In this episode, Jason Keath of Social Fresh joins me to discuss how companies and brands are measuring online influence and why you should be paying attention to some of these new metrics from sites like Klout, Twitter Grader, & Blog Dash.
We also dive into
David: Hello, Internet! This is David Wells with HubSpot here to announce our brand new show, Inbound Now, bringing you the latest and greatest expert interviews where I reach out to industry experts and we talk about the latest happenings in social media and inbound marketing. Make sure to subscribe to the channel and tweet @InboundNow.
This is the first interview that I did with Jason Keath, founder of Social Fresh. I hope you enjoy it. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the comment section below or tweet @InboundNow.
In this interview with Jason Keath, we talk about reaching out and gauging online influence, how to grow your blog into a multi-authored blog, how to use social media to transfer those relationships online to offline via events, and specific tips on how to make your offline event as successful as possible. And we also chat a little bit about what's happening in 2011 that you should be keeping your eye on.
So without further ado, here's the first show, Inbound Now. Let me know what you think.
David: So today, on the show, we have Jason Keath. Jason is the founder of Social Fresh, a social media education company that runs a series of conferences around the U.S. He works as a social media consultant focusing on overall social media strategy and influencer outreach. Today we're going to be talking about gauging influence online, how to use social media for if you're running an event, and also we're going to look into maybe some trends that are coming up in the upcoming year.
So without further ado, Jason, thanks for coming on the show.
Jason: Thanks for having me, David.
David: No problem.
Jason: Your office is looking sharp over there.
David: Yeah. Working from home today. That's one of the perks of working at HubSpot, so it's a great thing.
I wanted to start off talking a little bit about the Social Fresh conferences. I've been to a couple of them. They're a great event, kind of geared at educating businesses on social media and marketing best practices, and you pull in some pretty big name speakers. What made you start Social Fresh?
Jason: The genesis of the first event, which happened last year, 2009 in August in Charlotte, where I used to live, it was a big opportunity needing kind of a new way of thinking about social media for me. I was still a consultant. I actually don't consult anymore. I was transitioning from trying to get clients and just getting by as a consultant and really trying to find my way through helping people with social media, to thinking about it on a broader scale and talking to more people that were doing it for large-scale enterprise companies and seeing the industry challenges rather than just trying to get by as a consultant.
With that new perspective I was putting myself into, the idea of a conference just seemed to work. It was a big need. It was a big, as they say, pain point, especially in the Southeast. There were no conferences in the Southeast that had to do with social media. There were no conferences really, at that point, nationally that were talking about social media from the marketing perspective, which is where I was coming from, for marketers and the business use case.
So there was a gap to fill. I put the idea out there to a couple people, and people were just really energetic about it and a lot of people got behind it. Honestly, the first event was by far the easiest event I've done and it just kind of . . . the energy behind it from other people supporting it to really carried it forward.
David: Yeah and you mentioned there weren't that many conferences that go to smaller cities. There are a lot of conferences that focus mainly in L.A. or New York, but they didn't really travel down South.
Jason: Yeah. There were two things going on. You have your big national conferences. BlogWorld's been around now for four years and South By and some other advertising and tech conferences. And then you had a lot of blogger conferences and the blogger conferences, the WordCamps and the PubCamps and the . . .
David: The Webcons. All the names are running together now.
Jason: A whole lot of things for creators, but there weren't a whole lot of things for marketers. They weren't really going to business case stuff. Sometimes they would, but these were mostly free events. They weren't really there for case studies and tactical things for the business perspective. So that's what we tried to attack. So far it's . . . obviously, we've done eight events now, so there's an audience there for it and we're continuing to find new ways to offer value to the audience.
David: So in your mind . . . I think it's cool that you found that need and that lack. There wasn't something there in the space and you kind of took advantage of it. If other people in other industries were trying to kind of do the same thing, what, in your mind, kind of makes or breaks an in-life event?
Jason: Live events are interesting. For some reason, I've done some type of event planning all my life, which is kind of why Social Fresh was so easy for me to get off the ground. So I've kind of been building this skill set without realizing it most of my life for some reason. I think when I did Social Fresh the first time and I've learned a lot of lessons from the events since then, my biggest thing was to keep it simple, was to make the event itself have very few distractions, have very opportunities to confuse people, like which room do I go to, what time is the event. I wanted to make sure it was very simple to grasp the concepts and it was very simple to know what was in what room.
