Klout measures your online influence and gives you a score from 1-100 with 100 being the maximum you can reach. You can sign in with Twitter or Facebook and then add a number of different networks to get a more accurate score - other networks you can add such as Tumblr, Blogger, YouTube, Linkkedin & even Instagram plus a few more. Klout will then tell you what area's your influential about "in everything from barbecue to tech gadgets to gardening".
Klout currently scores over 80 million people and brands use Klout to run campaigns with the people which have the most influence among their chosen market. Doug Clark the GM of Social Media & Customer Engagement at Audi of America said "We identified Klout as a skilled partner to help us recognize and identify our Facebook fans with followings and influence". You only need to visit their perks page to see some of the large companies they have done work for and look at some case studies of the work Klout have done. The fact on that page for businesses sums up the work they do perfectly;
"90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 33% trust ads".
Here's a few things that you could write about through your social media;
1. Promotions - Why not run a promotion through your social media so that everyone that follows you can get a discount! e.g "10% off all products if you follow us on Facebook!"
2. Questions - Ask questions of your users to engage them and you may even get a bit of market research! e.g "Why do people where socks and sandals? #Crazy"
3. Company News - Tell your follows you "what's happening" at your company! e.g "Moved offices, have a new employee and featured in the press! [press link] #AmazingDay"
4. Facts - Give your audience a some facts that relate to your business! e.g "10k people order umbrellas every summer because their cheaper!" - Just an example, probably true though!
5. Friendly - Just give your readers a message to let them know you appreciate them and get seen! e.g "Good Morning! hope you had sweet dreams :)"
Bonus Box - Use hastags when possible (#theyhelp), Try to reply to people and show them you appreciate them!
All of the social platforms offer developer tools from like buttons with Facebook to real time status plugins on twitter check all of them out and with knowledge of your audience choose ones that will engage them best.
Last week we wrote a number of articles on Facebook but this is because they are such an interesting company that are getting so many things right. We are well aware Google+ bought out a product which allowed group chat(Hangouts) but Facebook know that the majority of people have one-to-one chats and launched their video chat feature.
Facebook have given businesses people lessons for years now and we managed to see some just last week
1. Get your product right - make sure the consumer loves it then start charging for it - this could mean market research first & knowing your customer - Facebook have data on over 750m people.
2. Innovate - because once you have a great product then people will copy and it's important to always be one step ahead - but for Myspace and Skype partnership in 2007, may have been to early.
3. Stay Efficient - if your not efficient enough to do something then outsource or partner with someone who has the resources such as Facebook and Skype - Spotify are also reported to be reaching a deal with Facebook.
From yesterday SnakSocial had been blogging for one week and what a week it has been.
We have been reviewing the new Google+, seen Skype come to Facebook, find out that the UK's 168 year old newspaper - News of the World is publishing for the last time on Sunday and MySpace get sold for £22 by News International for a fraction of what they paid for it. So really not a good week for News International which holds News Corp.
We have managed to get readers in over 10 countries, post 21 articles and tweet 35 times.Our Poll closed with Twitter being the favourite business social tool.
So thanks to all our readers! Let us know what you think...
Google+ have today told businesses not to use their service whilst they continue to develop their platform for brands. They still haven't opened up the service to everyone yet either but those brands who have managed to get on their have been told that the service won't be ready until later this year.
With yesterdays launch of Facebook's video calling feature, is this going further damage to the appeal for Google+? because not everyone will need the Hangouts 10 way calling and will users stick to the brand profiles where they are offered things? - on Facebook. We recently wrote about the use of Google+ for professionals!
The recent reports were right - So we now have Facebook with one-on-one video chat, not to long after Google+ launched and gave us hangouts. This i'm sure is going to be quite a problem for Google attracting users, who don't need to chat to more than one person.
So we have Google+ hangouts where you can get up to ten people in to one chat and yet to be opened to everyone. Whilst Facebook has launched its one-to-one chat that brings Skype inside your browser. You don't need a new account either to use the Facebook video chat. I still see Google+ as an additional profile for remote workers and Facebook video calling for those personal social calls. We also found out that Facebook have their 750 million users - WOW!
How easy do you find Facebook's Video Calling - here's a clip from YouTube.
The recent knowledge that Google is going to rename their Blogger (very special to us!) and Picasa to Google Photos & Google Blogs is some interesting news for out tech readers but we also have a bit of business side to us as well so I think a mention of the importance of branding to an organisation needs to be mentioned.
Blogger and Picassa are already strong brands in their own right but Google has been ranked fourth by Interbrand best global brands with a "brand value" of over $43bn. We realise that it can have a lot more attraction to a larger market and we understand that Google is making a lot of changes to accomodate Google+, most recently their Realtime feature went down. Reported that this was because their contract for the twitter firehose ran out but also to work on developing it for Google+. The point is that these brands contribute a large part of the valuations of many of our big online names such as Facebook.
Another "brand" is Huffington Post and they have just launched their UK version, will they have the same success in the UK and will they get it right?
With a number of IPO's in the pipeline from many of the major online services we use, are we going to see less user targeted features and more shareholder "profit making" features. Just recently we have seen Linkedin go public on the 19th May this year and they have profits of just over $15m for the 12 months ending 31st December 2010. Shareholders are probably happy at the moment though - LNKD share prices are holding on the NYSE.
However with some of our other future IPO's such as Groupon later this year and also Facebook expected next April - these companies are said to not be making profits. A little consideration needs to be taken in to account at whether these organisations will come under pressure from their shareholders to give them a return. Will we see any changes in the user experience for the products we use online? I'm not saying they are all going to start charging monthly subscription but perhaps more adverts.
