Launching late last year the ‘new kid’, Kred, hit the social world and is now beginning to challenge Klout as a serious competitor. Here’s the good news, we think not only is Kred more viable, it’s more accurate too!

So what sets Kred apart from Klout, giving it that edge, which forces you to check your Kred score over your Klout? Here are some of the reasons why we do…

Influence Level & Outreach Level

Firstly you get 2 scores. Kred works by looking at 1000 days worth of Data, including your tweets, conversations, topics and hashtags. Your first score is your ‘influence level’, this is measured out of 1000 on your ability to inspire others, and can be increased by other people re-tweeting, @mentioning or following your account. Secondly, Kred measures your ‘Outreach level’, which calculates your specific activity on Twitter, and is measured out of 10. You can earn more outreach points by @mentioning people, retweeting and following new accounts.

Break Down of Score

The accuracy of the Klout score has often been pulled into question, as it is quite difficult to verify why exactly your score is so low, or so high. For example, our digital marketing platform BeeLiked only has a Klout score of 33 and has been highly active on Twitter over the last 2 months. When comparing our twitter account @beeliked, to a staff member’s personal account, the employee’s score is over 16 points higher when he admits he less active, and tweets infrequently. In contrast, when @beeliked’s Kred is compared to the same staff members, you can see the scores are much closer, and more reasonable.

The true distinction with Kred, and what really differentiates them from Klout, is in the detail and valuation of your score. Kred gives a complete break down of every single tweet, @mention and follow, letting you know exactly what each was worth. This assessment allows you to see what you are doing right on Twitter, and which aspects you need to improve on.

 
Kred Communities

Kred also incorporates ‘Community Kred’, which lists up to 200 communities based on the topics you are influential on…

You can select a topic, ‘marketing’ for example, and Kred gives you a list of the top ‘Influencers’ & ‘Outreachers’, in that particular field for you to follow and interact with on Twitter. Kred also gives you a score for how influential and active you are in this particular sector, therefore, this application is great for enhancing your twitter account in the fields you wish to succeed and progress in.

Offline Kred

Finally Kred lets you upload your life achievements, including, degrees, honors and certificates etc. You can simply send Kred a PDF as evidence of the real-world accomplishment, and they will add it to your profile. Offline achievements are a really nice touch to Kred, giving a personal feel to your profile.

Check out your score at www.kred.com now!

The Experiment

‘Follow 1000 sector relevant people’

Why?

To discover whether following 1000 people, would generate a sufficient amount of accounts following back!

Factors of the Study

Anyone can follow a 1000 people and get some sort of response, however, there a certain aspects to this strategy that will affect the response and outcome. Listen carefully…

Follows must be sector relevant

We don’t need to stress the obvious, by following sector relevant people there is a much higher chance they will return the favour.

We are a digital marketing platform that helps companies manage their social media; therefore any account that we follow, would include interests like ‘digital marketing’, or ‘social media’ within their bio and tweets.

Twitter Account must already have some followers, relevant tweets & a bio

If you’re starting from scratch with something like 0-50 followers, and you’ve only tweeted a few times, it’s notable that your ‘follow back’ percentage, will not increase as much an established twitter page. Therefore, make sure your account has some relevant tweets, and 50 followers minimum, this way people will view your company as ‘professional’ and follow you back.

Make sure you don’t underestimate your Bio! You must strategically write your copy, as it sums you up as a company and as an account – it’s often what people judge you on, before deciding to follow you back.

Our profile before we started:

 
Accounts must continue to tweet throughout the experiment

Throughout the ‘follow frenzy’ you must continue to tweet. If people are looking at your profile and they see you don’t tweet at least once a day, the chances that they will follow you back slims dramatically. We recommend that the  average professional account should tweet at least 5 times a day minimum.

Method

• Follow 1000 sector relevant accounts in the fastest possible time.

• Measure the results after 24 hours, remembering to tweet throughout.

• Measure the total amount of followers after 48 hours and un-follow those who didn’t follow back

The News

So, did it work, and was it worthwhile  you’re wondering?

To give you a rough idea of the experiment time, it took us around 1 hour 30 minutes, between two members of staff to follow 1000 accounts.

Here were the results:

We received 143 unique followers in 24 hours and totalled 159 followers in 48 hours.

Start: 250 Followers End: 409 Followers

Start: 315 Following End: 1239 Following

Start: Tweets 208 End: 227 Tweets

 

Interestingly out of the 159 new followers gained, 95 (59%) were not accounts that we initially followed for the test, therefore indicating only 65 (41%) of new followers, were profiles that we initially followed! Nuts!