For instance, for most of our first events, we had single speakers in one room and panels in one room, so you always knew the panels were over here and the speakers were over there. We had two rooms of content. Everything was 50 minutes long, everything was a half hour break, so it timed out really well. I'd say keeping things simple, especially if it's your first event or your first go at an event is the biggest advice I could give. Just focus on the content. Focus on whatever your main value add is. If it's content, focus on that. If it's networking focus on that.
Then the second thing is to build a community around the event or become a part of a community that's going to build the event for you. So don't try to intersect yourself into . . . like when I go to a new city, for instance, I don't go there and say, "Hey, this is Social Fresh. You need to go to this because we're Social Fresh and we're important."
I go there and I talk to people and I ask them who are some speakers locally that we could bring to help push social communication for an event here? Who are some organizations we can work with in town, like the ad club or the tech club or the social media club? Who are the organizations we can work with that can help put this event on and help it represent this city well and help it represent this community well? You want to become a part of the community that is going to help the event it's going to be a part of. Or you want to create that community if it's something new.
David: Right, right. So tapping into that existing community if it's there. If it's not, then you can build it. You have a huge opportunity if there's nothing there.
Jason: Yeah. That's kind of what the first Social Fresh was. There was barely a community there. Honestly, we've hardly ever done any advertising, but the first one came together purely on Twitter. All the speakers, all the organizers, all the volunteers, all the attendees, all of our marketing was word of mouth through Twitter. Without Twitter, it would have never happened, and we didn't have any need to do anything past Twitter, for the first one. Since then things have gotten a little broader. We've gotten a little more complex with our marketing, but for the most part, it's still a backbone to what we do.
David: Right, right. And I thought one of the cool things, at Social Fresh Tampa, you kind of kicked it off right where you said, "This event is for you. The speakers are going to be sharing awesome content, but it's really, really important that you meet as many people as you can and network there." All this social media stuff is happening online, but if you can transfer that offline, I think there's a lot of value in that.
Jason: Yeah. Some people don't go to a lot of offline events. Some people just go to conferences to get away from the office, to be completely honest. But there's a huge value in just the one-on-one, in-person interaction. Something we've built in, a lot of our conferences we built in half hour breaks between almost every session. We don't do that anymore, but we still build in two or three large breaks during the day. I'm a firm believer that one of the reasons you should be going to an offline conference is because of the one-on-one conversations that happen. You can watch the same sessions online and still learn from them, but the conversations that it inspires right after the session when you talk to your peers, the things that you learn in those conversations I think are more powerful than what you think you learned during the session. When you start to talk about them with other people and when you are able to talk about them immediately with industry peers, I think that's a great learning situation and that's something I've believed since the first conference and it seems to work well.
David: Totally. So from your experience building these eight conferences around the U.S., pulling in all these speakers, you've built up a pretty large network of social media enthusiasts, businesspeople and thought leaders, which are authors, contributors to the Social Fresh blog. It's growing at a pretty rapid rate and you're churning out some great content there. Would you have any tips for the people out there of how to encourage people to want to guest blog and kind of help you build the content?
Jason: Yeah. I think the first thing is to understand why your blog exists. So for Social Fresh, our blog exists as kind of a rallying point for our community. SocialFresh.com has been around, obviously, since the event has or beforehand, but we were using it only to talk about the events for a long time. So there wasn't really a whole lot of traffic there except for the people that were thinking about going to the event or people that were going to the event or looking at the event after they had gone to it.
We decided to start to bring the same kind of content that we had at our events to the website because we wanted that rallying point online for those people to comment on the same topics, for those people to learn on the same topics outside of one or two or five events a year. So since that is our main objective, I need to go out and number one, look for authors that get value out of talking to that community and number two, look for authors that have the expertise or the passion about the topic.
