Toward that end, we thought we’d share this post from our own Tim Hastings – Reputation (trust) vs. User Interest (ego) (TagWalk blog) who talks about the concept of deriving relevance from social media.

“When trying to find interesting people online, it is useful to be able to differentiate between somebody who is very interested in a particular subject from somebody who has a good reputation for that subject.”

Inbox Influencer leverages algorithms used in our flagship product, Optimizer for Twitter, for finding “who to follow” in Twitter. It is based on the same concept of combining relevance with reputation using qualitative (keywords, hashtags, links, etc.) and quantitative (number of influential followers, frequency of relevant posts, whether they follow relevant profiles, etc.) data sets to produce the most relevant and actionable recommendations.

If you haven’t already signed up for Inbox Influencer, do so today – it’s quick and 100% free.

And if you have signed up, keep that feedback coming!

Also make sure to rate us on CatchFree – thanks!

Fifty percent of the 2010 Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008. In this new 2011 study, the use of blogging dropped to 37%.

Yet despite the drop in blogging, other Social channels are picking up the slack.

This was the first year that executives were asked if their company plans to increase their investment in social media. While 25% said they would keep their social media budget the same, the other 71% plan to increase their investment and only 1 company (4%) plan to decrease their investment.

There is clearly a shift going on around the focus of corporate marketing efforts. Personally I believe that the decline in corporate blogging is in part due to so many corporate bloggers having emphasized ‘tactics and quantity’ over ‘content and quality’ these past few years. Those organizations that blogged half-heartedly, churning out a multitude of uninspired & uninteresting posts in an effort to ‘get something out there’, have since discovered that their readers’ lack of commitment matched their own. We discussed this during a recent Focus Roundtable and the discussion continued on afterward.

It’s gratifying to see how clearly attention is shifting toward Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but in our view these social initiatives should be complementing, not replacing, corporate blogging efforts. There is no better way to promote and drive quality traffic to your blog than an effective social strategy, while at the same time well-written blog posts provide the anchor content for effective social campaigns and engaged customers, communities and audiences.

Content (or as many including our friends at Hubspot like to call it Inbound) Marketing remains highly effective and can and should be a key part of your marketing mix. Integrating your Social initiatives with your blog can enhance the success of both – and that is a strategy we endorse wholeheartedly and enthusiastically.

My answer, which built off fellow Focus Expert Andrew Baker’s, is that the ‘best’ time is when your audience is attentive and available – and when you have the right content. And those times depend – so it’s very difficult (and I’d argue impossible – or at least overly simplistic) to say something like ‘11:00 AM”.

Which in turn got me thinking about the related and much-debated topic of ‘Influence’. I read a post yesterday on the Pivot Conference site which makes the argument that Influence is a ‘numbers game’.

While at Terametric we certainly believe in numbers (we have our own Timing Optimization and Influence Measurement algorithms in our Optimizer for Twitter and Inbox Influencer products), the answer still ‘depends’ on context – and on what you’re trying to accomplish.

As my friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular (and Focus Expert) Paul Greenberg recently posted (using the much-maligned but also widely-used Klout score as a proxy):

Klout is good at measuring how engaged an individual is on social channels at any given time but doesn’t really measure influencers of the buyer kind or the industry kind.  Three weeks off the grid would lower your Klout score but wouldn’t necessarily impact your influence.  You see that don’t you?

In other words, numbers help but they only provide guideposts to ‘the answer’ – not ‘the answer’ itself.

‘The answer’ is ‘what works’ – and that only comes from defining what you will measure, and then in turn testing, and benchmarking those results against those desired results.

At Terametric we are, of course, rather partial to our own Timing & Influence algorithms but are also exploring opportunities to work with other offerings in order to meet customer preference and provide a more complete picture of your success in attaining the results that matter most to you. At the same time we will be rolling out a suite of services – some of them built around our own technology but also working in conjunction with partners – that can help you better define, measure, benchmark and improve the metrics you and your organization most care about.

