Is Klout credible?

If you've launched yourself into participating in social media using say, Twitter, it is likely that you have seen a few tweets from people asking if you need help in gaining more followers. You might have heard of Klout too. 


The thinking is that getting more followers on Twitter will propel your business or personal brand so that you can influence people more effectively. Klout is a service which launched to measure your influence. This post aims to show whether Klout has any real value.


Influence


Influence is a coveted asset in social interaction which can be superficially satisfied by getting more followers. It feels good when lots of people start to follow you on social networking sites. You start to see the follower numbers rising and you get excited that your influence will follow suit.


But, the reality is that it is relatively easy to gain followers on Twitter by way of a technical fact that many Twitter accounts are set up to automatically follow people back who follow them. You can use tools like Twollo and SocialOomph to do this for you by setting them to follow anyone who use a specific keyword in their tweets or in their profile. You set up these tools, switch them to auto-pilot and watch the followers rise while those you are following rises too.
So, the reality is that you have gained little real influence through the use of automation tools. It's not real influence. Your followers are just a product of a robotic process.


Social Network Analysis


In 2009, a new service launched called 'Klout'. It was was designed to measure your online influence by aggregating all of your social media activity to carry out social network analysis to give you a Klout score. Your score also comes with a description of you which denotes whether you are perhaps a 'Specialist' or an 'Explorer'.


My current score is about 49 and I am described as a 'Specialist'. Klout believes I am influential in the following areas, in descending order: Business (OK, that's good), Publishing (Yes, good), Vanity (what the..?), Bedroom (I hope my wife isn't reading this), and Ocean (I'm feeling sea sick).


Klout picked those words from post I wrote in this blog and other blogs and has taken them out of context. I wrote one post called 'Start a factory in your bedroom' which is where the 'Bedroom' reference comes from.


I asked the well known and truly influential blogger Chris Brogan for his opinion on Klout's and his reply was succinct: "Zero Value". I had a conversation with Thomas Power, the founder of Ecademy, on Google+ after watching one of his tech talks where he spoke about companies that won't hire people with Klout scores of less then 50, and asked for his view on the value of Klout. He said it was not about influence on Klout. Your score is about time spent online. He wrote that it did not matter who you were communicating with online as long as you communicating. Really? 


Lucky Escape


I tend to agree with Chris Brogan about Klout and its importance to measuring your influence through social media. The best way to influence people online through social media and offline is to be helpful and open by providing them with valuable content and ideas.


Don't go chasing a Klout score through just spending time online which provides no value to anyone. If anyone asks you for your Klout score in an interview start making for the door. You might have just had a lucky escape. Spend more time working on great content for your followers and sharing it through social media rather the chasing an abitrary score.

Using Weebly with Google Calendar

I learnt something today about using Google Calendar with the website solution, Weebly, while setting up a simple website which was preventing a key page from being visible to the sites visitors.

The website is for an apartment in England which is let out for private rental for people wishing to rent in Somerset, in the west of the UK. A vital part of any property rental website is the page showing its availability to visitors. The beauty of Weebly is that it lets you integrate a Google Calendar into the pages by simply copying and pasting some HTML from the Google app into the page through the straightforward content management system in the package.

Of course, that is simple to do, but the problem was that visitors to the Weebly based website could not see the Google Calendar which prevented them booking. No Google calendar, no revenue.

Ad-Blockers?

At first I thought my web browser was preventing it because an ad-blocking application was preventing it. But, this was not the case. I checked the Weebly help forums and contacted the help desk, but their response was not very precise and I still could not work out why I could not see the Google Calendar.

Permissions

I eventually tracked it down and it came down to two little check boxes in Google Calendar which dealt with the 'permissions' of who could view it. In the 'Calendar Settings', you need to click the 'Share this Calendar' tab. Then, click the 'Make this calendar public' check box. Finally make sure you un-check the 'Share only my free/busy information (Hide details)' box.

These two little ticks made the Google Calendar in Weebly available to everyone who visits the site. This page is the second most visited page on the website.

Broadcast your Business with Google Hangouts

YouTube is famous for enabling millions of people to broadcast themselves through placing the videos they record on their  mobile phones and video cameras, of course. 

What they are less famous for is their new social media platform, namely Google+. It's relatively new to the world but it is rapidly growing its audience. It has a slightly different approach to how Facebook works but one of the most important components of Google+ is its live streaming service called 'Hangouts'. This is a broadcast tool which, through the use of your web cam and microphone on your computer enables you to run your own TV show to anyone on Google+ or who is watching through your website.

Live streaming has been around for a while but Google Hangouts make it that bit easier. The tools available make it very interactive and easy to use to broadcast You can live broadcast while taking chat messages from your audience. You can swap to the web cams of your audience and  listen to their questions and feedback too.

With Google Hangouts on Air, businesses will be able to provide help desks, how-to broadcasts and broadcast journalism anywhere they have internet access, a web cam and a microphone. The almost instant live streaming ability is very useful.