I think, number one, figure out what your purpose for your blog is and pull lessons from that. So make sure you're getting people who are passionate about your topic, make sure you're getting people that gain value either from the community that exists on your blog or other opportunities on your blog, whether it's affiliate opportunities or if there's revenue involved. If you're looking for free guest bloggers, there has to be some type of return for them. Some people will probably do it just to get experience blogging, but that's not a long-term thing and that's not the best reason you want a guest blogger for. You want a guest blogger that is as invested in your community as you are and that is getting value back from being in front of that community. So once you know that and once you know that topic and that value exchange, I think you can easily go out and find people that exist and that will get that value exchange.
David: Right. I think another thing is make it as easy as possible.
Jason: Yes. That's something we've learned at Social Fresh. There's all kind of plug-ins and things you get in the back end, but at the end of the day, for a lot of our blog posts, I find the images. I go in and do formatting for people sometimes. People that do articles on our blog a lot, they know the routine and they do a lot of it themselves. But if you're the first time person coming to guest blog for Social Fresh, I'll typically go in and clean it up a lot, give you some guidance, and let you know how our style sheet works and get the right kind of image and kind of help them along.
If it's not easy for someone to do it, then it's going to be a big roadblock for them to help you. And if they're already time-crunched, which most of us are, that just might be enough for them not to complete the blog post. So you want to eliminate any barrier. Give them their own WordPress login. Get some plug-ins in there that make it really easy for them to get around and get things going smoothly. Give them constant reminders and feedback and thank yous.
David: Yeah. Because at the end of the day, most guest authors, you're not paying them, so you've got to make it worth their while. Like you said, time is very, very valuable to people.
Jason: Yeah. And thank yous. We do little things on Social Fresh, like whenever I tweet out from the Social Fresh blog another person's article I try to say by that person's Twitter handle to give them a little credit on Twitter. We just added our author pages so they can put links to their websites and their bio and their social media accounts, and then we've also added that same author page in the footer of each article so that people can get access to that author's information as quick as possible. It gives that person a little more recognition for what they're putting out there. Instead of just a little byline, we're trying to give them as much recognition as possible without getting too over the top.
David: I would also say putting a call-to-action -- write for us -- letting people know that you're looking for guest posters, that's one of the biggest things that people are like, "Oh, I wish someone would help me with . . ." That'll get people, that'll pull them in. They don't know that you want content. Everyone does, but you've got to let them know.
Jason: We've had a form on SocialFresh.com for people that want to guest blog for us and it's kind of hidden. We don't make it a call-to-action yet because, honestly, we couldn't handle a whole lot of people filling out that form right now on our about page. But we get maybe one or two a week that fill it out, and come Q1 we're going to be responding to most of those people and putting them through our editorial process. So, you're right. If you put it out there, people will volunteer.
David: All right. So what do you have planned for the future of Social Fresh?
Jason: Well, it's definitely evolving. One of the things is with SocialFresh.com, we're focusing less and less on just the events, just the in-person events, and we want to build up a large ecosystem of resources and training for people that are trying to learn social media for marketing. So we've got two new websites coming in 2011 and potentially two new events. One of them will be a blogging event and a kind of a blogging version of a Social Fresh. So like a Social Fresh, but purely on the niche of blogging for business. The other one, we haven't announced yet and probably won't announce until January.
The two new websites are going to be, one is a social media directory. So it's going to list social media agencies like PR agencies, ad agencies, little niche shops that do social media, social media consultants, and social media vendors and that's the largest category. It'll include anything from e-mail companies, companies like HubSpot to Compendium, which is a blogging company, to Radian6 and all kinds of monitoring companies. It's called InvestInSocial.com. Basically, we want it to be a one-stop resource for people that are looking for other businesses, other support, other resources for social media.
David: How are you vetting that list? Because there's 20,000 social media experts on Twitter.
Jason: Anyone's free to sign up. If we see something that's obviously suspect or we get a flag on it that says it's not really legit, we'll delete stuff. We have full editorial capabilities. But we're also . . . it's free to post, free to look on the site, free to search, so we encourage all those people to sign up. The one thing that we vetted a little bit from the start is that it'll be listed by completeness of profile and the profile's pretty robust. So if you don't have a lot of experience and a lot of contact information and things like that to list on it, then you won't be showing up very high in the directory. So that in itself will be good.
David: Okay. Cool.
Jason: As we go down the line, we're considering adding in ratings and reviews. It's not going to be there on launch day, but it will, especially for the vendors, it will be there soon. I'm not sure about the agencies and the consultants, because that could get kind of like a battle. But we definitely want to find a way to make it as filtered as possible and as easy as possible for people to find the resources and the companies they want to work with.