Please contact us to learn more, and we’d love to hear your feedback and experiences. And of course, if you’re not already using Inbox Influencer (it’s 100% free) signup today!

This infographic from Volinsky Consulting does a great job of summing it up.

Created by @svolinsky of Volinsky Consulting

H/T to Barry Ritholtz for the link.

I love this post from Mark Hughes of C3 Metrics as published on Business Insider. 5 Things Chief Marketing Officers Need To Do To Stay On Top Of Their Game

Here’s the list – click through to read the rest:

Five ways for CMOs to lengthen that 18 months to 36 and much longer.

1. Stop Worrying About Your Tenure: Part of the problem is that CMOs play defense. They spend a lot of time worrying about the chain of command, who reports to who and when the next board meeting is. They play too little offense because they’re afraid they’re going to ruffle some feathers, and then the next thing you know they become a statistic themselves. Get out there and be what your title says you’re supposed to be.
2. Don’t Base Your Strategy On The Economy: Remember “Mr. T” in Rocky III? “Prediction? Pain.” You can’t be a CMO and base your strategy on an “if-then” economy. Don’t base marketing spend on the S&P 500. Base marketing spend and strategy on growing customer value, increasing marketing ROI and taking market share while your competitors play chicken with the stock market and latest Eurocrisis.
3. Stop Experimenting With Digital Marketing:  Check the most recent Nielsen report on branding online. “It would be a mistake to assume that all ad networks or demographic models are created equal,” according to Nielsen. “It’s critical to measure the efficacy of delivery using campaign reporting to ensure the tools and audience are aligned with the premium pricing charged for that model.” Take note. The tone here is not one of testing and recalibrating. The tone is, “do it, and measure it properly.” The time for experimenting with digital marketing is over. The time for acting like a CMO, and demanding the right metrics, is on.
4. Control Your Destiny: The best way to stay off the CMO scrap heap is to understand what you can control. Most great marketers share that. You control the message, the channel it will be delivered through, and the way you will measure the effort. You don’t control customer reaction or random events (see the economy).
5. Measure Your Legacy: When you do get to that day when you decide to leave, get promoted, or they throw you out, what will they say about you? That you increased revenue? You controlled spending? Or you left some best practices and processes to do both? What’s good for the company is good for you. Make sure you have the tools to measure your impact.

We’ll be focusing (pun intended) on the digital/social marketing question in particular during today’s Focus Social CMO Roundtable. We’ve got a great panel – joining me will be:

• Mitch Bishop – CMO, DotNetNuke
• Debbie Qaqish – CRO, The Pedowitz Group
• Britta Meyer – CMO, Magnet Systems, Inc.

I hope you can join us!

Also we are seeking panelists for what will be a monthly series on various topics surrounding ‘The Social CMO’ – if you’re interested or have a panelist to propose, please email me.

Evangelists in social media spend 13% more and refer business worth 45% what they spend. flpbd.it/tLkm Make the investment. #smb

— htoby (@htoby) January 16, 2012

Not long afterward, we came across this terrific blog post and video from Brian Solis:

Yet despite the increasingly obvious positive (and negative) impacts that ‘Social’ is having on our businesses, we continue to hear many claiming that the impact of Social ‘can’t be measured’.

Wrong.

It may not be easy, but it’s increasingly necessary. There simply isn’t an option to ignore it anymore.

Quoting Brian:

What the social media gurus aren’t telling you is that the landscape for business isn’t changing because of social media, it’s changing because consumer expectations are evolving.

Your customers are empowered through technology where social media becomes only part of the disruption.

Your job in 2012 is to not embrace new technology with arms wide open, but instead understand it and learn which disruptive technologies separate you from existing and potential customers.

Exactly right.

Our Focus Social CMO Roundtable on Wednesday will be specifically focused on the metrics being used by leading CMO’s to measure – and manage – their Social initiatives in light of the tremendous changes we are all facing. There’s already an online discussion going around this topic – which will be continued live.

