Are You Somebody?

Are you a digital somebody?

I can tell you now, that if you don’t tweet, and facebook, and whatsapp and all those things, then in the eyes of marketers, you are nobody.

But read on – it is not actually hard to be “somebody” in this world, and some of the people who belong to the marketer’s empire don’t know it, and perhaps people outside of this world want their opinions to count.

Since the beginning of the last century, marketing has been a “thing”. Companies used marketer’s to wrap their “products” – from actual packaging, to ads, to values, stories and changes to the products themselves. To do this marketers needed to understand what people wanted.

So there were questionnaires, and focus groups and opinion panels. Huge companies specialised in gathering all the information about what consumers want and think. As products became global products, these companies, like McKinsey, became global companies.

But now social media and very clever use of technology, is taking the manpower, and the man (and woman) out of this equation. The marketing just world counts your clicks.

One company specialising in this technology, uses software that combs through 30 million websites a day in many languages. They look for references on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs, etc) to specific companies, events or products. They use software robots to crawl through text and even photos to pick up references relevant to their clients, and then sell that information to their clients, to inform them about what customers like and don’t like, what they want and what they don’t want.

The information that is searched through is all publicly available. It is all information which we put out there, every time we offer an opinion or “Like”, it is fodder for the marketing robots.

Opinion Leaders

So the marketing world garners opinions from the activities of social media users. But that’s not all – they can pick up which social media users are actually influencers.

Influencers or opinion leaders are then targeted deliberately by marketers – and courted – for example with free samples or invitations to special events, so that they will broadcast positive feedback on social media, and the marketing job is done at a very low cost.

So how do “they”, the marketing robots, know who is an influencer? This blog has a relatively small audience, but I am 100% certain, that some of the readers are “opinion leaders” about the arts, about technology, about restaurants. You might not know that you are an opinion leader, but the marketing software can see how many people liked your comment on a product for example, then acted in some way to follow your advice – by going to a site related to the product and then commenting about a similar purchase. If people follow your advice – the ‘bots will know – but only if you exist in the social media stratosphere.

This brings me to another interesting point. Do you want to know how much influence you have on facebook or Twitter? Well that’s eay to find out, there are free packages which tell you.

Klout

One of those is Klout. Google it, register (just put in your Facebook or Twitter details) and you will get a score between 1 and 100. Apparently the average is 40. My score was 10 (which I suspect might be the minimum).

This doesn’t surprise me, because I find social media, socially challenging. I don’t want to tell people who I don’t know what I think (I don’t mind so much on this forum – we are an exclusive little group, and if you are still reading at this point, you are probably in a very exclusive little group!) I don’t particularly want to change this, but if I did, Klout and other similar products would help me to do that.

Now I have mentioned Klout 5 times – that should be good for an extra point on the Klout scale.

I don’t think I care that marketers don’t know what I want and don’t want, but all this makes me think that the future offerings from businesses is just going to be based on the likes and dislikes of those who live in the social media empire. That’s not a good thing.