David: Cool. Well, we'll definitely keep an eye out for that. I wanted to switch gears a little bit. On your blog, Social Fresh, you blog a lot about online social influence and how to gauge that and how to interact with those people. Who in your mind is a major influencer online?
Jason: I'd say Chris Bergen, Scott Stratten, Jay Baer. Those are people that I consider influencers that are maybe in my ecosystem, maybe in the social media ecosystem. Outside of that, I think there's plenty of actors and athletes that are influencers. A lot of YouTubers, I think are huge influencers. There's people that are watching their videos every day. Some of these people have millions of subscribers. They have subscriber numbers that are higher than some primetime TV shows. Just for sheer size of audience and the amount of people that they can get to click on a link sometimes to win some type of voting contest. There's tons of influence in those really higher echelon YouTubers that are doing videos every day.
David: Right. A lot of them are getting sponsors too.
Jason: Yeah. The people that are top of the list on YouTube are making six figures.
David: Right.
Jason: A lot of things going on. There's a lot of eyeballs on what they're doing, and where there's eyeballs, there's money.
David: So have you seen a company out there that's really taking this idea of we need to listen in and identify influencers and then engage with them in a non-business spammy way and actually leveraging their online communities and influence to build their brand?
Jason: So when I talk about influence, I think . . . the answer is yes. There's tons of companies doing it -- tons of Fortune 500 companies, a lot of consumer companies. And it's been going on for a while. When you talk about blogger outreach, that's looking for influencers. You're not going to reach out to the bloggers that have no audience and no capability to get people to do anything, right? You're going to look for the bloggers that have the largest audience, have the most passionate audience, have the audience that will do what they want to do.
Some of these influencers aren't even bloggers necessarily. Maybe they just have an e-mail list. There are people in niche categories that have huge e-mail lists that do e-mail newsletters that can really move people to action. I think a lot of big brands are looking at paid blogger outreach as well. A lot of the big companies are doing paid blogger outreach. The most notable would be Walmart starting the Walmart Moms thing, over I think it's almost two years now when they started that and they're on their second iteration of it, where they compensate mommy bloggers -- I know people hate that term -- but women bloggers to participate in a program that supports their brand. That includes blogging about things. They don't have editorial control over it, but they blog about things that Walmart is doing, issues that Walmart wants to talk about, things that are relevant to the Walmart community. That kind of program is echoed in a lot of large brands today.
It's expanding past just blogging. It's expanding to people that are on YouTube, people that are on Twitter and Facebook. When you're looking for these people to do outreach for you, when you're looking for consumers to do outreach for you, even if you're a small business, you're going to look for the person who has the biggest opportunity to give you the biggest bang for your buck. You're looking for efficiency. If you're a company that's anything higher than 100 employees, you likely can't reach out to every single customer and cultivate a very good one-on-one relationship. So you cultivate those really close relationships with your best customers, the ones that talk about you the most to the most people. So there's all kinds of tools, you know, Klout is driving the conversation a lot today.
David: I want to talk with you about Klout. So that's one of the metrics that companies are using. What other kind of metrics would you say? They look at how many followers they have, how many blog subscribers. And then Klout, Klout's interesting because it kind of aggregates all that into one score.
Jason: It does a little bit. Klout misses things. For instance, there's a company being started in New York in January called BlogDash that's focusing on finding bloggers based on their niche topic, and they aggregate all kinds of metrics, probably more than Klout. They include Klout score, Twitter followers, Facebook followers, blog subscribers, blog traffic. They try to include all these metrics in one place so you can find bloggers under a certain topic and then with as many metrics as possible to give you some insight there. Klout right now is focused on the ability to cause people to react to what you do on Twitter and Facebook, and they're going to expand that to other social networks and possibly to blog traffic and blog commenting and things like that.
There are a lot of little tools. What I see a lot of agencies doing these days, agencies that are in charge of going out and looking for these influencers on behalf of brands, is they'll make their own spreadsheets and they'll determine what they think is the best way. So they'll look at if they have a blog, how many subscribers are there? What's their Alexis score? They'll look for metrics that they can include in a spreadsheet. They'll look for Twitter followers. They'll look for Facebook fans. They'll look for blog comments. If they have a blog, are people actually engaged on it and if so, how much? Frequency. How often do they post on the blog? How often are they on Twitter and Facebook? And Klout Score. There are more metrics being added every day.
