Archive for the 'Strategy' Category

Measuring Influence on Twitter

Published
by
Dave
on August 31, 2009
in Strategy, Twitter and social-media
. 12 Comments

Marketing on Twitter is largely about influence, unless you simply want to use it as a customer service channel. You either want to co-opt people who are influential on the platform, or become influential yourself.

Some people think that influence on Twitter can be determined simply by looking at the number of followers a person has, but this is crude – you have no idea how that person grew their follower base, to what extent people actually pay attention to what they are tweeting about, or how many of their followers are active.  Another approach is to survey other Twitter users in your target segment about how you or others influence them, but this will be subjective and time-consuming. So the most viable approach I’ve found is to use analytics tools.

One of the best Twitter analytics tools I’ve yet used is called Klout. It measures your influence, or “Klout” on Twitter. I found the output, the KloutScore fascinating and insightful, so I wanted to know what variables they use to get their results.

Influence on Twitter, according to Klout, can be derived from the following variables:

Engagement
o How diverse is the group that @ messages you?
o Are you broadcasting or participating in conversation?

Reach
o Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?
o How far has your content been spread across Twitter?

Velocity
o How likely are you to be retweeted?
o Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?

Demand
o How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?
o Are your follows often reciprocated?

Network Strength
o How influential are the people who @ message you?
o How influential are the people that retweet you?

Activity
o Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?
o Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?

So, you may be wondering how you can raise your level of influence. Well, according to Klout, it’s simple:

Just use Twitter on a regular basis, say interesting things and engage with people and your score will inevitably start to go up.

To that I’d also add: use Twitter analysis tools to help you understand where you could perform better!

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Top Tips for Succeeding in Unpredictable Times

Published
by
Dave
on February 1, 2009
in Academic, Attention, Attention Economics, Education, Principles, Security, Stats, Strategy and Trends
. 2 Comments

While exploring my insurance options in the past week I became caught up in exploring the idea of Randomness and preparing for the unexpected.

As luck would have it, Elaine sent me an article about a chap called Nassim Nicholas Taleb who is a philosopher of randomness about the fallibility of human knowledge, and (according to the article) “now the hottest thinker in the world” (he has a $4m advance on his next book, and gives about 30 presentations a year to bankers, economists and traders for $60 000 a pop).

As a trader, Taleb has said he took a skeptical and anti-mathematical approach to risk and uncertainty and had a severe distrust of models and statisticians and a contempt for finance academics, especially economists. He accurately predicted the current market crisis – and made a fortune (estimated at half a billion dollars) from it.

Fooled by Randomness,  the title of one of Taleb’s books, has also become an idiom in English used to describe when someone sees a pattern where there is just random noise.

In his other book “The Black Swan“, he rejects the distinction between non-fiction and fiction.

Here’s  Taleb’s Top 10 life tips, drawn from Appleyard’s article:

1.  Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2.  Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3.  It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4.  Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5.  Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6.  Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7.  Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8.  Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9.  Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW, but you need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10.  Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Extreme events do happen and have a big effect. Examples abound, including September 11th. The Internet with its various effects was scarcely anticipated, and it is a development that has had a significant effect. The effects of extreme events are even higher due to the fact that they are unexpected.

So, in short, I think Taleb’s teachings can be summarized simply as “expect and prepare for the unexpected”. I’ll be sorting out all my insurance posthaste!

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Judgement Heuristics and Productivity

Published
by
Dave
on April 6, 2008
in EBM, Heuristics, Management and Strategy
. 2 Comments

Heuristics are “rules of thumb” used to make complex decisions easier. They are particularly used to create a method that often rapidly leads to a solution that is usually reasonably close to the best possible answer, although they are a form of fuzzy logic and not always accurate in all contexts.

Heuristics are useful in the world of Business where choices involving many variables (including social dynamics which are hard to define) need to be made.

For example, here are some Heuristics I use to make my business life slightly simpler:

  • If you can’t think of a solution to a problem, imagine it is already solved and then work backwards to find out how you might have got there.
  • Don’t take on new business opportunity which doesn’t align with the stated vision and purpose of the organization.
  • Given the choice, meetings are always at my office.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. It just means that I spend less time wondering about these little decisions which need to be made quite often.

Heuristics can be applied to many instances which require subjective judgement. For example, when deciding which person to hire among many candidates (where each “box” you need to “check” is a heuristic of sorts). You can and should weight the heuristics in cases like this so that more important criteria can be prioritized over “nice to haves” in any particular individual.

Many business processes which are used by consultants are heuristics, which serve as guidelines. So, yes, heuristics can be monetized. People love guidelines, and “formulas for success”, if you’ve worked out a technique to generally ensure a good outcome to a particular challenge (be it weight-loss, or website design), then consider documenting it.

Another useful application of Heuristics is in gaining rapid competence in unfamiliar fields. If someone has done it before you, then you can model their process and break down more complex challenges into definable steps to follow. This is often what we seek to achieve when we use case-studies, and define “best practices” in business.

My own finding with judgment heuristics is that they should be documented, practiced, and be in an almost perpetual form of testing, where you tweak and refine the process as you go. As the chaps at World Wide Creative would say – never trust a skinny chef (which is itself a heuristic)! The outcome is that you can become a more reliable performer, and you can save time, and use more mental energy on more interesting challenges.

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Guerilla Kindness

Published
by
Dave
on November 22, 2007
in Events, Ideas, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Nomadic Marketing and Strategy
. 7 Comments

Mike Stopforth often speaks of a concept called Guerilla Kindness. There’s not much about it online though, so I thought I’d start the conversation about this as a business strategy.

Guerilla Kindness is an ongoing strategic approach undertaken by a company to surprise and delight people in the hope of creating a great story associated with the experience to pass on to their peers, and hopefully mention online.

Examples:

  • Graham from Missing Link was sent a toy car by the call-centre agent at Outsurance when he crashed his car. He blogged about it, and many a reader of his blog (including me) was impressed by the remarkable courtesy and good humour displayed by the insurer.
  • Aston Martin gave Mike the keys to a DB9 for a day after he wrote an article mentioning the vehicle. He subsequently blogged the experience, the post was picked up by some major sites and over 50 000 people read it. As a result and I’m sure quite a few of those have grown their appreciation for the company and its cars (I have).

Execution:

  • An idea might be to organize a flashmob to clean up a really messy city street in an instant; paint an ugly building; plant a few hundred trees or organise fabulous suprises for random clients.
  • The idea is not to brand the act, nor to publicize it yourself.
  •  Your intentions should be good, and hopefully someone will mention it of their own accord (that’s how things work in the blogosphere and the world of S0cial Currency)
  • In other words it refers to random acts of kindness that are:
  • Creative
  • Unexpected, and
  • Personal

(Drink from the CUP of kindness :-p)

  • By the way, the more money you spend, the less it is trusted. Use some energy, thoughtfulness and time instead.

It’s a fun idea. I’m already working on my company’s Guerilla Kindess strategy for 2008.

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