score. It’s more important to just enjoy your social media experience and let the chips fall where they may.

My Life Without Facebook: A Social Experiment

I deactivated my Facebook account as a sort of social experiment. With Facebook and real life becoming increasingly symbiotic, what would I miss? What wouldn’t I miss?

This didn’t begin as an impulsive decision with unexpected consequences, and I’m not a Facebook hater by any stretch. I love and use social media, and am fascinated by what its explosion has enabled in a variety of arenas. Facebook has obviously been a huge — and probably the single most comprehensive — part of that.

My experiment has continued longer than I expected. I haven’t quit, purposefully not deleting my account entirely. But through extended deactivation, I have learned some things: that I miss out on a lot of conversations now; that, somewhat ironically, I’m more focused now than before on my own life and needs; and that I’m not the only person who wonders, to-FB-or-not-to-FB?

A recent New York Times article titled “The Facebook Resisters” profiled young-adult Facebook abstainers who point to concerns about privacy, alienation and information overload. But I’m interested in a broader question: In a world where it now seems more generally accepted to be on Facebook than not be on, what’s it like to opt out?

I haven’t felt like I need Facebook socially, but there is plenty I’m missing out on. During the many times when funny Facebook photos from parties or nights out come up when hanging out with friends, I feel like the only kid on the schoolyard without a TV, lost at sea while other kids recite lines from The Simpsons. I also frequently find myself playing catch-up when someone brings up an article someone else shared on Facebook. And there’s a whole world of flirting and getting-to-know-you that no longer exists for me.

I miss the definite ease of communication with friends and acquaintances. I’ve used Facebook before to find sources for articles too, but no longer can. So, now my avenues of communication are more segmented: Twitter to keep in touch with some friends, mostly those I’ve met through work, and find cool articles people recommend; LinkedIn to organize my professional contacts; and old-fashioned phone and email to keep up and make plans with close friends.

But it’s what I’ve actually enjoyed about being off of Facebook that has surprised me most. I spend less time on my computer without Facebook’s source of infinite content. During real life experiences, what is or isn’t worth sharing on Facebook no longer lingers in the back of my mind, so I spend more time simply enjoying the present. And the false comparisons between others’ curated digital self-presentations and my own naturally widespread sources of pride, fulfillment, dissatisfaction and insecurity no longer exist.

In the final analysis, what my little experiment has shown me is that Facebook has become so ingrained in human life that it’s kind of like religion in a way. You can partake or not partake as much as you like, but the thing itself isn’t going anywhere. Your choice won’t change anything in the bigger picture, but I’ve found it fascinating to explore the differences in my own life.

After five months, I’m going to keep the experiment going. It’s been fun to be deactivated, but I’m not going to delete. I’ll be back one day. But, for now, I’m enjoying my life offline.

Most Top Brands Have Google+ Pages, But Few Have Many Followers

At this point, most of the top brands have Google+ brand pages, but only a fraction of them are getting many visitors, according to two research firms.

BrightEdge found that 77 of the top 100 brands (as determined by Millward Brown’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2011 list) now have G+ pages. In comparison, 93 of the top 100 have Facebook Pages. The total number of followers for those 77 brands is now 222,000 vs. 147,000 when BrightEdge took its first survey of G+ brand pages last month.

Meanwhile, Simply Measured, which looked at the Interbrand Top 100 Brands, found 61 had Google+ brand pages. However, only 13 of those top brands had followings of 5,000 or more, according to the researcher.

Among the standouts tracked by both: Starbucks quadrupled its followers over the past month while H&M and Pepsi each surpassed the 20,000 follower mark. Once again, Google had the most-followed brand page on Google+ with more than 100,000. (Simply Measured excluded Google’s brand page from results, arguing that it skewed the data.)

Brad Mattick, VP of marketing at BrightEdge, says the movement from 61 brands to 77 was a “big jump.” Mattick says he sees some momentum for Google+ over the past month. “I think brands are seeing more interaction,” he says. “There’s been a ton of growth.”

Meanwhile, Adam Schoenfeld, Simply Measured’s CEO, says he believes most brands are “just dipping their toes in the water” on Google+. Shoenfeld says he doesn’t see a lot to celebrate yet for Google. However, he says Google might be encouraged by the fact that the top 10 brand pages had 80% market share, which could prompt laggards to try to catch up. “I wonder if there’s a sense among the other brands that ‘If we don’t get on this, we could fall behind and lose ground,’” he says.

Google hasn’t released a figure for Google+’s total membership since October. At that time, the company claimed that the social network had 40 million users.

Simply Measured provided a deeper dive into brand activity on Google+ below:

Biggest Share : H&M, Burberry, Dell and Amazon are among those with the most-followed (non-Google) brand pages on G+.

Google+ Brand Pages Begin Showing Up in Primary Search Results

In a move that could raise some charges of anti-competitive behavior, Google has begun integrating Google+ brand page information in primary search results.

The inclusion, noted by researcher BrightEdge, appears only for some brands at the moment. BrightEdge, which has tracked Google+ brand pages since they went live on Nov. 7, just noticed the Google+ integration on Dec. 20.(ThoughSearch Engine Land discovered it last month.) In particular, the company identified the following Google+ brand page results in a search for AT&T:

As Brad Mattick, vp-marketing for BrightEdge notes, the addition of G+ brand pages in this case allows the marketer to wedge in a promotional message. In this particular case, a call for a sweepstakes gets a much bigger audience via Google natural search results than it would have otherwise.

Though AT&T appeared to be one of the first brands to get such treatment, a search for Toyota showed two Google+ entries (from late November).

Other brands, including T-Mobile and Macy’s, also displayed G+ results in their searches. A Google rep offered the following statement about the search results: “Content from the +Page, such as recent posts, will appear as annotations attached to its associated web page under the sitelinks in search results if that site is eligible for Direct Connect. It uses the same bi-directional link and algorithmic criteria as Direct Connect.”

For Mattick, integrating G+ brand page information into search results is an obvious enticement for brands to join and be active on Google+. Mattick says he believes blurring the lines between G+ and search results parallels Microsoft’s inclusion of the Internet Explorer browser in its Windows OS in the 1990s. The U.S. Department of Justice accused Microsoft of using its Windows near-monopoly to beat Netscape in the browser segment.

However, Google’s share of the search market — 65.6% in October according to comScore — is lower than Microsoft’s 78.5% share of the desktop OS market at the time of the IE bundling.

Nevertheless, the move may attract some unwanted attention for Google. The search giant’s push comes as Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) have called on the Federal Trade Commission to look into Google’s search business practices.