I think things like that, that list I just ran off is probably a pretty common core of what most people are looking at -- web traffic, blog comments, Klout, Twitter, Facebook. I think that's kind of the core, but then it comes down to you really have to make decisions that are gut calls, that are human decisions. All of these things are guides to human decisions.
I know you. I know you're somewhat interested in non-profits and helping them. I know you're kind of a tech geek and number geek, right? I know you're interested in Facebook and how it works a lot. So even though you have probably a decent Klout score and decent numbers in a lot of these categories, I probably wouldn't go after you for a brand that's looking for a female audience, because your interests do not align with that. If they're trying to sell baby food, you're not the best person for me to reach out to. You also have to come down to the human decisions. It's not just about the numbers.
David: Right, right. The numbers and metrics are kind of guiding them, kind of making it a little easier, speeding up the process so it's not that manual spreadsheets. I think that's where it's kind of moving in towards the future, the company you just mentioned that's doing this. I'd be interested to see how well it actually works and how it helps streamline that process.
Jason: BlogDash is a very cool tool. They did some demos at BlogWorld. I would definitely check it out. They're doing private beta right now. I think Klout is going to go continue to get better and better and add more metrics and more metrics. The important thing for all of these is none of them are going to be perfect, none of them are going to do your job for you as a marketer, but they will give you an incredible advantage of filtering through the data. They'll give you that first step, that first piece of data and really give you some intelligence in the human decision making, like I said, which is the most important part of it.
David: So going back to engaging with the influencers online. We'll bring in a real world example. You had a chance to speak with the agency that did the Old Spice campaign.
Jason: Yes.
David: How did they go about identifying those people and making the custom hilarious YouTube video and then tweeting at them?
Jason: They did not send a single message to anyone that had not messaged them first, except for a few videos they did in response to random Yahoo Answers questions that were kind of relevant to the wacky world of Old Spice, like how to wrestle an alligator or something. Outside of the Yahoo Answers thing, they never replied to anyone that hadn't replied to them. I had a reply video sent to me because I had been messaging Old Spice on Twitter along with Wayne Sutton, and we just liked the commercials and we were joking back and forth about them. I also know one of the guys that works for the agency that did the thing, so that's how I was involved slightly.
Most of the people that they did video replies to on Twitter were, I would say, maybe 60% to 75% of them you would say are influencers, people that have a lot of followers, people that had a community. And they were smart that as they did them throughout the three days that they did it, if they had someone that had a large following that mentioned, "Oh these Old Spice videos are funny," like Alyssa Milano did, I think Kevin Rose commented about it, Mashable commented about it and they made reply videos to them.
They weren't stupid. They went after numbers. But they also, and you can say they did this just so that you couldn't label them for going after only big numbers, they also replied to people that had very small audiences. Their goal in their own words was to reply to people that were the most passionate about Old Spice online. I think they did a good job representing that.
David: Do you think the success of the campaign, because obviously, it was a huge, huge buzz. They probably had massive amounts of inbound links. I can't remember the sales reports around it. But do you think all of that happened because they were kind of the first ones to do this sort of thing? Or do you think . . .
Jason: They were the first ones to do it on the scale that they did. There are plenty of people that have gone out and done video responses to Q&A and things like that. Nobody's done it, number one, on the scale and nobody's done it with the incredibly talented creative that they had. I think the character that they had which had built up in everybody's mind, most of the people had had seen the Super Bowl commercials and had seen the Old Spice commercials, so they were familiar with the character so they were prepared to see it. I think it was a lot of things coming together and they just pulled it off brilliantly. I think the creative part of it is a big piece of why it was successful, but also the strategy behind it was sound. They put a really good strategy together.
David: Yeah, yeah. It was hilariously awesome. I hope to see more creative stuff like that happening in the future. Speaking of the future, it's about that time for everyone to start making their "what to look for in social media in 2011." All those posts kind of come out around this time of year. What do you see, moving on in to 2011, what should people be keeping their eye on?
