Whenever the subject of Klout comes up, some folks get a wee bit snarky, feeling that to measure anything about social media is tantamount to a popularity contest. (And hey, I’ve tweeted my share of Klout jokes. It’s easy material: at one point, the topics about which Klout claimed I had influence were cowboys, babies, and Shark Week.) So as you might imagine, right away, there was backlash. The very first comment on the story called Klout the most meaningless metric in online marketing. Blog posts linking to the story took issue with treating the topic as front-page-worthy news.

For the record, I don’t think either criticism is wrong, per se. But they both fall a little short of a full look at the situation.

It happens to be my business to traffic in meaningful metrics. But the funny thing about what’s “meaningful” is that it’s both subjective and relative to the quality and type of data available. Data about influence in social media is soft and subjective. It’s squishy. You can’t measure a person’s influence directly, but you can develop hypotheses about what types of activities might correlate with people who are highly influential. For example, someone who has a great deal of influence on Twitter probably has a greater chance of having his or her tweets retweeted than does someone without much influence. When you measure those activities, you create a sort of leading indicator of influence. Klout has attempted to do that. Is it a vanity metric? Sure. Any publicly-visible metric can be a vanity metric. Especially if you check it compulsively. But even that doesn’t necessarily make it meaningless.

One of the other vanity metrics we encounter when working with clients on marketing measurement strategy is Alexa ranking. Alexa does a pretty decent job of gauging relative volume of website traffic using a method that could be compared with Nielsen ratings for TV shows. (The Nielsen ratings are vanity metrics too, but they’re a data point that TV industry folks use as directional data.) Should you base your marketing strategy on monitoring your Alexa ranking? Of course not, but if you’re looking for a top-level measure of your website’s traffic relative to others’, you can certainly include the rank’s variance as a gauge on your dashboard, and you can feel good when it’s holding steady or showing gains. If it shows a big drop and you have no idea why, even if your own website’s traffic didn’t really change, it’s possible that something is going on in your competitive landscape that you need to know about.

Klout isn’t really any different. Although it’s still in the benchmarking stage of developing integrity as a metric, it may ultimately be useful as a directional indicator of social media engagement and effectiveness. That doesn’t mean you need to babysit your score or contrive to inflate it artificially, but it does mean that if your score falls, it may be an indicator that you’re not connecting with your audience. And there isn’t a much more meaningful pursuit in marketing than connecting with an audience: it’s what has to happen before you can make money. So if you’re concerned about ROI in social media and you’re not thinking about measuring earlier-stage metrics like engagement and influence? You’re missing the point, my friend.

Klout’s efforts to quantify influence may seem frivolous, but it isn’t unusual for forward-looking work in analysis to seem frivolous. Being ahead of the curve inherently means that most people don’t get what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.

And this is where the newsworthiness comes into play. Whether you think Klout as a company and a concept is ahead of the curve or not, most of the people blogging about social media in 2011 have spent a good amount of time discussing the idea of “influence,” and that concept isn’t going away in 2012. Rather than dismiss it, it might be worth spending a little time as 2011 winds down planning how you will develop your influence and cultivate your online audience for a more profitable 2012. I’ll be right here cheering you on and retweeting you, as long as it doesn’t involve cowboys, babies, or Shark Week. I can’t go screwing up my Klout.

Seconds Of Beauty – 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

Perhaps you think of Montblanc as a pen company first and foremost, but this is a promotion for the chronograph. And it is yet another example of how a company can extend how its brand interacts with customers, and how customers experience the essential value of what the brand represents. Pretty clever, and beautifully effective.

Plus, they engaged Wim Wenders, one of my personal favorite filmmakers, to intro and “present” the concept: see his video intro here.

A taxonomy organizes concepts and presents a representation of categories and concept hierarchy as a thought framework, shared vocabulary, and institutional knowledge.

For example, one of my favorite book titles is by the linguist George Lakoff, called “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.” It’s a humorous illustration, but a vivid one: the groupings we agree upon say as much about us as they do about the things we’re grouping.

