In an attempt to increase their visibility and speak to their influencers, every organization engages in active Public Relations, which has naturally been affected by the boom in social media. According to recent data shared by Facebook, there are over 900 million objects that people interact with like groups, events and community pages. An average user is connected to 80 communities and pages while 30 billion pieces of content get shared each month (blog posts, notes, photo albums etc). Press Conferences vs. Blogger Outreach. Conversation Versus a Speech. MORE >>

They are people that help you and your brand generating awareness and influencing decisions to purchase exclusively based on their own interest. Naturally, this makes brand advocates very important to your business and especially in relation to your social media presence, where there’s great possibility of making an impact in various online communities. Brand advocates = Facebook-ers, bloggers etc. They write comments, post pictures and they are active in the community. But who are they – and why are these people so important to your business? Let me know :). MORE >>

Bottom line: companies will find it a whole lot easier to influence the behaviors of their customers. Badgeville will leverage Klout’s influence-ranking technology to help enterprise leaders increase online engagement. The partnership will allow businesses to pinpoint which customer/employee carries the most influence and provide key analytics to score social influence. Bloggers Aren’t Special, Just Different. Then along came bloggers, and their taking over of the media as the perfect news channel. Insights PR blogger outreach prSeriously. MORE >>

Old media models have dominated the markets influence for years. The mix that drives both the influence and the related models fall into five categories that drive economic returns. Most communities have to attract and support a high proportion of advertising to cover the costs of production; without it, they could not leverage resources to gain their traffic position, influence and viewers. community which gets less advertising than its competitors is put at a  disadvantage. Social media proponents proclaim that social media promotes innovation. MORE >>

I’m back from my keynote speech for the American Marketing Association – West Michigan where I talked about Influence. In my speech I reinforced my blog assertions that popularity is not influence and influence is not popularity. But then I added a new twist when it comes to measurement: As marketers, we need to start focusing on measuring intent instead of just measuring online influence. believe it’s not just how popular somebody is online or how much influence they have, but whether they are intending to use that influence to effect change. MORE >>