I know this is really quite far fetched but I think we need to look at the growing population of social network users and also the increasing features available on these platforms. With many of them you have private messaging features and I know that Facebook allows you to add attachments as well. I've also seen that many websites are allowing users to sign up with their Twitter or Facebook and this is growing.
Email is like your key to the internet you can use it to sign in to the vast number of websites on offer some which will send you discounts on your favourite stuff! but every time we visit our inbox many of the unfortunate ones need to delete a load of emails we don't want. This is time consuming and frustrating that when you get to the ones you want it's like finding a needle in a haystack. If your a daily deal subscriber you can get some cool stuff or your teeth whitened for cheap :)
On the other hand, this isn't very likely anytime soon because many websites would need to find a new way for them to stay in contact with their users and have them sign up. Also sometimes its good to keep your email for work and then personal social platforms for keeping in touch with friends & family - not saying people don't mix them. However we all know about Google+ having a circles feature which allows you to separate groups and change the visibility they have on your profile.
***NOW CONFIRMED***
This recent spoiler that I have heard, doesn't surprise me - Skype is being brought to Facebook! With the recent knowledge that Google+ has a group video feature how will Facebook's compare? Are both skype and Facebook going to see a huge rise in users, almost certainly.
Skype was recently bought by Microsoft for $8.5bn. Microsoft became the "exclusive third-party advertising platform partner for Facebook" and began to sell advertising for Facebook internationally on Oct. 24, 2007. This shows their close ties and Microsoft's lack of entry in to the social network market other than Facebook. Is this as Mark Zuckerberg put it "awesome"? Tell us your thoughts @snaksocial
Facebook's making an announcement next Wednesday on the 6th of July. I've had a little look around and I can see some speculation around a new application. Mark Zuckerberg says its "awesome", so would anyone who was releasing a product - so we need to wait and see. After a number of good reviews on the new Google+ (Google plus) this week we'll need to see if Facebook has done again what it is so good at - Innovate.
Next week though, we will display twitter feed from the press conference.
Let us know what you think and will be updating this post.
I have recently looked at Microsoft office 365 and seen that their new "cloud-based management tools" are somewhat late as this article. Microsoft seem to just be following other services and then shoving them in users faces as we have seen with Bing. This now seems like a bold move as they have to compete with the what is becoming a fast and simple to use product - Google docs. We are all aware that Microsoft have been making office software for years so I don't understand the lateness, although they had tried a partnership with Facebook. Which was Facebook docs by fuse labs but I don't know of anyone using it and couldn't access when I was writing this because its being fixed?! However we know that their are still problems with Google docs in that they don't have all the features Microsoft can provide, which I only assume is why Microsoft are still charging for their software, because they still are market leaders.
The £4 per user/month starting price for using office 365 is fairly cheap and the options to sync your files across the web and mobile devices make it an attractive option but even when I began to sign up for the free trial I was felt it was time to leave as the sign up process was ridiculous. It wanted you to set up a sub-domain then a email address or that... blah blah blah. It may be targeted towards professional and different sized organisations but I never found ZoHo(4m users) that mundane.
Dot-Com Bubble of 2000 springs to mind for many people when we consider the ongoing valuations of a number of tech companies. With sites such as Facebook which is ranked second most visited site on the Alexa rankings do we think that the valuation of $85bn (based on the sale of 100,000 shares on SharePost) is justified seen as it is supposedly nearing 750m users.
If we consider this to be growing and the recently reported drop in figures in some area's of the world to be just a minor blip.The increase in users of the internet world wide will flock to social media as they go online should see the company hit 1bn users. The site is a daily destination for a large number of users and Facebook has data on its users that other companies could only dream of knowing. So Facebook can innovate, develop and bring new features to market very quickly which if managed properly I think we could see them beat Google to that number one ranking (unlikely but possible if Facebook improves services).
On the other hand companies aren't about just rankings and users because in the long run they need to make a profit with their users. Many of these companies are asking for more funding and these are inflating valuations, at the end of the day these companies need to give value to their investors. So obviously investors are taking the risk because they don't want to miss being part of what could be very profitable. (Groupon reported value $25bn)
When I last wrote about Myspace I spoke about my thoughts on redeveloping the product and didn't mention the price which I feel now is better suited to the company. The company which now has the real opportunity to look at the gaps in the market and what their users want but don't have from a different perspective. The £22m price paid for a failing company which was once valued at $580m and still couldn't compete with Facebook. could we see this happen again to some of our other giants? I expect so...
OK this story was broken a while back but I have received an invite to try it out. I have seen some cool features with the new google+ which I think is going to be really helpful for some business people. Their idea to give invitation has only made the buzz more appealing because we can see the product but only a number can touch it.
The first cool feature is the hangouts which I think is going to be really helpful for any conference calls which if you want this service at the moment many people use Skype's group video calling which costs around £5 per month (not much but still...).
I have also seen sparks now this can be quite cool for sharing news stories perhaps industry news with colleagues and can also help you to collectively gather cool stories that you'l find benefit the people you work with.
Circles has got to be one of the coolest things because this will allow you to put your contacts into what can only be called "circles" so that you can share certain information with those who you wish to target. In a business sense (which this article is targeted to) the circles will be great for putting your contacts in to different circles such as media contacts, editors, directors, programmers & so on. this could be great for finding new staff, getting answers, marketing the business etc...
My conclusion is that the odds are stacked against Google+ becoming the next Facebook but I think it will be one like Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and so on because it will be used "as well as" not "instead of". Remember though I haven't actually tried Google+ yet. With all these useful features for business as well as people I believe that allowing integration with a company like Linkedin will give Google+ a strong position for a more mainstream social growth if it doesn't grow that way at first.
