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What Is A Refugee?

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Today is World Refugee Day, and there is an organization, called USA for UNHCR that is working to raise awareness for the plight of refugees from across the globe. They’ve been fund-raising with the sale of $5 #BlueKey(s). Together the power of cause-related marketing is being executed to promote the fund-raising and sale of blue keys — I bought four and donated more to their cause. Cost is merely $5 each sold in the U.S. only.

An admirable woman I know, Shonali Burke, has begun working this this group and has implemented the broadest, most impressive social media campaign strategy I’ve seen in awhile. (I must give kudos to colleagues’ work.)

But, what is a refugee?

This word conjures up Angelina Jolie, Oprah, Madonna, George Clooney and Bono, among other celebrity faces hitting Sub-Saharan Africa and other poverty-stricken regions of the world to raise awareness of the problem that is so far removed from other corners of the world, yet so critical.

It’s truly easy to ignore this situation, isn’t it? To turn your cheek and resume remoting the channel changer? Do you remember Sally Struthers? No greater humanitarian back in the day, and she asked us for our money all the time. Who gave to her? Now’s your chance to rectify that and help the United Nations. You can convince yourself that the plight of these people does not affect you in the least. But, you’re wrong. Refugees come in all shapes and sizes and from all countries of the world.

Violence is an overriding factor that causes people to be uprooted from homes, villages, and comfort zones. Invaders, dictators, war, and poverty become issues for women and children who are victims of rape, violence, kidnap, and murder while husbands, fathers and sons watch helplessly the slaughter of their families.

The victims of the Haiti earthquake now living in shanty towns; are they considered refugees? Probably not, but their choice is to leave poverty and seek refuge in the Dominican or the U.S., but they can’t. Semantics.

For those people seeking asylum from various homelands, such as Iran, for example, to escape a dictatorial regime operated on the theme of Islamic fundamentalism, how shall we define them? Is asylum seeker a higher-end, more affluent and non-poverty oriented moniker for refugee? Semantics.

The UNHCR is one of the most respected not-for-profits across the globe. Its brand and credibility are second to none. America is the land of the free. So, free your vision from your immediate surroundings and open your heart to help and give. When you spend $5, those 500 pennies will be shared with people who believe $.25 is a treasure.

Please consider buying your #BlueKey right now, and when you do, look around. You do know a refugee you can touch in your life today; it’s just that you’ve never wrapped your head around how to define that word — migrant, immigrant, illegal alien, asylum seeker, refugee. It’s semantics, and regardless of the label you put on one another; we’re all human and each of us deserves a safe place to make a home.

 

Blogging & #BlueKey: Use Your Influence

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I’m late to the party; what else is new…yet, there’s still time to help founders and planners of the global BlueKey campaign make their mark by June 20, World Refugee Day. Shonali Burke is driving the digital program to earn 6,000 blue keys for $5 each, and Gini Dietrich is riding tandem. Together they’re making a difference, and you can, too.

As a blogger, hit Shonali’s blog and you can lift content from her blog (because she’s provided everything you need to spread the word).
Then, you can launch and post a cute photo like @JennWhinnem did when her  blue key arrived. Or, go directly to the Blue Key Campaign site  to adapt content for your post.

And, so, please read the below excerpted directly from Waxing Unlyrical; Ms. Shonali Burke’s amazing blog. It’s only $5, folks, we can afford that hands down. While you’re there, take a look at the solid digital/PR strategy behind this campaign; it’s one for the text books.

Extracted directly from Shonali Burke’s blog, Waxing Unlyrical:
So I’ve been working with USA for UNHCR on the digital aspects of its Blue Key campaign. It’s very simple:
1. The Blue Key campaign symbolizes the key to the home that refugees may never ever hold again;
2. It’s a $5 symbolic Blue Key pin or pendant that is really very cute – and by getting your own, you’re showing support for the cause of refugees worldwide, as well as for the 6,000+ UNHCR staffers working globally to bring them some relief; and
3. Our goal for this phase of the campaign is to get 6,000 keys out to Americans (they can only ship within the US) by June 20, which is World Refugee Day.