I was recently asked to be part of a BBC show called 'World Have Your Say' where the producer of the show started a Google Hangout asking people to share their stories about 'Dark Tourism'. This came into my stream of updates on Google+ and I responded through the chat saying I had some experience of it. The producer connected with me through their web cam and we chatted about the topic. An hour later, I was speaking on the show. Live streaming like that provides levels of interactivity which, ten years ago, businesses would never have thought possible.

For any business that wants to get to know their customers better, or to provide them with support and help, Google Hangouts are a great way to make it quick, cheap and easy to do so.

There's a good Google video below which explains more about how you can run live broadcasts too and a good post on Fast Company by Amber Mac called '3 Ways To Work Smarter Using Google+ Hangouts'.

Search Engine Optimisation for Beginners

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is one of those phrases which, if you are in business, you will hear mentioned increasingly often. It's a phrase which is describes a skill and practice which more people involved in sales and marketing need to understand if they are to succeed in the hyper-competitive world. 

Search engine optimisation is the very necessary activity which is going to help people looking for what you supply find your business more easily when they search on the internet through search engines like Google and Bing.

But, if you are running a small business and have little time to learn about search engine optimisation in detail, it's useful to know some basics so that you can, at least, have a sensible conversation with someone in your marketing team, or with someone you hire to carry out your internet marketing.

Firstly, search engine optimisation sounds complicated, but the basics of it are quite simple. The first thing you have to get right is knowing which words or phrases your ideal buyers or visitors will use to find you. These are known as keywords or key phrases. Any seo company that you hire will start asking you to do this as part of your internet marketing plans.

So, if you supply people with fishing tackle in your local town and you want to attract more customers for your products, you might want to use the following keywords in the text you use on your website's homepage: 'fishing tackle Oxford'.

The next thing you need to know about search engine optimisation is that search engines look through websites (called crawling) for text to understand whether your website is relevant to what people are searching for. But, you have to balance the keywords you use to show your relevance to search engines with writing good content which is easily understood by humans. It's no good stuffing your web pages with keywords which don't make sense to people.

In addition to this, it's important not to put keywords onto your web pages which can be seen by search engines but not by humans. So, you might write some keywords in white on your web page which is a white page. Search engines know about this trick and it will get you penalised by them, which means your website could be so far down the search results page that you might as well not exist. This practice is one of a number of tactics which would be carried out by a spurious seo company and it is known as 'black hat SEO'. Don't do it. Insist on honest 'white hat SEO' practices.

'White hat SEO' is being honest with your customers and the search engines. Write good content which is relevant to your customers and don't try any 'black hat seo' internet marketing tricks.

Another SEO lesson to learn is that search engines don't look for relevant websites for the keywords. Search engines look for relevant web pages. So, when you are planning your website, you need to select keywords which are relevant for each of your web pages. For your seo plan, think at the page level and this will help your enormously to get your web pages to a higher level in the 'organic search results' (the search results which are below and to the left of the 'cost per click' advertisements.

It's also important to know that for good SEO that search engines, as you can probably guess by now, look for text on web pages. They don't see images. Images are good for people using a website, but you need to make sure that images are 'described' in the code which makes up each of your web pages. These descriptions in the code are known as 'tags'. The tag for an image in a web page is called the 'ALT' tag. Use relevant keywords in your 'ALT' tags so that the search engines understand the relevance of the image to your web pages.

Finally, probably the most important search engine optimisation lesson for beginners to know is another meta tag on each web page which is the 'TITLE' tag. Each of your web pages should have a unique description relevant to the web page. This is one of the first items that search engines look for. Without this description your chances of getting your website presented in the organic search results is greatly diminished.

In conclusion, SEO is a vital part of internet marketing. Proper keyword research is the basis of successful search engine optimisation. If you get this right and do some basics right, such as tagging each web page correctly, you are going to get better results. There is a lot more to SEO to get right too (which I will cover in posts to follow) but, if you understand some of principles behind it you will be in a better position to do some of the work yourself or to speak sensibly with a SEO specialist.

Computer Data Loss is a Thing of the Past?

Not so long ago, when your PC or laptop had a hard drive crash or file system you were likely to lose most of, if not all, of your computer data. 

The anxiety and stress that you feel when you know you have lost your computer data is immense. It may not be a stressful as getting divorced or moving house but it must be somewhere near the top of list of bad things that happen to you when you had forgotten to backup your computer. Your precious collection of photographs, documents and videos would have been lost unless you had remembered to carry out a physical back-up of it all onto an external hard drive or USB mass storage device.

Most large companies have a computing infrastructure which is supposed to help you recover your data by backing it up automatically. But, my experience of these services is that they were not always as reliable as you would like them to be, and you had to wait an awfully long time before you could shut down your computer while the back-up of your personal folders was completed through your network connections.

There have been back-up services available for a while, such as Microsoft SkyDrive, but they were never that easy to use and the ability to share documents or files within them was fiddly at best.

The public cloud environment has made the stress felt after a hard drive crash and the arrival of Google Drive last week marked how serious the market now is for storing your computer data online. Google Drive is what used to be called Google Docs and is a free service which allows you 5GB of online storage of your files which can all be synchronized automatically, backing up data without you even realizing it. All you need is Google account to get hold of this service for storing computer data.