 

 
Our Account after the experiment

 
Our Website Hits

Not only did our follow count rise, but because our Twitter bio includes the link to our website, we generated over 1000 hits to our site in over the 48 hours.

 

 
Did you notice something?

We didn’t quite manage to follow 1000 people. We followed 923 and then Twitter told us we had reached a following limit!

 
Woops…so apparently this strategy is technically against the rules of Twitter. According to the social networking site ‘aggressive following’ is a breech of the rules. You are only allowed a 2000 people follow limit, and you can’t follow more accounts until more are following you. It seems that Twitter also counts if you followed and un-followed an account!

Summary

We would definitely recommend undertaking this experiment to get a quick boost in your followers. The underlying moral to story, however, isn’t that if you follow people, they will follow back.

The key to  success on twitter, is ‘follow few and often’ and make them ‘sector relevant’, this should steadily increase your followers and ensure you’re not kicked off Twitter!

Hope this helped!

Digital is rapidly replacing old media models, leading the new media age into 2012, and quickly becoming essential for all companies. As we all know we’ve entered into the New Year in recession, however, it seems that the digital world will benefit from this, as companies must utilize social media marketing to increase customers in 2012. Here are 5 digital predictions from us here at BeeLiked for 2012:

1. Rise of Mobile

Mobile marketing seems ready to really take off this year, more and more brands are seeking mobile advancements to their companies, to ensure to capitalise on the rise of smart phones and tablet devices. This year more brands will utilize mobile, to ensure they are effectively engaging and building brand relationships with consumers.

The app industry is coming of age, but currently we are still seeing more brands using them in a general manner, rather than creating strategic, engaging apps that appeal to consumers. It seems this year that is going to change; we’ll see brands developing apps for both customers, and employees. Which means increased experiences for customers, and well-equipped staff with the ability to work on the go!

2. Gamification

Gamification is a method of creating a ‘real life’ game within social apps in your browser, or your smart phone, which allows consumers to take part and compete for certain rewards, badges or points. This new trend seemed to spark some interest in 2011, with the rise of Foursquare, that now receives over 2 million check-ins a week, and will continue to be implemented by a number of brands this year.

A number of companies will also start to execute this feature into their campaigns, as another method to grab and hook the consumer – you will engage and ‘play’ with a brand, all the time building your loyalty and relationship them.

Primarily this method has purely been used in the consumer environment, but this year, expect to see it in other areas from human resources, healthcare, government, and potentially business management – this year at work your targets and rewards could be based on how well your doing on the business digital leaderboard!

 
3. Engagement & Relevance Marketing

2012 will be all about relevant marketing; companies will no longer have the luxury to waste time and effort on ‘nice to have’ mass communications, instead, they will be replaced with digital concepts, that are tailored to the right audience, at the right time. Therefore it’s seems this year companies need to focus their digital marketing efforts on engagement over the amount of followers.

Most companies now are using Facebook and Twitter to give themselves a presence online focusing on how many ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ they have. It’s clear that in 2012 the focus on social media will be quantity over quality with companies focussing on who is following them instead of how many.

Many businesses are in the trial and error stage of implementing social strategy; nonetheless, they will face a challenge this year, as they are driven to evolve their social media strategy to engage consumers to ensure ROI. With a recession still looming people need to justify time and money put towards digital.

This year it is essential for companies to produce innovative ideas, interactive content and great campaigns, to capture and engross followers and fans online – transforming their social audience – into profit.

4. Social Media Optimisation

Social media optimisations or SMO, is the process by which companies make their content easily sharable across the social web – leading to essential visits to their website. This can include features such as apps and widgets, which we have seen much of over the past year or so!

SMO will play an increasing part in companies search engine optimisation (SEO), with businesses using social activities, and social media marketing, to boost visits to their website. The key for companies this year is to understand the audience of each social site, and what to implement on each particular site, making sure their content is more ‘clickable’.

5. Social Influence

There has been a huge rise in the interest of ‘social influence’ online, with sites like ‘Klout’ and the new kid of the block ‘Kred’. Some people are slightly dubious to the accuracy of these scores, however; people seem to be paying a great deal of time, and effort, to improve their score.

Klout well established their platform in 2011 as they attempted to convert digital influence into business value, which will continue to develop this year. More and more businesses will begin to pay attention to Klout, and Kred this year as they attempt to increase their social influence rating, and influential topics.

This year we predict the influence trend will become less about scores, but about the technique companies use to receive and score digital influence, as well as measuring the outcome of it.

The redesign has been released now for over a month, yet many Twitter users are still waiting in frustration. If you create a new Twitter account you view the new interface automatically, whereas us loyal ‘tweeters’ have to wait patiently. Twiffic Twitter!

