Today I’d like to present some musings about the klout score. Now, mine is not particularly high – actually it is pretty low – as you can see below; but the curve is interesting, if set into a context. So far I only followed my klout score pretty idly, till I started to do some minor experiments on 16.02.2011. You see some immediate effect on the day after. This is mainly due to me posting a blog entry and communicating this via Twitter and LinkedIn. There also should be a communication via CIBER’s Twitter account. This usually leads to a few clicks and one or two followers on Twitter. However, the real point I’d like to draw your attention to is the 22.02.2011. This is the day the 6.3 earthquake struck in Christchurch downtown and caused severe devastation. As you may know, I normally blog about CRM and social CRM on the CIBER site, so that event is clearly outside my usual activity. Now the catch is: I do live in Christchurch and quite some of my network friends do know this. So I did some simple things by updating my status in the few networks that I actively use:

• LinkedIn with direct update to Twitter
• Facebook
• XING

As you can imagine this still caused some reactions of my friends – quite some of which are real life friends. Of course there are still one or two CRM related posts of mine in there, plus an opinion on a political matter in Germany, but the majority of all conversations deals with the Christchurch quake, and the good thing is that it shows a lot of empathy, for which I am really grateful. I do not want to diminish the empathy shown by my friends but I am particularly grateful for reactions from Miriam Schwab (klout score 44) from Israel, Chris Heaslip (klout score 21) from NZ, Francine Hardaway (klout score 61) and Paul Greenberg (klout score 61) from the US, four persons who have never met me physically but who instantly asked whether my family and I are OK, which led to brief conversations. The conversation with Francine was on a mailing list, so is not relevant for the further discussion. I added the klout score here as I think the number is relevant for what happened to my klout score. A few of the sites I used are monitored by klout to calculate their score, the mailing list isn’t. Note: LinkedIn was not added to my account, this followed only on 24.02.2011, leading to a further boost to 29, as this is my most frequently used network. As you can see there is a sharp rise from 19 – 24. What does this tell me? Well, a couple of things: The number of conversations matter, i.e. not the own tweets but getting reactions. Proof will be a far slower increase of my klout score or a slow decline, as I am not as diligently blogging or twittering than colleagues (but may be I, one day, make it out of the explorer section ...). However:

• The topic seems to be pretty irrelevant
• there is no visible measurement of sentiment. This ties in with with the soaring klout score of Kenneth Cole who now can be used as a bad example of Twitter usage after tweet relating his brand to the Egypt revolution that came across pretty cynical
• It seems logical that interactions with higher scoring partners increase the own klout more than interactions with lower scoring partners

The klout website is unluckily not particularly helpful when trying to analyse this, so all faults in this article are genuinely mine. Without being cynic we can learn some lessons from this which might help companies in their social media marketing efforts, and again, I am not cynic here, just starting off an example that intrigued me because of the effect in the system that I observed and because it effected me; and then since klout is starting to become a business tool with companies starting to use it to plan their reactions on activities on the network that relate to them. Consumers also use klout to assess brands, inferring from a high score (high influence) that the brand is of high value or trustworthy. This ties into the word of the “company like me” that Paul Greenberg dubbed in 2008. My lessons learnt are:

1. Interaction pays off. The klout score as a measure of influence makes some participants in conversations more attractive than others.
2. A quality network is important. I define quality here as the average klout of the participants.
3. Using the right networks is important. When using klout these important networks are at this time Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

But be aware: At this time it doesn’t really seem to be important what one says as long as it generates conversations. It also does not seem to be relevant how well received the statement is. This may tempt us to lose focus as quantity seems to be more important than quality and to start to overly polarize but this is an approach that is dangerous as

• Further research by the readers easily shows that the klout score does not relate to the own competency
• The analysis tools and algorithms will surely improve fast and give a more detailed picture on where the klout comes from. An early indication for this is the quadrant that klout spans already now

Did you have similar observations? This is a repost with the author's permission from the original one on http://socialmeetscrm.blogspot.com.

