
(Satire) Not just for Rock Stars – Now Analysts/Influencers have contract riders!
Contract riders are those special line items people slip into contracts. Some have a valid business purpose (like NO brown M&M’s) and others are a tribute to the requester’s vanity/ego. Do IT analysts/influencers have these? Your ace investigative reporter teamed with the always inscrutable and snarky Frank Scavo to get to the bottom of this. […]

Put the Open Back in Oracle Open World: Why Oracle Needs to Influence the Influencers
I was finally enlightened as to why I find Oracle’s annual customer event, Oracle Open World, to be an increasingly frustrating and largely unfulfilling experience. For the last few years I have been laboring under the misperception that one of the goals of this event was to inform the influencers about key Oracle technology and […]

A Guide to Influence(rs): Chapter 2
I’m presuming that you’ve read Chapter 1 a.k.a. the first post on this. If not, here’s the link. Go do that now. If you’re reading this in the book form, I know you’ve read it because this says Chapter 2 and who reads Chater 2 before C…

A Guide To Influence(rs) Chapter 1
What this post is not is a discussion of how to determine influence. I’m going to leave that to my dear friend and brilliant scientist, Dr. Michael Wu, the Chief Scientist at Lithium. He, far better than Klout, PeerIndex and any of the other so-called influence indices, knows how to look at and determine the […]

Simon Cowell Left American Idol to Launch CRM Idol. But He Did Not Make the Final Cut.
Paul Greenberg did. Simon is off doing X-Factor instead Joke apart, if you are in the CRM business, or interested in CRM, or even just social software, chances are you’ve heard of Paul Greenberg. Simply said, he is the Godfather of CRM. And Godfathers get to make decisions. If you follow Paul’s annual CRM […]

What’s Your Customer Score?
I’ve been writing about Klout and the broader topic of social scoring for a while now, but after last week’s piece in the Boston Globe, the level of consumer awareness of the site has stepped up dramatically. What is Klout? In short, it’s an algorithm that assigns anyone (or anything) owning a Twitter handle with […]

Maggie’s Content Farm
Apologies for the post-Grammys inspiration, but if you make your living – directly or indirectly – by writing, you need to read this New York Times piece, and Barry Ritholtz’s followup – right now. At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs (New York Times) The Dangle: Illusory Promises of Content Farms (The Big Picture) As […]

Targeting Consumers with Klout
Interesting post from David Armano today – a demonstration of how marketers are beginning to use Klout and other scoring engines such as PeerIndex to target ‘influential’ consumers. We’re still quite far from marketing nirvana. For instance: * His name is ‘David’ not ‘armano’ * He professes to have little to no interest in basketball […]

Real vs Faux ‘Influence’ and why Klout Matters
Klout’s announcement of an $8.5M round is a clear sign that social ‘scoring’ – and the development and utilization of effective and accurate ‘influence’ metrics in order to more effectively support and service customers – is an idea whose time has come.

Conversation >> Pontification
‘Influence’ is a hot topic these days and rightfully so – but I’ve become a firm believer that influence is less and less about individual experts and more in highly-participative community environments.