Jason: I've said this a few times online. If you hate and you're getting tired of hearing the word influence, you're really going to hate 2011, because the word influence is going to dominate the year. I think Klout is a big part of that, but they're going to become one of many companies that are going to try to become guides to agencies and brands and small businesses to aid them in finding people that can help them online, people that can be ambassadors for their brand. I think that's going to become an industry in its own. They've got a few small competitors that are starting. There are companies, like BlogDash that I mentioned, that are taking other routes. I think that will be very common.
I think you're going to see more and more . . . and this is maybe more relevant to me. If you're in marketing and social media, you'll notice it. I don't know if consumers will. Agencies are on a big-time hiring spree right now, trying to get as much talent as possible in the social media space because all the brands are requesting social media on some scale. So it's a talent race right now and all the agencies, all the big agencies, advertising, PR are all hiring very high level and very low level talent. You're actually going to have people coming out of college now, I think, targeting to work in social media, targeting to be a community manager, targeting to be a social media monitoring specialist. I think you're going to have these career paths emerge in social media this year for the first time. Community manager has already started there. I think community manager is the first clearly defined role that's emerging in the social media space as an industry and more and more are going to follow in that footstep.
The lastly, I think location is still going to be very huge. Facebook is still going to remain very large in our mindset. Facebook's still going to be a dominant force. But as far as things that are coming new that are going to be buzz-worthy, at least for the first half of the year, I think Foursquare and Facebook and somehow Gowalla is still hanging on and I think this new bucket of location apps that are based purely on coupons, like Shopkick and Google Latitude is launching a coupon-based check-in with your phone physically thing, kind of a Shopkick competitor out there in Portland. I think that bucket is going to get bigger and the focus on couponing, on real money savings for the location space, I think that's going to continue to become a bigger and more talked about part of the industry, at least for six to nine months.
David: I agree. That's one of the questions that I had for you. Will location-based services finally reach a critical mass? And I think what you just touched on there where there's more and more businesses adopting these in their marketing practices and then adding some incentive for people to actually use the apps, be it a coupon or, with Foursquare actually giving an incentive for someone to check in and become the mayor because they get something. If they don't get anything, where's the value other than the social component and the gaming component? But I mean, add something on top of that, if you have a brick and mortar location, I think there's a lot of value there. I think a lot more people are adopting slowly.
Jason: There are two big trends in location right now, and they're both going to continue to spiral upward. The main one, in my opinion, is making it really easy to save money. Foursquare and Gowalla for the longest time led the location industry before Facebook got on board, and they didn't really make it super easy for location check-ins to save you money. It existed, usually in an informal fashion. Slowly they built processes around it. Now you see them really starting to focus on it, and you see the first thing Facebook did after they launched Location is launch a couponing system on top of it. So I think that's the biggest driver of innovation in that space right now.
The second thing is the whole gaming/social aspect, making that more of an experience. Because what's going to happen is coupons will be good, saving money is good, but brands are going to want to separate themselves, and the way you separate yourself is you make the whole location check-in experience more of a brand experience and you can't do that by just checking in for a coupon. You have to add some type of scavenger hunt around it or some type of game piece around it. So that's going to continue to get more complex and more integrated. It'll be fun to watch where that lands.
David: Cool. Yeah. A Boston-based company here, SCVNGR, they're doing kind of that. They're involving a lot of game dynamics into it. I'm really interested to see where it's going to go.
Jason: If you look at Gowalla, they keep staying in the news, and the only way they're staying in the news is they're doing deals with large brands that are based around their trip check-in process. It's similar to SCVNGR. It involves taking a tour of like Disney they just launched. I know Sprint's just launched a tour of New York City for the holidays through Gowalla. So these are experiences that they're able to produce through this app, very similar to what SCVNGR's after, and that's keeping them out there in the press. It's keeping big brands interested in them. We'll see if it keeps the consumers interested.
David: Yeah. We'll definitely keep an eye out for that stuff in the upcoming year. Jason, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Where can people find you online?
Jason: You can find me at SocialFresh.com, or you can find me on my personal blog JasonKeath.com.
David: All right. Cool. Well thanks for coming on the show, and we hope to get you back sometime.
Jason: Definitely man. Thanks, David.
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