Brick-and-mortar retail businesses face a combination of ever-increasing customer expectations, customers being “educated” to expect and receive promotions, and of course an ever increasing competition in the market place for their customers’ share of mind and share of wallet. On top of all this they need to realize that they do not control the communication to their customers anymore, let alone being capable of controlling the communication in between their customers. As many bloggers, including myself, and analysts already stated, the advent of extremely user friendly and ubiquitous mobile devices and web applications essentially decoupled retailers from communications between their customers and even led to their marketing messages becoming part of the “background noise” for lots of consumers – just something one filters out when it comes to getting serious information. Of course there are exceptions, especially considering that retail businesses reacted to this threat. For retailers it is about being where the customers are. This started with setting up transactional web sites (web shops) to drive additional sales, using more and different ways to address customers, e.g. setting up and participating in communities, building fan pages on Facebook, Twitter streams, keeping in touch with exciting new services like Groupon, building capabilities to monitor and participate in discussions in forums, creating loyalty programs, and so on. Quite some of the challenges facing retailers have the potential of being disruptive to their business models. Take Groupon as an example: Groupon is the successful implementation of a scheme that shifts the power balance drastically to the buyer (consumer) side; the scheme is similar to the earlier development of retailer purchase organizations that intended to counter the power of their suppliers (e.g. the expert group). Another example is yourbus, a German startup company that organizes long distance bus services, if the demand is high enough. Yourbus has the potential to really hurt the German railway. Another main challenge is that fending off possibly disruptive attacks and staying in the minds of customers is a costly exercise – and retailers often run on slim margins. This means that activities need to be organized and efficient while making sure that the customer experience is consistent across all channels or touch points, like radio, TV, store, point of sale, web site, general marketing collateral, and, yes, of course, Facebook, blog sites, Twitter, and so on and so forth. The key word here is consistent; the experience does not need to be the same, actually cannot be the same; just imagine the differences between radio and TV, or between Facebook and Twitter. The current buzzword for achieving and maintaining this consistency is customer experience management. There are a lot of good approaches towards keeping in the minds of customers. There are interesting reactions to Groupon, e.g. Wal-Mart’s CrowdSaver on Facebook or Uniqlo’s Lucky Counter that does the same via tweets on Twitter – offering a discount if enough positive voices are there. Social commerce and F-Commerce (e-commerce via Facebook) are definitely on the current hip list. The need to integrate topics like CRM, loyalty, mobile, e-commerce is definitely there. What currently inhibits retailers (and other companies) from more effectively pursuing this necessary integration is lacking integration into back end systems. Gartner identified more than 100 vendors with Social CRM offerings in their first Magic Quadrant on Social CRM that dates June 2010. In the same research they assessed that only in 2011 social CRM suites will emerge, which then will be rapidly evolving. I do not say that there is nothing out there – that would not be true. Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Sage, RightNow technologies and Netsuite, also SugarCRM, they all have some or the other functionality, but there is no real breadth yet. Of course this list of vendors is not complete. Let us focus in on SAP as an example. I do not single out SAP here; it is just that I know SAP a little more. SAP has all the necessary technologies, including an engine that is capable of measuring sentiments and StreamWork, a highly interesting tool. But neither SAP nor its partners do have a compelling integrated social CRM solution yet. There is SAP consulting themselves with their Social Media Cockpit, which effectively does some integration of CRM and Twitter as a marketing and service support tool. SAP consulting, too, has an add-on to CRM that extends loyalty management to Facebook. Then there is movento who have a Social CRM add-on that provides information about business partners from online communities directly in CRM. And CIBER is one of few companies bringing an integrated solution to organizations managing consumer marketing across multiple websites, having more a process than a product view. So, what are avid retailers doing in these times? The market even now offers tools and technologies to support most important business processes that involve the social web, from (community) platforms via monitoring and listening tools, towards more business process orientated tools that support marketing, sales and service processes. Today retailers pick and choose the tools that best support their social CRM strategies. They implement them as spot solutions, in silos, and increasingly also with custom integration into business systems. Tomorrow we will see that they also have the option to choose pre-integrated software. This post is a re-post of the original post on blog.ciber.com with the permission of the author.