In attempting to produce a meaningful taxonomy for website content management, it is useful to attack the problem from a few different angles:

• What is the consumer vocabulary? What terminology does the consumer use to describe the concepts, and what groupings make intuitive sense to the consumer?
• What is our aspirational vocabulary? What terminology would we ideally like to train the marketplace to adopt? What groupings would demonstrate our conceptual framework and biases for the sake of influencing consumer perception of our subject matter?
• What are the areas of greatest content density? Topics within our subject area about which we have a great deal to say are going to need finer resolution and sharper distinctions than those about which we have very little to say. For example, if we create a taxonomy of [meta]marketer terminology, it will be insufficient to talk about marketing: we will need greater specificity for what aspect of marketing we’re talking about, such as marketing analytics, online marketing, search marketing, etc. But for something that isn’t our core subject, we will not need to be so specific. We may occasionally create content about Nashville, for example, but we probably won’t need to describe whether the content is about Nashville businesses, Nashville lifestyles, Nashville music, or anything more granular than Nashville… whereas clearly other websites and businesses that do focus on Nashville would find it meaningful to drill into those additional levels of detail.

And so on. Truthfully, it hasn’t saved us time or money yet, but it may someday, and for now it seems like good discipline. But I wonder, how are other companies tackling this? Do you have a “smartzz” notebook or folder somewhere, or a wiki? How do you make sure that good explanations of difficult concepts don’t have to be re-created every time?

This coffee sleeve, which I picked up at Drinkhaus, my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, promotes a fun seasonal event that patrons of independent coffee shops are probably going to want to know about. The event’s organizers printed these and distributed them, I’m told, all around town to locally-owned coffee shops. For the price of design and printing, they have a memorable vehicle for communicating with an audience that’s already, by their presence in an independent coffee shop, demonstrated an interest in supporting local, independent goods.

It’s a good reminder to think about the unconventional ways we can reach our audiences.

I’m all for being called wise. But then I have to admit that I don’t know what “tyro’s” are.

Nonetheless, what Milt is referring to is what I often describe as the essence of Nashville. I know it’s off-topic from marketing optimization, but, well, maybe it isn’t so off-topic. Whether you’re in Nashville or not, if you check out the article, you’ll see that what we’re talking about is collaboration. And when you think about marketing optimization, perhaps collaboration isn’t the first concept that springs to mind, but perhaps it should be.

Because one of the key ways we’ve seen marketing optimization programs fail – or at least, fail to take hold – is from a lack of collaboration between internal resources. And that generally comes down to a culture that hasn’t been set up to reinforce trust and interdependency. When teams are more competitive with each other than collaborative, it’s very hard for one person to ask another for, say, the design support they need to develop creative assets for new landing pages, or for someone to ask for help with implementing a testing platform. And it’s a rare situation when this kind of cooperation isn’t needed.

So marketing optimization programs sputter and stall, and that’s a real problem, because there’s real money on the line. Most companies have enough wasted money hiding in their marketing channels to pay for a massive boost in profitable customer acquisition, and what company doesn’t need a little help with that in this economic climate?

In other words, it pays to cultivate a culture of openness. We’ll be writing more about this in the coming months, so if this is an area where your organization struggles, stay tuned for insights about how we’ve seen this play out, and how companies can start to build trust in the place of animosity and competition. It makes for a better work environment, of course, but it also pays for itself as programs like marketing optimization start to become feasible and achievable.

In the meantime, enjoy Milt’s article, and let us know if you want to come visit Nashville and see this great culture for yourself. It’s a pretty amazing place to do business.

“Consistency is almost never a factor in conversion effectiveness.”

By that I meant that just because a button works on one page, it won’t necessarily be the winning button for another page. Just because a message resonates with one audience, it won’t necessarily be the message that clearly communicates value to another audience.

The one dimension where consistency matters is in communicating benefits across the user experience. If you brought a visitor in on the promise of, say, protecting their kids, don’t change the message a page or two later to be about how little the service costs, unless you’re talking about trading off payment for peace of mind.

Context matters far more than consistency.

So when I tell you that this latest feature in the Chrome browser extension for Evernote changes the way I’ll be using it for the better, you can bet it’s worth noting. (“Noting.” See what I did there?)

The new clipper highlights the area most likely to be the article, as it’s done for some time now. That’s cool and useful, but that’s not the thing that motivated me to write this. What it now does (well, what it’s apparently been doing since September but I’m just now noticing) is allow you to use your keyboard’s arrow keys to select a larger or smaller area, or move the highlight to another area altogether, in case the clipper’s logic fails on an oddball page layout.

