6:03PM January 12 2012

Nominations are open for the Social Brands 100

Headstream’s Social Brands 100, the authoritative ranking of those brands succeeding in the social age, is open for 2012 nominations!

Social Brands 100 measures genuine engagement based on a brand’s content and behaviour. Last year’s report recognised the achievements of brands across retail, FMCG, media & entertainment, travel, technology, and more.  It found that any brand can choose to ‘be social’, but it’s not about making noise, it’s about how brands behave with their communities that really counts.

To be included in this year’s Social Brands 100, brands need to be nominated before February 10th. You can nominate your own brand, or put a shout out for a brand that you love.

Nominations are being collated through the @SocialBrands100 Twitter profile. Once the nomination period has closed, Headstream will work with its data and analytics partner, Brandwatch, to create the ranking. To find out more, and to nominate a brand, go to www.socialbrands100.com.

Inclusion in the Social Brands 100 is a great way to show the world how your brand is performing in social, or give recognition to a brand you think is doing it right.  It’s as simple as sending a tweet to @SocialBrands100 with the name of the brand you would like to nominate, and the hashtag #sb100.

So, what are you waiting for?

10:45AM November 4 2011

The tricky issue of influence

Influencer ranking tools have been a hot topic of conversation lately. Last week when Klout, the original influencer-ranking tool, changed its ranking algorithm there was a sharp backlash on social media. What emerged was that some individuals had been adapting their online behaviour to try and ‘game’ their Klout score, and now they were angry that the rules had changed. To us this seemed to be a lose-lose situation. For the individuals it showed a huge lack of authenticity, and for Klout it demonstrated how its data can be flawed.

With this in mind Headstream were pleased to be able to listen to Azeem Azhar (@azeem) the founder of Klout competitor, Peerindex, at yesterday’s #dellb2b event in London. He provided his take on just how good the current tools are, and how he thinks influencer rankings can be used.

Headstream’s view is that the current tools (the third competitor in this market is PeopleBrowsr’s Kred) are blunt instruments that should only form one small element when assessing influence. And this appeared to be shared amongst the gathering of social media, technology and business thinkers at #dellb2b.

When Azeem asked the room ‘Who believes influence can be measured in a single number?’ just one hand was raised amongst the sixty people or so present (@bejaminellis you know who you are!). The consensus was that there is a huge problem when applying a single influencer ranking for an individual when influence is such a subjective area. For example one person’s influencer could be another person’s non-entity, or an influencer in a certain subject in one geography could be irrelevant to those in another.

Azeem admitted that ‘There is no single accurate definition of influence at the moment’ but he believed that one could emerge over time, moulded by market forces. “There needs to be a standardized definition of influence. That will emerge from the to-ing and fro-ing of the market, and for that there needs to be competition.”

As luck would have it one of those competitors, Kred, in the shape of PeopleBrowsr’s Andrew Grill @andrewgrill, was in the audience. He agreed that the definitive influencer ranking doesn’t exist, and questioned if it ever would. Andrew said: “We have a really big responsibility. We are scoring humans, can that ever be definitive? I think it’s important that there are three or four companies out there doing this to give healthy competition.”

So is that the future? A ‘basket’ of different influencer rankings that gives an aggregated picture of how the individual scores in terms of online influence? That solution is probably little better than the single rankings.

From our practical experience in mapping influencers for clients the best solution is to use human analysis, rather than automated rankings. By using monitoring tools to gather data about a particular topic, then diving into that data and tracing relationships and information flows between individuals we establish if individuals have reach, relevance and respect around the brand (or issue) we are working with. These insights can then be used to create comprehensive profiles of each influencer, and to map the links between them.

Three elements of influence - reach, relevance, respect

We do use automated influencer ranking tools on occasion to double check named individuals. Most often though we use them to fuel some banter within the team along the lines of ‘my Klout is bigger than yours’ !

12:22PM October 28 2011

In conversation with Jeremiah Owyang

Headstream had the pleasure of meeting Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) last week, partner at social business and technology advisory firm Altimeter. We’ve always been big fans of Jeremiah’s work, so it was a real privilege to hear some of his thoughts on the future of social business and technology. Here are five key-points we took away:

 

Open will beat closed

The business models that will thrive are those which “work with the internet rather than against it”. Jeremiah believes that “open will win” and cited as an example Altimeter itself, which makes all its research openly available, compared to other research firms that charge for access. He sees Altimeter’s  business model, which gains its revenue from follow-on advisory fees, as more sustainable than the paid-for content model.

 

“Make the market your marketing department”

By adopting an ‘open’ business model, distributing content widely, and providing individuals with the tools to link back to your content, the entire market can become your marketing department. A business like GiffGaff is a good example of a company where the customers are working for it in this way. (GiffGaff ranked highly in Headstream’s Social Brands 100 listing, published in March)

 

URLs will go away

As we enter the era of the social web i.e. an internet built around people rather than machines, the traditional architecture of the internet will change radically. Jeremiah sees a future where “corporate web pages go away, URLs go away, search as we know it goes away. We will know so much about customers that we won’t need those things. Data will be used so well that we can predict and anticipate what the market wants.”

 

Europe vs. the U.S

Jeremiah had two observations. First, Europe is 24 months behind the U.S. when it comes to adopting social business practices, and second, Europeans are much more decorous when it comes to conversations on Twitter, in the U.S. the Twitter ’noise’ is much greater!

 

Teaching people to shout

If you respond to unhappy customers on Twitter without a co-ordinated and in-depth social CRM strategy in place, you are simply “teaching them to shout at you some more”. Only those companies that are prepared to introduce a service culture throughout the organization e.g. Zappos, will be able to handle customers successfully. Jeremiah is wary of any company that says it wants to undertake social CRM if the executives aren’t prepared to get personally involved.

 

These are a few highlights from a wide-ranging and excellent conversation over a lunch organized by Neville Hobson @jangles, and supported by Dell’s Kerry Bridge @kerryatdell. Many thanks to them for making it happen, and to the other guests @sheldrake, @benjaminellis, @jas, @abigailh and @sophiebr, who made it such a great conversation. Lovely photo here.