ethics

Coping with the Klout Reality

Lost
Image by cintamamat

Marketers and individuals will have to deal with social scoring in the form of Klout and its sister technologies.

As time progresses, technologies and alliances evolve. I haven’t written about Klout outside of general discussions on social scoring for a good long while.

There wasn’t much to say. I agreed in principal with many of my colleagues and their continuing coverage about the broken nature of influence metrics.

But I had a second reason: As a professional communicator, it’s become increasingly clear that we won’t escape Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

The business marketplace cannot help itself. It will chase quick fixes to community building, recruitment and measuring individual online capabilities, making social scoring an obvious play. I have three reasons for coming to this conclusion.
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The Big Facebook Screw

Screwed
Image by El Tel63

Since Facebook’s mandatory Timeline conversion and IPO last spring, we’ve been screwed.

In what can only be described as the coup d’etat of strategy plays, Facebook got the world and businesses hooked on its network. Then the social network leveraged its monopoly power, and pulled the ultimate bait and switch in history. Facebook implemented its Timeline interface.

Timeline sabotaged traditional brand page performance, created a money generation vehicle, and sacrificed its users privacy for business purposes.

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The PR Industry Can’t Help Itself

Agencyinsanity

Of all the professional skill groups that can be included in the marketing toolkit, public relations is the most ridiculous (PR is also used for public affairs and other non-marketing activities). Filled with backwards unethical and untrained professionals that consistently spam people and promote attention metrics instead of actual outcomes, the PR profession can’t help its poor image.
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