Danny Brown's Blog, page 49

What’s the Return on Influence Marketing?

For many brands, gauging the return on influence marketing has been one of their sore points in recent years.

While social scoring platforms like Klout, etc, can help identify who could potentially be influential from a brand amplification standpoint, the business return – dollars in the cash register – has been more problematic to solve.

Likes, shares, blog posts and more are discussed abundantly when it comes to reviewing a campaign using social scoring as the lead means of influence identifi...

Why Social Software Platforms Fail

In my role as Chief Technologist over at ArCompany, and from a love of technology in general, I test, play with, compare and recommend all sorts of different platforms, software technologies and solutions.

There’s just something about the promise and potential of data and technology – when used properly and for the benefit of customers as well as the business – that gets my motor running (sorry, Steppenwolf fans!).

An interesting side effect of this is you get to see firsthand why certain socia...

The Crossroads of Influence Marketing

Influence marketing is at a crossroads. As we know it today, influence marketing is primarily defined by social scoring platforms like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

However, while these platforms are decent starting points for brands looking to identify influencers, they don’t really go deep enough into contextual and situational human relationships to offer a true metric of influence.

What’s needed is a bigger understanding of how the human psyche works; what makes us tick as people; what impacts...

Quit Treating Your Blog Readers Like Second Class Chumps

Bloggers are a breed apart from many other online outlets. That’s not meant in a grand or condescending way – just that it takes a very different mindset to be a blogger, and one that stays the course.

Of course, a large part of this success comes from the readers a blogger attracts. These readers turn into subscribers, turn into loyal members of your community, turn into “brand advocates” for your blog.

Essentially, your readers dictate much of how your blog is viewed by the interactions both...

Special Pre-Order Promotion for Influence Marketing Book

In two weeks (or less, depending on shipping), Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing will be released.

The culmination of over three years worth of client research and implementation, discussions with technology vendors, concerns over the impact of scoring on peoples’ livelihoods and more, the fruits of that labour is almost ready to be shared.

I won’t lie – it’s exciting to know that the methodologies Sam Fiorella and myself are pres...

The Sunday Share – Disruptive Technologies and the Digital Revolution

As a business resource,Slidesharestands pretty much head and shoulders above most other content platforms.

From presentations to educational content and more, you can find information and curated media on pretty much any topic you have an interest in.

As a research solution, Slideshare offers analysis from some of the smartest minds on the web across all verticals. These include standard presentations, videos, multimedia and more.

Which brings us to this week’s Sunday Share.

Every week, I’ll be s...

Why Diminishing the Benefits of Slacktivism Isn’t A Great Idea

Over on Facebook, my friend Gini Dietrich posted a question about trying to locate an image, used by a non-profit organization in a new campaign.

The image in question is the one below.

The messaging behind the campaign is simple – while Liking unicef.se (unicef Sweden) on Facebook is all well and good, and they certainly wouldn’t discourage that, it costs money to actually carry out the work unicef and other non-profits do every day of the week.

That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is poten...

Empathy is a Social Currency

In their excellent book Humanize, authors Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter share their insights into why a truly successful business needs to take the reasons social media has enjoyed exponential growth as a business imprint, and implement it across the organization.

It takes more than simply activating staff on social media and being more “approachable” as a business on the social web – it’s a complete mindset and culture change, for which many organizations today are still not ready for.

It’s pr...