I hope you can join us – and hope that you are able to respond to the ’seminal changes’ we are all facing in 2012 in a positive, constructive, and measured manner.

For these reasons I’m delighted to be moderating and helping assemble a monthly Roundtable series with Focus.com on the impacts of Social in B2B. Our first event is taking place Wednesday January 18 at 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST and is titled “The Social CMO in B2B: Lessons from Marketing Leaders on Social Media Marketing Success”. Focus Roundtables are not your typical webinars – the company has a unique platform that is highly interactive and allows participation from the audience before, during and after the event – the discussion has already started, and if you haven’t already signed up please check it out and join us.

For this first Roundtable I’ll be joined by Mitch Bishop of DotNetNuke, Debbie Qaqish of the Pedowitz Group, and Craig Rosenberg at Focus.com. We’ll be talking about real-world case studies around the adoption of Social in B2B companies – lessons learned, metrics measured, and plans for the future.

We’re also looking for ‘real-world’ panelists for future Roundtables so if you’re interested or know of a strong candidate please email me and we can discuss adding you to a future event.

While companies often give lip service to providing all customers and prospects equal allocations of resources and attention, the truth is that resources are limited – people, money, time. These limitations force organizations to tier their efforts, and to apply more resources to the more valuable relationships in order to provide the greatest economic return – ROI – on their investments.

Understanding who our most valuable, profitable customers are – and supporting processes to channel more resources and attention on them – is the entire foundation of investments in CRM applications, loyalty programs and other traditional customer-facing systems and processes.

In this new era of Social engagement, do we need to employ similar methods and tools to understand relative value? Absolutely! If anything, measurement becomes far more important, although the methods through which such measurements are attained changes dramatically.

This is exactly why, despite the protestations of many, Influence Scoring systems and tools such as Klout and our own Inbox Influencer continue to rise in importance. As NetBase CMO Lisa Rosner recently blogged:

As marketers, we’re always measuring things. It used to be butts in seats, then clicks, now followers and re-tweets. In 2012, we will be measured and rewarded by metrics like Klout scores—both our personal and our company’s scores. Last I checked, my Klout score is higher than my age—whew! But that was not the case a few months ago. So as you drive followers to your various social media outlets, make sure you have all the necessary elements going: influence, comments, mentions, unique likers and yes, still re-tweeters, to keep that score growing. Your boss is watching and measuring.

It is indeed about measurement – and the social data that we need to measure to understand Influence, and react accordingly, is expanding massively and rapidly. We cannot manage what we cannot measure, so tools to measure – and make recommendations on – this data are in increasingly high demand. As I discussed during my presentation at the recent Social CRM event in NYC, IBM estimates that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last 2 years alone.

As Cision USA President & COO Peter Granat wrote in his excellent post titled “Taming ‘big data’ for influencer marketing” yesterday in B2B Magazine, we are still in the very early innings:

Social media is only the first foray into big data in influencer marketing. The next advance will connect social profiles and content to customer profiles and transactions, accurately and in real time to bring message targeting to a new level of relevance and impact.

In other words, the coming challenge is to connect the results of the new science of Influence with the existing science of Customer Relationship Management – which is what the term ‘Social CRM’ should ultimately be about.

Like it or not (and many self-proclaimed ‘influencers’ don’t) Influence Measurement is here to stay – and grow in significance – in both marketers’ and executive toolkits. As Doc Searls suggests in the most recent Harvard Business Review, this shift will be wholesale, turning the practice of ‘marketing’ in a completely different direction:

This shift will be scary to many. It will strip the gears of marketing as we know it. But it will also improve marketing by fostering the design of new and better means of customer engagement—means that satisfy real demand directly, inform product development, and build true loyalty that goes both ways.

Yet there are still voices that continue to label Social as a ‘fad’ that will fade in importance in 2012 and beyond. For instance, Vivek Wadhwa predicted that Social will ‘lose its sizzle’ in this past week’s Washington Post.