A hard drive crash may be something you just laugh about in future.

SEO tips for landlords

Landlords need to know SEO basics

Not everyone needs to be a search engine optimisation expert (Justin Walmsley is just one such SEO expert) but it helps if you have a basic understanding of SEO if you have a business and you get business through the internet. 


Here's why:


Recently, I have started helping a family member to start generating further bookings for their flat in Frome, Somerset which they rent out when they are not in the UK to supplement other marketing of the property. The flat is already being marketed on three sites which specialise in holiday rentals, namely Cottages4You, Holiday Rentals, Holiday Lettings and AirBnB.

But, the bookings from the major rentals sites are disappointing overall. The site which is producing bookings is Holiday Rentals. The others are not. The owner complained to Cottages4You about the lack of bookings and they came back with a message which suggested he changed the photographs of the property to get more bookings. The problem not being addressed was that nobody was getting to the property's page on the site, so having different photos was not going to make much difference.

Furthermore, what was particularly interesting was that Cottages4You (owned by Hoseasons), according to the local area manager of the company, "spends millions to guarantee that Cottages4You is at the top of Google".

Of course, the member of the family owner of the flat does not care what Cottages4You spends on Google. They only care about the bookings for their flat; which are none.

I decided to take a look at the different sites by looking at the underlying code of the website (you can see this by 'right-clicking' the web page and clicking the 'View page source' link which appears) which can tell you a lot about how each website is likely to be viewed by search engines.

I looked at one aspect of each site and that was the keywords which they use in their photographs of the property which can be found by looking for a code which reads 'alt='. This is a 'tag' which helps search engines to identify the image and relate the keywords in the tag to the content of the web page (i.e. if your content is about a bedroom in a property the tags in the photograph on the page should be relevant to the content on the page).

In short, it was clear that Holiday Rentals had done a better job. They had made sure the webpage for the member of my family's property was optimised for search engines to know the relevance of the content to the search terms used by potential customers looking for a property to rent. The optimisation of the webpage on Cottages4You was pretty much non-existent when it came to the tags in the images, as was it for the other rental websites.

The tags on the photographs are not the only aspect of a webpage's search engine optimisation which will bring in relevant visitors to a page. There are many more details which need to be addressed to make help grow the visibility of the pages on your site.

However, it is a good indication of how much business you are likely to attract if you use one of these online rental specialists. If they don't do the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) for your property on their site, how can you expect to get any bookings? Search engines look for web pages with relevant content to the search term being used.

To get your property noticed on these big websites relies much more on the internal search engine being used on the site than search engines like Google and Bing being able to find properties on the site. If I was a property owner wanting bookings, I would prefer to find it through Google or Bing than through the search engine on Cottages4You, for example.

That's why it's important it's important for landlords and landladies to know some basic SEO techniques.

Six minutes to sell

photo by @waynemah

Imagine that you have been given six minutes to stand in front of 200 prospective customers and that you have to convince them that you have a solution to their problem.


How are you going to make those minutes count?

To make those minutes be as productive as possible, you have to know something about the audience in front of you, at least.

You also need to understand the environment they are in. For example, are you facing them in a webinar or at a conference? Are they there having been invited by you personally? What are you going to show to persuade them that you can help them? How are you going to show them what you can do?

These are all vital questions to ask as you plan to turn six minutes into sales. Those 360 seconds are often all you get these days when you have sponsored an event and have a window of opportunity to get people interested in your solutions.

So, still what would you do? What is going to capture the imagination of the audience enough to motivate them to pay you a visit?

You will have seen product demonstrations or Powerpoint slides full of bullet points trying to spark your interest. And yet, your six minutes is usually tucked between two long sessions of presentations already. Your audience is likely to have reached their limits already in their ability to absorb any more information. They will have cognitive overload by now and will want to stop for the upcoming break and all that sits between them and a cup of coffee is your six minutes of persuasion.

Let's think about it like this: The presenters before you are likely to have required their audience to do something difficult. They will have asked them to do three things at once which human brains were not designed to do, namely read, process and listen at the same time.

The presenters will have shown them a set of information in the form of lists or bullet points, or graphs which they are likely to be struggling to understand the main point being made. The human brain is not designed to handle this multi-channel information blast.

So, here's your chance to capture their attention, make what you your point clear and to engage your prospects.

You stand up and show them slides which have one sentence which clearly states your point for the slide, with one simple graphic to illustrate the point. You reinforce your point by speaking.  No bullet points; no crazy, complicated diagrams and no images which just fill space but don't help you get your point across.

You tell a story which has a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a format we've all been brought up with and which we understand.

You spend 30 seconds or less on each slide which means, in six minutes, you can show 12 to 16 slides containing glorious images to support your points and to tell a story as if you are film director.

This approach works. I know. This happened to me last week and prospects came to see me straight away when none had come before. My presentation is below.

If you want help with creating presentations like this, I'd be delighted to help you.