From an SM campaign point of view, I think we’ve been doing some interesting things (but of course, I’m working on the campaign, so take that with a fistful of salt if you need to). We have:
• Refined the “online home” for the Blue Key campaign as much as possible, so that messaging is in sync;
• Reached out to cause-passionate bloggers who are active in social spaces to become Blue Key Champions (you can become one too, just let me know, the main “ask” is for you to publish a post on the campaign between now and June 20);
• Using the #bluekey hashtag on Twitter to amplify the conversation and drive awareness;
• Created tracking URLs for the primary outreach mechanisms, i.e. blog(ger)s, Facebook, Twitter & email newsletters (which USA for UNHCR is sending out);
• Customized the “thank you” email someone gets when they sign up for a Blue Key (or more than one), so that they can choose whether or not to “like” USA for UNHCR on Facebook, follow on Twitter, donate a tweet a day, or become a Champion.

(I really like it when I get to shamelessly copy content from someone else’s blog; makes my work so much simpler.) Please buy a Blue Key (and then head on over to @DannyBrown to get your #12for12K mojo, too).

Thanks! You won’t regret it.

 

Can We Measure Influence?

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Today marks the culmination of this week-long series on Influence. We’ve explored Klout, two camps, factors that influence, what it is, and now we look at ways to consider measuring influence.

Neicole Crepeau is a partner with Coherent Interactive, a digital shop specializing in all things web, social media, and digital, of course.  Aaron Sachs is working on his Masters degree at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where I’m certain his coursework includes many live discussions about measurement.

Neicole kicks off:

I believe there are several  factors that contribute to defining influence:

  • Topic—nobody has influence in every area, most people have influence in specific areas
  • Community—most influencers are active in certain communities or have the greatest impact in certain communities
  • Activity—some influencers are content creators, others are mainly speakers, etc.
  • Type—There are different types of influence. For example, there are people who are very good at spreading the word/content, and might be valuable for content marketing purposes or to gain traffic to your website. There are people who are very influential in terms of shaping opinions—think Walt Mossberg in tech. A recommendation from him on a tech topic carries a lot of weight. There are people who are influential in their ability to start conversations and connect with individuals. I think you and Mark Schaefer fall into that category, Jayme.  (Thank you, Neicole!) There are probably other types, as well, thought-leaders, etc.

From a business perspective, you’d want to connect with different influencers depending upon your goals and audience. You want influencers who are in the communities where your audience is and who are influential in the ways that will help with your goals. If I want to get someone to be a speaker at my conferences or do webinars for me, I probably want to connect with an influencer in the relationship-builder model. On the other hand, if I want my content shared widely to people interested in a certain topic, I probably want to connect with a content curator, as per my post on Mark Schaefer’s blog. And so on.

Measurement

Is there an effective way to measure influence? I don’t think so, not yet. Currently, systems are using proxies of real measurement.  We use RTs and reshares to measure how good an influencer is at spreading the word. But we can’t really accurately measure that. If I share a link, someone clicks on it and reads the blog post I linked to, and then clicks the Retweet button on the blogger’s site, we’ve lost the trail. Someone may click the link that the reader shared, and that click should actually be attributed to me, but we can’t track it.

Klout measure shares and @’s and DM’s and comments on Facebook, too. That measure’s engagement of a sort, but from the number of interactions, Klout makes assumptions about someone’s influence. If the influence type is Walt Mossberg style, @’s and DM’s may not matter at all. What matters is how well-regarded the influencer’s opinion is and how well-spread his/her opinions are to a key audience, not whether he/she actually talks a lot with fans.

To really measure, we’d have to have a good breakdown of the different types of influencers, by topic and community, use different measures for each community, and measure all the way through. We’d need to know things like what audiences/customers the influencer is reaching, how far down the sales funnel it’s happening, who is sharing the opinion/information with customers, and whether it actually resulted in conversions (however you measure conversions: sales, registrations, etc.). We aren’t anywhere near that, yet.

Influencer identification and measurement is still in its infancy. We’ve got a long ways to go.

Aaron Sachs has some great

I want to begin with the tools that are out there–Klout, Backtype, PeerIndex.  They all measure influence, but there’s a key thing missing, before we get to what the tools measure, and that is:  Who is defining influence for these tools and what are they basing it on?

It’s all well and good to have an indicator based on partial metrics–Tweets, retweets, followers/following ratios, etc.  But where is influence in all of this?