Twitter introduces its own photo sharing service

This could spell the beginning of the end for services like Twitpic and Yfrog, unless of course they introduce additional features. Twitter will now allow users to upload photos along with their 140-character long messages. The service can be accessed by clicking on the camera icon which appears when users click on the ‘What’s Happening’ box.

The service, which was initially unveiled in June, is powered by Photobucket, which will be responsible for hosting the images. Users can upload images as big as 3MB in size. Twitter has also noted that addional photo features like Galleries will be available soon. You will be able to continue using third-party upload services like Twitpic and yFrog, and those images will also show up in the upcoming galleries feature. Protected accounts will not display images uploaded through the Twitter photo service to the public. If you’d like instructions on how the new system works, you can visit Twitter’s help topic on the subject.

Our own service, BeeLiked.com currently allows images to be uploaded to Twitpic, but as soon as Twitter lets us, we’ll be looking to add this new functionality.

Let us know what you think. Maybe even tweet us a pic!

twitter.com/whaddamedia

We tweeted this pic via Twitter's new photo sharing service

The ‘Like’ button is a simple way for an individual to broadcast to their friends that they like something and thus share it with their Facebook friends.

Companies that place a ‘Like’ button on their website are making this act of sharing very easy. Previously, to recommend a website to friends, would have required users to copy a link, write an email and then select who to send it to. One simple click of the ‘Like’ button and this information is broadcasts automatically.

With 27 million people in the UK using Facebook on a daily basis and the average person having 130 Facebook Friends, the ‘Like’ button is probably the best free advertising that a company could ever hope for.

So don’t delay – put that ‘Like’ button on your website.

The best way to share what you like with your friends.

Google +1

Google processes 92% of all UK web searches, but it is playing catch up with Facebook in the social stakes.  ’Google Plus’ is the new social network that Google has been working so hard on building and it is quickly gaining momentum. Within a matter of days of its launch it already had 20 million active users and is growing at a phenomenal rate.

The +1 button is Google’s answer to the ‘Like’ button. The more people that click +1 on a website the higher up the rankings that website will go and the more people that join Google Plus, the more search results will be personalised according to the tastes of their own networks.

If you haven’t yet added a +1 button to your website, do so now.

The Dunbar Number

Robin Dunbar, is The director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. Dunbar’s theory goes something like this:  throughout our history it has been consistently shown that we as humans have a capacity to form meaningful relationships with approximately 150 people at any one time, whether in a hunter-gatherer society or on Facebook.

The way in which our social world is constructed is part and parcel of our biological inheritance. Together with apes and monkeys, we’re members of the primate family – and within the primates there is a general relationship between the size of the brain and the size of the social group. We fit in a pattern. There are social circles beyond it and layers within – but there is a natural grouping of 150.

This is the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation – there’s some personal history, not just names and faces.

The Doomsday Book of 1086, for example, records that the average village size was 150.  It’s the same in the 18th century, where thanks to parish registers, county by county, the average size of a village is again 150. (Except in Kent, where it was inexplicably just 100).

Quality trumps Quantity: The idea that 150 followers is all you need probably sounds crazy to people, especially if you are just starting out. However, it is all down to your ability to interact with these 150 people and start a meaningful relationship that will make all the real difference.

In The Tipping Point, the author Malcom Gladwell further expands on Dunbar’s Number theory. He suggests that 150 people is all you need to make an idea spread and importantly our ability to influence people decreases once we try to engage with more than a core audience of 150. Now I can think of several examples with modern media where this theory appears to fall down, however I can see that when first reaching out to find a new audience, it is better to concentrate on a small core base, than try to appeal to everyone. There’s no way you are realistically going to engage effectively with thousands of followers, unless you absolutely have no life.

The role of 150 in business: At Gore Associates, there are always no more than 150 people at anyone plant. Everyone is known as an Associate not an employee and there are no bosses in the traditional sense, only sponsors and mentors. Founder Bill Gore termed this style as a “flat-lattice organization.” Gore found that beyond the number of 150 Associates per factory, there seems to be breakdowns in the ability of the group to act and agree upon anything with one voice.  One of the lessons that Gore discovered, was that if you if you want to create one large company, you have to master how to create several small companies first.

