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Most social media “listening” systems have a way to evaluate the influence of the various sources in your social media ecosystem. They do that by looking at a variety of factors, such as number of incoming links, number of comments, number of unique commenters, Google Pagerank, etc.

The problem I have with these systems is that an influential person for one company may not be so influential for another. For example, a blogger could score really high on all the above metrics yet only influence other social media pundits. That might be a good influencer for one company, but not for a company who is trying to influence traditional press people or a business audience. They would need a blogger who appeals mostly to those audiences.

Does that mean that the only way to determine influence is to look at those influencers manually?

[photopress:game_change_sm.jpg,full,alignright]More and more people in the marketing space are starting to talk about doing marketing with social media, or leveraging social media in their marketing efforts, or better yet, and especially coming from the PR front, monitoring the social media space in addition to the traditional channels.

For some reason that started bothering me. And it should bother you too.

Unlike email, which was a new channel of communication with customers, social media is not a new channel. Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values – to use the game theory elements of the game.

So marketing has become a new game because of social media. It is not just a new channel to reach and interact with customers. Not realizing that distinction will result in companies not being able to achieve their business objectives. And those objectives have not changed – and were best described by the late Peter Drucker when he said: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

So the end goal of marketing has not changed – it still is to create a customer. It is everything in between to get to that goal that has changed! And you will not get there by monitoring the new social media channel. The only way you will get there is if you understand the new rules, the new players and all the other elements of the marketing game.

[6/20 update] I actually expanded on the topic on the Marketing 2.0 blog

Confirming a recent survey from Arketi, a new survey commissioned by Brodeur from Marketwire found that:

• Blogs are a regular source for journalists: Over three-quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue
• Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis:
• The majority of journalists said blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested – except news quality.

Note to PR people – an increasing share of reader attention is moving to social media, and that is why you need to engage in the social media space. Two recent surveys now show that if traditional media is still your main goal, then an increasingly effective way to influence traditional media is by engaging with social media. So one way or the other, you can no longer ignore social media!

Oh, one more point – creating anemic, corporate-speak-laden, CEO blogs does not count
(via Marketing Charts)

On Thursday 12/13 at 1pm EDT we will be conducting a public round table discussion with Lenovo’s VP of Online Marketing, David Churbuck, and SAP’s VP of Social Media Relations Michael Prosceno on what it takes to make all this social media and marketing 2.0 stuff to work in a large company. It should be a fun discussion and we hope you will be able to join us.

For more details and to register, visit the Facebook event’s page.

Johnson & Johnson is suing the Red Cross and other parties over the use of the Red Cross. Talk about one heck of a juicy story. The reality is that J&J is suing the Red Cross because it is licensing the use of the Red Cross symbol to for-profit organizations, while J&J holds trademarks to the Red Cross symbol since before the Red Cross actually existed.

So what is a VP of corporate communications at J&J to do in response to such a corporate public affair’s nightmare? Send out press releases, hold press conferences, use all the traditional tools available to corporate communicators in crisis management mode? Not so for the J&J corporate com VP, Ray Jordan, who took his story to the J&J corporate blog, where he wrote up J&J’s point of view in an everyday and personal voice.

The result? A large number of comments and stories generally providing broad support for J&J’s point of view. While there are negative comments, the blog achieved what no other crisis communication’s vehicle would have delivered.

(via Johnnie Moore)

[Tags: Red Cross Johnson & Johnson J&J corporate communication crisis management]

Yesterday Nate Ritter posted a comment on my story about Alaska Airlines – bringing up a good point about whether bloggers with a certain audience should refrain from lambasting companies with which they have had bad experiences.

Journalists have a clear code of ethics – as maintained by the Society of Professional Journalists. The code of ethics is built around the basic premise that journalists should “Seek Truth and Report It.” One section of the code says “Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.”

But isn’t that what a blog is by definition? This is not a news site. It is a stream of personal commentaries on marketing and sometimes personal experiences.

I am very aware of the power of the blog and its ability to harm in Google searches and the like – and that makes me pause when I have a bad experience with a company. But when the experience goes as far as costing someone $900 out of their own pocket, and when the experience is representative of a whole industry-segment’s trend of disintegrating customer service – does that not give an individual the right to use his or her personal journal to retell the story?

[Tags: ethics blogging customer service worse practices airlines]

As many of you will have noticed, I have had my fair share of mishaps with my local Bruegger’s. The last time I wrote about my experiences, Scott Hughes, the VP of marketing posted a comment on my blog asking for more information so that they could address the problem.

We went back and forth on email a few times and then two weeks ago I noticed that they put a new general manager in charge of the store. Not only has the service improved considerably, the whole mood of the store has brightened somehow. And then yesterday I get an email from Scott to inform me that they had made some management changes at the store and asking for my business, saying: “I hope you give us another opportunity.”

WOW – Scott thank you for listening! You just turned me into a big Bruegger’s fan!

And btw – your new Ciabatta’s are great too!

[Tags: bruegger's customer service bagels]

Nick Car over at Rough Type has an interesting post on how AOL Ted Leonsis used his blog to control his message. He calls it defensive blogging – a blogger who’s main goal is not to engage in a conversation but to gain more control over the results that show up when people Google you.

[Tags: blogging conversation messaging]

Many people are confused about web metrics and especially blogging metrics – who’s numbers can you trust, what is important, etc. The problem and the confusion become even bigger when you start using Ajax – which does not refresh the page when you request something -, and RSS – with most solutions not counting those readers unless they click through your article to come and read at least parts of it on your site.

Heather Green at Business Week spent some time looking at all those issues and wrote a great article on the subject – one that even non-geeks will be able to appreciate.

The bottom line is that we really need some new measurement sticks…

My friend Pito (from Blogbridge, where I am an advisor) muses about what next generation aggregators could look like (here and here)…a solution to deliver appropriate content to a person based on very minimal profile information.

This is indeed going to become one the biggest challenges in the near future – and not just for readers who are struggling to find the right content, but also for content publishers – including marketers, bloggers, reviewers, publishers, etc. – who are increasingly finding it harder to get their content in front of the right people (at the right time).

What makes this challenge especially complicated is that the information needs for people change over time. Some “information consumption” needs are episodic or one-time – like the need to find vacation-destination related information or college admission information. Sometimes, the “information delivery” or the “information packaging” needs also change over time – some days you might have a lot of time on your hands and be in the mood to read large amounts of detailed information while other days you are so busy that you can only consume headlines for those things that are most important for you at that particular point in time.

Another twist to this is that sometimes I may not even know what might interest me – especially when you are talking about the intersection of disciplines. I may have a high interest in social networking issues and not really know that there is a rich body of knowledge about that in the online gaming content providers, or in the systems-dynamic based learning community.

Pito thinks that the answer to this will not be a better aggregator, but something else. I tend to agree with that. But considering that the solution is probably one that combines human expert content filters with non-expert human tagging and automated technology based filtering and behavioral targeting solutions – what would it be?

…any ideas?

[Tags: information overload publsihing content aggregators]