Michael Wu at Lithium has an excellent post on influence.  In an interview with him, Michael stated that simply, influence is the ability to cause a change in mindset or actions.  Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion.  It is causing someone to think or behave a certain way.  Whether the motives of the person influencing another person are “pure” or not is irrelevant to defining influence. However, we all hope that people influencing any field are pure of heart and have the best interests of an industry or field at heart and won’t influence the direction of an industry or field in a negative fashion.  But that’s beside the point.

The tools that are being used to measure influence are broken.  They don’t measure true influence.  RAAK did several tests looking at PeerIndex and Klout. The key test was Klout, as that seems to be the standard right now.  They found that the bot that tweeted the most had a higher score than the other three bots. By conducting that test, RAAK essentially found out that Klout’s definition of influence (and somewhat the industry standard, by proxy of accepting Klout as the defining measure of influence in the social media world) was relegated to Tweeting…a lot.  Is that really how we want to define influence for social media?  For that matter, do we want to define influence as simply retweeting, interacting with others, or posting content?  I would hope not.

For social media, there has to be a CONCLUSIVE measure of influence.  If the definition of influence is to cause a change of mind or behavior, then THAT is what should be measured.  Simply measuring retweets or interaction does NOT prove conclusively that a person has experienced a change of mind or behavior. Sorry 🙁 long rant about the tools.

The other factors that are missing in influence are things like credibility, relevance of material to audience (or relevance in general), physical appearance, communication skills, and persuasive ability. These items are the major items that contribute to influence.

Then, you take into account the things that have contributed toward a person being influential–professional opportunity (essentially status–we’re more likely to believe someone who is in a position that lends them more influence or credibility), economic opportunity, and access to tools/communities.

Retweets, tweets, and engagement are not a conclusive measure of influence, not if it is defined as causing a change of mind or behavior.  Really, the approach that the social media world should be taking to Klout and other influence measuring tools should be a mindset that understands that these tools don’t really measure influence.  If anything, they measure how engaged you are with your audience.  Engagement (does not =) Influence.

 

(Photo: NextWeb…never thought I’d see the day when Old Spice Man was relevant for an image; very cool.)

Defining Influence: Two Camps?

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In our first post in the series on What is Influence, I presented three views from three influential people. Comments suggested each are saying the same thing, and yet, the pathway to defining influence is rocky (just like that journey to define public relations, if you recall). This week, I’m running a series of ponderences (I coin words) from a variety of Tweeps, and I thank each of you who has lent thought, time and writing to contribute.

Rachel Minihan is owner of Purple Phone PR, and I love how she writes her thought process in plain speak for us all to nod and ponder and agree (or not):

Well, I guess the thing is that the definition already exists, right?  According to Websters, it means “the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command.”  Let’s skip right on through the last part of that definition, because that’s essentially what social media IS – you throw your idea out there and see what comes of it.  You don’t FORCE people to hear or experience it, right?

That leaves the phrase “producing an effect.”  Yesterday, I was certain that this meant an action had to result. Now, I wonder…does an effect have to be an action? Can it just implant an idea or a feeling?  Is one (action, thought, feeling) of greater importance than another?

This made me decide that I really didn’t know what the word “effect” meant (despite having used it a billion times in my life!).  Looked that up.  It actually means that it CHANGES the person or thing in some way. Ahh…so to influence something you have to actually change it!

Back to social media–How do we figure out if someone was influenced? How could we measure if they had been changed in some way?

The first thing that comes to mind is sentiment. “They” already measure positive, neutral, negative sentiment. Honing that a bit more could help; for instance, if I RT something without comment, that would be one thing: it simply shows that I found it useful enough for others to have it, but not something that really resulted in me being changed. But, if I added “this made my day” or “gosh, I needed a kick in the pants!” or “Wow, I never thought of that,”– it would indicate the tweet had changed my perspective.

What’s tricky are the “who you know” metrics, right?  Because on one hand, if you know more people, the POTENTIAL for offering greater influence exists.  But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are influential.

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Following Rachel’s personal-brainstorm banter is Brian Ellis. He provides a nice counterpoint to Rachel – she of the esoteric-ness of influence, and he of the analytical measurement (remember when I said there are two camps?).