Creating Your own 150
Below are some ideas for how you can set about creating your 150:

• Track Mentions: Pay attention to mentions of your Twitter name and where appropriate start a conversation with that person by mentioning them back.
• Track Retweets: Make sure that you keep track of who retweets of your posts.  It’s obvious that they like what you are saying, otherwise they wouldn’t be sharing it.
• Create a List for your inner circle: Set up a list for yourself on Twitter (make it private) and call it ‘my inner circle’.  Then, anytime somebody mentions you or retweets one of your posts, add them to that list. Unless they’re a spammer in which case you should block them.
• Engage with the People on that List: Simply creating the list is not going to be enough. Once you have created your inner circle list, you need to start engaging with them.
  • Daily Conversations: Talk to at least some of the people on your inner circle list daily.
  • Retweet their Stuff: If you want others to take notice of you, then you have to start taking notice of them. So, make a point to promote the stuff of the people in your inner circle and don’t discredit the value of those with fewer followers, as they won’t be small forever.

Where to Start When You Are at Zero: If you are starting at zero, some of the above might seem more challenging, but it’s not. Go off the beaten track and find people that have something interesting to say and start engaging them in conversations.  They’ll be happy to hear from you. That will be the start of creating your 150.

Good luck and let me know how you go. Damian Dutton @whaddamedia

It doesn’t sound all that revolutionary really, but I bet it will quickly become popular. No more copying and pasting web links into emails. The ‘Send’ button today lauched with 1-800-Flowers.com, Gogobot, American Eagle Outfitters, Viagogo North America, and on our very own BeeLiked.com Facebook Page. So be sure to ‘Like’ us and ‘Send’ our page to your friends.

Now I’ve just got to figure how to add a ‘Send’ button to this blog.

Get your own ‘Send’ button now.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/send/

Facebook is already full of discounts and deals from companies trying to entice people to their Facebook pages, so its rare that a company comes up with an idea that is newsworthy. It seems though that starting today, Expedia is upping the ante: It has created a sweepstakes that offers more than $1 million in prizes, including five trips that cost more than $100,000.

Expedia launches ExpediaFriendTrips

Expedia FriendTrips is as much a game as a sweepstake.  The rules are fairly straightforward: Fans of Expedia can start a plane (becoming its pilot) and point the plane toward one of the 13 destinations offered as prizes. Pilots can then invite their friends to join them on the plane, each of which holds five passengers. Being a passenger or a pilot on the plane makes you eligible to win.

The prizes, called “trips of a lifetime,” include a $160,000 trip for the winner and five friends to go on a luxury tour of South America, with stops in Chile, Peru and Foz do Iguaçu, a natural paradise that spans the convergence of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay; a $100,000 trip to Las Vegas that covers the winner and five friends’ stay at a hotel suite, transportation by limousine, a shopping spree and $25,000 in cash (for gambling, of course); and a $100,000 European cruise for the winner and five others to fly (first class) to Venice, then stay in a 6,000-square-foot garden villa on Norwegian Cruise Line’s Jade.

To increase their chances of winning, fans of Expedia can merely start more planes and recruit more friends to join them on their journeys: 25 friends doubles your chances and 50 friends triples your chances. And to give everyone a sense of urgency, the competition ends in six weeks time.

If you would like to start your own Facebook Sweepstake, but want a bit of imagination put behind it, get in touch with Whadda Media. We’re good at thinking up and creating innovative marketing ideas.

Social is definitely in fashion.

All of a sudden everything from search through to e-commerce is proceeded by the word ’social’. Of course, the leisure industry knows better than most the power of social, after all personal recommendation is still the most powerful form of advertising, with word of mouth contributing to a large part of any venue‟s customers. Our collective desire to know what our friends are doing has fuelled the meteoric rise of countless social networks from MySpace and Bebo, to Facebook and Twitter, not forgetting Youtube and Flickr. It is no wonder that every business has scrambled to benefit from this new form of digital recommendation and climb on board the social bandwagon.

Now in 2011, as everyone takes long hard looks at their budgets, the need has never been greater for leisure groups to validate and measure the benefits delivered by their increasing investment in social media and digital marketing. However, before going headlong into number crunching, it is important to realise that whilst the size of a company’s online social reach is a reflection of the level of social media participation, it is not symbolic of brand stature, resonance, loyalty, or advocacy, nor is it an indicator for business performance.

Social media marketing delivers a wide range of benefits to organisations that are beneficial in the short term and long term in both quantitative and qualitative ways. To properly value the impact of its social media marketing investments, leisure groups must align their objectives, metrics, targets, and strategies across four perspectives:

• Financial – has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased?
• Digital – has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?
• Brand – have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?
• Risk management – is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?

Marketers must learn to evaluate a diverse set of short and long-term benefits and not concentrate solely on the financial aspect.  This approach furnishes several benefits, such as aligning measurement to all corporate objectives and not just sales, providing a means for gaining consensus from diverse stakeholders and avoiding short-term gains at the expense of long-term brand health.