It’s already happening in fact, as growth of social media usage has begun to slow for upstarts such as FourSquare and stalwarts such as Facebook alike. Silicon Valley has been obsessed with social media and investors have funded hundreds of “me too” start-ups to the tune of billions of dollars. There are social networks for pet owners, all manner of marginal Twitter apps, a ridiculous number of mobile photo-sharing apps, hundreds of apps targeting social media analytics and on and on and on.

Yet, is ‘losing sizzle’ such a bad thing? Or is it a signal that Social is becoming pervasive and mainstream?

There are still plenty of advocates for the value of Social. Forrester analyst William Band recently spoke for the demonstrated value of Social in Forrester’s The Top Thirteen Customer Management Trends for 2012:

More social CRM use cases spotlighting demonstrable business value will emerge. Forrester’s annual Groundswell Awards showcases hundreds examples of how organizations use Social Computing — for example, in market research, customer self-service, and product development.

Salesforce.com claims that 2011 was the year that Social already went mainstream.

Salesforce.com VP of Strategy John Taschek suggested in his recent blog post that ‘The Social Revolution Has Just Begun’ (and agreed with my comments that while pundits and others may overstate change in the short-term, we are understating it in the longer-term).

I could go on and on, presenting various opinions on how ‘hot’ or not Social is and will be. While investors will care (in large part to justify the stratospheric valuations many Social companies are receiving), it’s not clear at all why companies seeking to leverage Social should.

Then what does matter? Gary Vaynerchuk (i.e. @garyvee) does his usual very direct job of getting to the heart of what does matter, in this recent Inc. Magazine piece.

Social-media marketing’s monetization will come, too, he says. “People don’t want to embrace culture shifts because it’s not going to happen in the next 20 minutes,” he says.

“When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many business fail,” Vaynerchuk says. “Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They’re playing the sprint. They’re not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.”

So what should you be doing? Think long term, and consider how you can earn life-long customers. Says Vaynerchuk, “Social-media marketing is like going Beyonce on your customers. You’ve got to put a f—ing ring on it.”

In other words, for those of you trying to use it, don’t do Social because it’s ‘hot’. Do it because it’s about your customers and the value of their long-term relationship with you. In the words of Nick Cifuentes of ClickZ:

The long-term effect here is what makes social media more valuable than any other form of marketing. It connects with every part of your organization’s business.

As ‘Social’ continues to become mainstream and pervasive, we will likely no longer call it out as a special ‘hot’ category any more. Even the skeptical Wadwha admits to this:

Just as location-based applications became a “feature” rather than the “big thing,” social media will live on and become an integral part of what we do.

Exactly.

Influencers Drive the Interaction

Consumers are communicating more than ever online and making more of their choices based on the opinions of others – as experts, as friends, and as complete strangers. In the same vane for BtoB, industry experts are popping up everywhere outside of the traditional institutions like Gartner or Forrester.

The bottom line? It’s about peers influencing peers and brands engaging with consumers and industry experts on the their terms – wherever and whenever the they choose. This is where Social Media Marketing segments into another dimension – Social Influence marketing.

The Need for ROI

There is still no way around it – without the ability to not only find influencers but measure their impact on the bottom line is critical to the success of any Social Media Marketing campaign.

“Qualified Leads (35%) is always going to be the CFO’s measure of social media results. The marketing buzzwords of “activity,” “brand,” and “sentiment” are not going to hold water in 2012 for most businesses.”

Automating the Search for Peer Influencers

So with social media marketing budgets that are small and with pressures of demonstrating ROI, how can marketers leverage technology that will enable them to transcend from a world where brand marketing and direct response were all that mattered to leveraging IM? Here at Terametric we are developing sophisticated technologies to find peer influencers on a continuous basis.

We offer a free product that does just that (see: Inbox Influencer). Take the first step and try it today!