Brian Ellis is with Anocial Social Media:

Social media influence is the ability to inspire people to take action. We see this in simple forms with people like @GuyKawasaki and @mayhemstudios. They have a certain amount of influence shown in the sheer number of RTs they receive; that pertains to Twitter alone.

With Klout, I think that they are taking too much into consideration. They are trying to average out a score based on the “big two,” Facebook and Twitter. I feel like those are two separate entities. Tracking measurement for either is very much the same, but they are very different platforms with very different demographics. I think each platform should be measured separately and then can be put side by side to give you an overall feel.

That’s what all this really is anyway; it’s all about the feel. No matter what the numbers tell you, and as long as you are progressing, it really is about how it “feels” to you and to those you are putting your message out to.

I think that effectively measuring your influence must start with a decision as to where on the web you want to hold influence. Listen to which people are talking about you, and what they are saying; basic ROI will give you plenty of insight into your level of influence. Look at the simple things, like how many people have subscribed to your RSS, and it will show you in simple terms how influential you have become.

 

What Is Influence?

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Today marks the launch of a new series, “What Is Influence?” The concept came from the many in-depth comments delivered on the April 20 blog post about Klout. There seems to be two camps re Klout (the first mover, for all intents and purposes) for gauging influence scoring — one dissects the algorithm and the analytics behind the score and discredits that number; the other (camp) looks ahead at the significance and potential impact an influencer score will have on the industry at large. I’m of the latter camp…methinks Klout and other influence assessment via metrics and scores will change the face of business development and marketing.

Mark W. Schaefer, one of the most consummate B-to-B marketers I’ve had the privilege of “growing” with, suggests Klout-type apps are not to be taken lightly. Mark says:

At the end of the day, influence is your ability to change another person’s view, attitude or behavior.  That is why systems like Klout are so important to marketers. For the first time in history we can proximate (not necessarily quantify) word of mouth influence. That is a huge insight. Revolutionary. So no matter what you think of Klout from a personal standpoint, you need to pay attention from a business standpoint because it is an important development – a step toward measurement that will improve steadily.

To refresh what I said in the Klout blog last week, I defined influence as “authoritative, authentic, and accessible leadership.”

An opinion column in Advertising Age Feb. 28, 2011 by Greg Shove, founder and CEO of Halogen Media Group, said some pertinent things in his piece about influence metrics as they relate to traditional web publishing. I don’t want to take his opinions out of context, but he shares that Klout scoring is affecting online publishing; sites too large to be nimble and authentic are suffering. I’m fascinated with his remarks, pulled from his piece:

** “Being held to influence-measurement standards set by services such as Klout is the next blow that’s coming around the corner. Get ready for the next digital media bloodbath.

** Influence metrics will show that most big, blue-chip sites don’t have the same social influence that smaller, more authentic sites do.

** Though in its infancy, this shift to influence measurement will ultimately benefit publishers that cultivate and curate influence. I’d (Greg Shove) go so far as to call this ‘authentic media’ or the ‘authentic web,’ defined by the quality, passion and influence of their editorial and their audiences.”

Opinions about influence will vary as widely as the definitions I got to help me define public relations in the recent 15-post series done on this blog. I have invited my peers, with whom I engage every day, to provide their thoughts on defining influence.

Gini Dietrich, an extraordinary and impressive social media maven who blogs at Spin Sucks and will soon launch Spin Sucks Pro, says:

I define influence as a person or group of people who affect change around a product, service, industry, or cause. Your influencers are typically not the same as mine and vice versa. That’s why the issue of things like Klout doesn’t work because it’s not based on reality.

For instance, my Klout score is higher than Jay Leno’s, which is absolutely ridiculous because he is a household name and clearly has more influence. But, in certain circles (PR, especially), I definitely have more influence than Leno.

Finding your influencers takes a lot of hard work, time, commitment, and patience. There aren’t tools that effectively make it easy for you to find them. You have to research, dig, read, review, monitor, listen, and then do it all again to maintain the relationships. The only way to measure that is to benchmark what you are asking the influencers to do against your business goals. It’s the only way.

I’m eager and excited to see how this goes! With that comes a hearty thank you and sincere gratitude for your contributions here to make this blog come alive more each day. I appreciate everyone for visiting, sharing, and ‘raderie.

(Image: ShoutMeLoud)