The Wayward Celt

I’ve written on this topic before and in multiple spaces. I first touched on the idea back in January 2011 with this post over on the Notes from Rational Support blog: On Personal Digital Eminence. In that post I set for a simple call to action for “both IBMers and the public alike: Get out there and distinguish yourself in your space”. Many of you heeded that call, saw the value, and have begun sharing more in the social spaces and really building your own eminence, even taking the more specific actions of claiming your own name space to improve your digital eminence!

Today, rather than selling you on the value of creating your online eminence and thought leadership, I want to talk to you about a single small refinement that has the largest impact when sharing online.

One of the key items in the IBM Social Computing Guidelines is the idea of “adding value”. This means asking yourself before posting if this is going to add any value to the conversation, or if it will add value by creating a conversation worth having. Now, I think most of us can rationalize some sort of value into nearly everything we post today, so I’d like to touch on how to improve this notion of “value add”.

The single most effective and easiest way to add value is to provide some sort of context or commentary when sharing any link. Have you see people share only a link with no other text around it? How often have you clicked on those links? I’m willing to say rarely to never. You may also be thinking that most of what you reshare from others is self-explanatory; and in many cases it quite well could be. But, unless it is an eCard meme, I’m guessing there’s value you can add to anything you share or reshare… especially if you are sharing in a more professional context. Let’s take the following example which shows how I added value to a share that was already potentially self-explanatory:

In the example below, Susan shared Robert’s post on G+. Since I don’t follow Robert, Susan’s share gave me immediate value as the content was interesting to me… but when it comes to resharing, how could I add even more value to Robert’s post and Susan’s share? Simple: I added my own perspective as to why this post has value for me:

    .

Adding your own insights or context does a few things to add value here: One, it provides a reason for your audience to pay attention and click-through to the link or content you found interesting enough to share. Two, it begins to build up your own digital eminence as people begin to understand your views and insights on what interests you. And as a third tangential benefit, adding context and commentary like this surfaces you in Google search results lending even more weight to your personal digital eminence.

Don’t believe me? Need a real world example? Try Google searching on the phrase “digital eminence” and you’ll find that my content is not only one of the top 3 results, but two of the highlighted images are also from my own posts. Results which have come directly from adding value when sharing these posts from myself or by others.

If you want those same kind of results (or better) for yourself start adding your own commentary and context to the content you share. Soon, you’ll find your own name popping up in search results like this too! It really is the single easiest and best way to build your own digital eminence around the topics which interest you… you’ll thank me when a hiring manager does some quick searches and hires you into that new role because YOU show up in the results.

You’ve seen these kinds of calls before:

“Help me get to 1000 likes” or “Only 20 away from 2k followers, help me get there!”…

As I am sure you can guess, I have no real love for these, and I have a sense you don’t either. In fact I’m certain that none of my friends, followers, or fans really care about your counts. The higher your numbers are has no bearing on the value I get from following you. And therein lies the crux of this post: value.

I’ve been seeing a recent uptick on posts of this nature, as well as “real-life” membership drives for professional associations. Be it on-line or off, the issue is still the same: what value will I get from following you or joining your association? In fact one real-world professional association I became aware of in the past two weeks is so focused on building membership that they’ve seemingly completely forgotten to add any value to being part of the association, resulting in an actual decline in membership; a result which obviously runs counter to their intent.

Let me exemplify the fallacy of focusing on membership or follower counts by showing you a trend graph of a person I used to follow on Twitter (obfuscating to protect the guilty). When follower counts are all that matter, this is the kind of behaviour you will see:

Note the 35k+ follower spike on a single day. Yes, I am fairly certain he bought those followers. More importantly, in less than three months he also lost all those users as well. This simple trend graph shows perfectly how focusing on one particular metric can generate misguided behaviours and not only miss the end goal, but cause more pain and unnecessary churn around irrelevant results. Membership drives only incentivize one behaviour: to grow the numbers. Instead, focusing on the right behaviours will and incentivizing the right activities or tasks will not only show positive growth in your overall numbers, but will make that growth sustainable as well.

Let me show you what solid, organic growth looks like when you focus on the content and not just follower counts or membership drives:

What you see above is continued and sustainable growth as Kelly reaches more and more people, real people, who are more likely to engage and even reshare her content; all of which provides greater results and gets closer to her end goal. Having 40K followers is fine, but if only 100 of those ever interact with you or even read your content, what good are the other 39.9k? I’d much rather have an active and engaged audience of 1k followers who are more inclined to listen to what I have to say.

I will concede, however, that numbers do matter to some extent. After all, if no one is seeing your awesome content, there’s no hope for growth. Getting your counts up a bit higher so more people will have access and visibility to the amazing stuff you’re writing is indeed a factor you need to consider. But the focus solely on follower counts is a misguided one at best. The real key is to build the right behaviours of engagement and amazing content which provides value to your followers to the point where they want to share it out to their followers as well. I’m guessing the user shown above didn’t have the content to keep his newly found audience (assuming they were real people accounts to begin with).

The initial concern then is to ensure you are building the right behaviours, the right content and sharing it with the right people. I can buy followers to simply boost my numbers, but are those followers who will be getting value from me? Nope. Are they even real followers? Likely not. So rather than trying to build large numbers in a truncated time frame, let’s focus on solid organic growth of our networks based on compelling and exciting content that’s worth sharing, talking about, or implementing in your own test and production environments (oops, my software support background just slipped out there a bit).

