Estimating influence is a delicate balance of art and science. People are drawn to quantitative methods because scores are easy to understand. The downside of reducing influence to a number, though, is oversimplification. Lately, I’ve been looking at  Klout , the popular new tool that bills itself as “The Standard&# for influence measurement. The more I look at it, the less I like it. It is “the emerging standard&# for measuring influence online, said Klout Marketing Manager Megan Berry in a podcast interview with Eric Schwartzman last month. Beyond Followers. MORE >>

After two years at the helm of Avaya’s social media strategy which produced a very strong ROI in the Social Customer Support area, I am happy to say we finally got that strategy institutionalized within the Support organization so I found myself with a rare opportunity to evolve our strategy from brand monitoring and reputation management to something higher order like Social Insights. So I spent the better part of January looking at every social media listening, monitoring, analytics, intelligence and insights firm I could get my hands on. looked at dozens of dashboards, and reams of reports. MORE >>

For anyone in marketing or PR being asked to make “data-driven&# decisions “based on the numbers&# (and doesn’t that include pretty much everyone in marketing and PR these days?), the sources below provide a vast wealth of data, statistics and research results, as well as a bit of interesting social media trivia. How are consumers and b2b decision makers using social media in their buying processes? Which social media platforms are most effective at influencing buyer behavior? How do the audiences differ across various social networks? Social Media Facts and Stats. Adam T. MORE >>

The media habits of today’s B2B buyer have changed dramatically in just the past few years, and yet B2B Marketing departments are struggling to keep up. Pull back the covers of most B2B Marketing plans and you’ll find a significant amount of outbound activity working harder and harder to achieve decreasing results. Today’s buyers are clearly in charge. They are responding at rapidly decreasing rates to marketing messages and consuming more and more content on their own terms. They want content created for their needs. What can save marketing? Ready to get practical ? MORE >>

McKinsey recently learned a difficult lesson about what happens when the world takes your thought leadership marketing seriously—and when you lack the ability to respond in the moment through social media. The trouble started when the McKinsey Quarterly published an article in early June entitled How US health care reform will affect employee benefits,  based on a survey the firm did about what will happen to employer-sponsored health care insurance coverage when the President’s health care law goes into effect in 2014. textbook example of pragmatic thought leadership. And so it did. MORE >>