Klout- A Constant Struggle

I was just reading a PR Squared blog post in which Todd Defren discusses Klout. It made me wonder if all my social media efforts of the last few weeks and my recent interest in blogging have had ANY impact at all on my Klout score. I mentioned in an earlier post that my score was in the 40's and I was influential about moms and beer.

Defren's post laments a bit about the short fallings of Klout, and I think I can certainly add to that. My Klout score is now 51. I am officially considered a specialist. I've spent the last month and a half blogging about communications based ideas, and STILL I am influential about moms and beer.

 

I'm not sure if this is a sign that I should change my blog to be all about moms and beer, or if I should be proud that despite my apparent expertise, I am still a successful young professional. I could apply the PR spin to the importance of a work-life balance. To be fair, I am a college student. The beer part makes sense to me. It's the "moms" part that has me completely baffled.

I guess I'm just going to look at it this way-- There are Frat houses filled with college boys that would give anything to be so influential about moms and beer, so let the jealousy commence. 

And the world grows smaller...

The more I work, intern and network, the smaller I realize the world is. One of my coworkers (my original hiring manager) at Dunkin', who is coincidentally a BU College of Communication alum was recently interviewed by marketing expert Brian Solis, who my New Media and PR professor can't say enough great things about. Here's the video:

Internal or External?

I went home for dinner last weekend. After a few glasses of wine, I ended up having a very intellectual conversation with my father about the necessity of internal communication and culture building vs. external communications.

He is a business operations guy and oversees a 6 store retail business. We discussed the problem of communication in his circumstance versus my internship experiences at large corporations.

It seems that every business owner wants to be on Yelp, Facebook and Twitter. It’s easy for someone within an organization to point to these platforms and ask why they aren’t there. It’s also easy to blame any short fallings on a failure to adequately utilize these online resources. It’s easy, but it’s ignorant.

As we discussed, we both agreed that all of those great forms of online media will do NOTHING for your business long term if similar efforts are not invested internally. In a retail environment, you can tweet and facebook until your fingers fall off, but at the end of the day, a positive in-store experience is what is going to drive repeat business. Therefore, it is important to value, appreciate and communicate with your employees before you can expect success with external communications. If your employees are brand ambassadors, they will be passionate about their work and their satisfaction will lead to more satisfied customers. Satisfied customers tell their friends. External communications are sexy, but internal communications are sustainable.

Just a few days after I had this conversation with my father, the Founder and CEO of a social media strategy company ended up visiting my New Media and PR class. As he spoke about all the cool things he is able to do externally, I couldn’t help but ponder the fundamental issue of internal. Naturally, I just had to ask him a question along the lines of : All of this external stuff about creating brand ambassadors is great, but do you really think a company /brand can be successful if they don’t also focus energy on ensuring employees are brand ambassadors?

As soon as I said it, I realized that it sounded like I was questioning the validity of his entire business model. I don't mean to question social media, and I am SURE I will have to be extremely talented in it in order to be successful in my career. I get that it is important, I just question how much it can do without a strong foundation of internal brand ambassadors. Fortunately, he didn't  take it as an insult, and he actually answered it very well. Because to be fair, if you aren’t online in this day in age, you are WAY behind. The internet is still necessary for driving people to your business in the first place. And in fact, the internet can be much more beneficial to driving short term sales. However, he did agree that for long term success, it is essential that you can transform employees into brand ambassadors.

Long story short, we’ve just got to be good at it all… great!

Confession: I like beer... and moms

I recently became obsessed with my Klout score, only to realize that I am supposedly influential about two things: moms and beer.

My immediate response was to private my Twitter and check my Facebook privacy settings, but then I also began to wonder when I had ever motioned either of those things on social media. I think Klout is confused.

How, then, as aspiring young professionals do we guard ourselves against the publicly available misconceptions created by Klout? I might have made everything else private, but my Klout Score is still available for the world to see. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good brew and I think all of my friend’s moms are wonderful people, but I don’t shout it from the rooftops (or my keyboard). I guess for now I am left with the task of tweeting about news and hoping that I eventually become “influential” about something else by Klout standards.