I’ve used the phrase “content marketing” previously, and I am seeing it build momentum in the past few months… for good reason: audiences (your social following or association membership base) are demanding your channels show value. If you aren’t providing value, they’ll drop you and go where they will find value. There are so many channels and so much noise inundating us from all sides, it is content which is king and content which will bring those follower numbers others so desperately want.

Let’s recap:

• Membership drives can build numbers but don’t reward the right behaviours or actions and
• We have a choice: we can accrue followers or we can curate a valuable and effective network. Curating a network will result in accruing followers.
• Social Business is not a numbers game. Anyone can buy followers (those of us with integrity wouldn’t, but we easily could).
• Content is the way to drive traffic and increase visibility, as well as build your own thought leadership and digital eminence.
• Encourage and incentivize the right behaviour, and the follower counts will steadily climb up and to the right.

That got your attention, didn’t it? Last month I called 2013 the Year of Influence and shared Brian Solis’ interview of Klout founder/CEO Joe Fernandez where they spoke about the future of Klout as a tool for influence measurement. Contrary to the title of this current post, I still believe 2013 will be the year of influence for content marketers and social businesses on a large scale. But, let me tell you why I think it is also irrelevant to some of us:

In social business, the common belief is that measuring a person’s influence on social networks is the key to showing value; that influence is THE metric to use to show value and success. That is to say: is it accurate that if I have a higher influence score then I am obviously more successful in social business? Many people have been scurrying to quantify this as part of their efforts to define ROI. You’ve even heard me use the word when speaking about other aspects of social business and how being and influencer and working with other influencers are key parts to creating results.

While I’ve been cautiously skeptical about companies purporting to be able to define this soft concept in quantifiable numbers, I did buy in to the idea that influence is one of the keys to show value beyond simple click-through or follower metrics. I’m no longer so sure. From a strictly sales or marketing organization perspective that may indeed still be the case; but I don’t work in sales, I work in the support organization where our mission is different and our value is most often seen after the sale.

From a support delivery perspective, as a client what you want from me isn’t my opinion nor my ability to influence you to my ideologies; what you want (and need) is my tacit knowledge and skills to solve existing technical problems. As a client/customer your interaction with us has nothing to do with our level of influence, instead it is wholly focused on your trust in our expertise and capabilities; two items which activity measuring services like Klout, Kred, Crowdbooster, or PeerIndex can’t touch on… at least not yet.

Tom Webster at BrandSavant.com notes in a prior blog post:

“… These are the three appeals:

• Ethos, the argument from the author’s credibility;
• Pathos, an appeal to the emotions of the audience;
• Logos, or an appeal to the audience’s sense of logic and reason.

Writers who skillfully weave Ethos, Pathos and Logos stand the best chance of swaying their audience to change their state. I believe that what “influence measures” are working towards is this: a quantification of Ethos. They aren’t there yet, but they are iterating rapidly. And I can buy a Klout score as a representation of Ethos, especially if they would finally get around to applying these scores to individual topics. But Ethos alone is insufficient. What all of these scores fail to measure–indeed, cannot measure–is the effect of the message itself… “

Taking Tom’s ideas into account, we can still use the Rhetoric concepts of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to help our efforts in quantifying value within the support realm but outside of the concept of influence.

• Ethos= perceived trust and identified skill.
• Logos= quality of interactions and historic interaction/observation
• Pathos… There is less of an emotional need in support, as logic and reason are ingrained in our technical content used to answer questions or solve issues. But what this does touch on is the sense our clients get from our interactions which may help them be more inclined to contact us sooner when an issue is encountered, or conversely may cause them to use us only as a last resort. Call this approach-ability, friendliness, or personality.

So, let me try to define a new way of looking at this:

Value for a social business support account = perceived trust + identified skill + historic interaction/observation + quality of interactions + responsiveness + approach-ability.
Or, put more simply: value = ethos + logos + pathos

But it goes beyond that. You can see here, what we need from these measurement tools is not a quantification of influence. Rather, we need thought leadership or digital eminence quantified: a person/account which is perceived by their followers as best in breed; the people who are technically adept and know the right answer, the smart answer… the connectors to the knowledge you need.

The deeper root problem here is that the mock equation above is based on measurements of concepts, thoughts, and feeling; not always directly observable or quantifiable activities. So, how do we quantify perception?  In my research I’ve found that direct feedback is the single most critical component to quantifying subjective perception. But, often that feedback is scarce at best, and non-existent most other cases. Often (and especially in self-help scenarios) once a problem is solved there is no additional contact to close the loop and provide feedback so we are left attempting to quantify the unknown, and make educated assumptions of effectiveness to close the gaps as best we can.

In light of the lack of direct quantifiable feedback we only have indicators like click-throughs, reach, and influence scores to tell us if our efforts in the social business spaces are moving in the right direction and potentially effective in helping our clients solve their issues, and to show us value beyond the pure technical content we create and share. So, while influence is indeed irrelevant, the scoring information is a usable measurement to at least tell us if we’re doing something right.

All our efforts in the social spaces, of course, grow IBM’s influence as a whole as we build that level of trust and identified skill.  But in support, indirectly providing influence is a side-effect of our primary objective: getting the right answers to the right people just in time.