It’s not that selecting an area of the web page is so cutting edge; I mean, we do A/B and multi-variate testing for a living, so we’re pretty darned familiar with named DIVs and swapping their content in the DOM. (Nerd alert!) No, it’s what that added control means to your knowledge management workflow. This gives you even greater precision — quickly! — about what you’re saving for posterity. And with information coming at you like a firehose, it’s important to have every last bit of control you can.

Besides, [meta]marketer is made up of people who love data, but not as much as we love what we can learn at a meaningful level from taming that data. We’re all about using every tool at your disposal to turn the flood of data into meaningful insights. Evernote is like that, but for the flood of random stuff you encounter in your day-to-day life.

If you don’t have a tool that allows you to capture every meaningful thing you encounter at the level of granularity you want to capture it, and with metadata and attributes that provide context for later when you can’t remember why you thought it was important, then you need this tool. Evernote’s not paying me to say this (yet! but we’d love to talk with you about any marketing optimization needs you may have, Phil ) but we’re such fans that it’s worth making the time to point this out and share it with you.

Here’s to keeping your head above water and not drowning in the flow of your life’s information.

It’s based on just this kind of interaction that I came back to my team a few months ago and talked about creating an education series for marketers. What I was hearing from folks in the field was that there’s plenty of abstract, high-level, theoretical discussion about “strategy” and “ROI,” and that there’s sufficient opportunity for low-level, tactical training about tools and how to use them, but that what seemed missing was the stuff that ties that together. How do you define the next actions from strategy? How do you tie it all together, and build not just an optimization project or experiment, but an optimization program?

It so happens that we’d been ruminating internally about a need to help our clients and prospects get their arms around this type of thinking, so hearing that marketers were actually looking for this made us sit up and take notice.

We’ve now developed a marketing optimization curriculum through 2012, and we’re beginning the series next Thursday, November 10th at noon central. Our plan is to charge $50 per screen per webinar, although we’ll be rolling out a subscription plan by the end of 2011.

You may be wondering why we’re charging for these webinars when so many other companies are producing them for free? I think that’s a fair question, but to answer it, let’s think like a marketer at one of these companies that’s producing the free webinars. Free is only a valid pricing model if you’re extracting value elsewhere. Most of these companies are using the webinars for lead generation. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that, in my view, and we may choose to add some free lead-gen-oriented webinar content down the road as well. But as a consumer of goods, you know you don’t get something for nothing. You know that if you’re attending for free, there’s something expected of you down the road. We want our attendees to feel secure in the knowledge that they’ve paid their admission and the value of their learning is theirs to keep. We also want to offer this learning opportunity to marketers at organizations who might not be the best fit for our consulting services. Everyone stands to benefit from a better understanding of marketing optimization; we want to help cultivate smarter marketing everywhere, not just with our prospective customers.

In the meantime, while we’re getting started on the series, we’re broadly offering a 50% off discount to November’s webinar attendees. If you enter the code “ORANGE” when you register, the cost will be only $25 per screen, meaning you can join from a conference room screen and invite others from your department. We really want to make this valuable for everyone, so we hope you’ll attend and provide feedback to make our December webinar and the 2012 curriculum a no-brainer for you and for many others.

We look forward to seeing you on November 10th!

BarCamp Nashville speaker coordinator Cal Evans names our swag bag insert of a highlighter playfully labeled the “[meta] marker” the “best BCN11 swag.” We’re truly, deeply honored.

After an opening keynote Wednesday morning by conference chair (and ubiquitous event photog) Tim Ash, the agenda split off into two side-by-side tracks, but they were consistently both interesting topics, making it tough to choose between each. As Tim quipped during his intro, “You’re screwed. This agenda is packed.” But it’s a welcome dilemma compared to conferences where hours lapse by with nothing of particular interest, leading attendees to wander off away from the event.

Presenters like Lance Loveday, Charles Nicholls, Larry Marine, and Steve Krug kicked some serious ass (well, I witnessed the ass-kicking content first-hand with everyone but Steve — I missed his closing keynote because I had to catch my flight). In fact, all of the sessions I attended — truly ALL of them — delivered solidly on their premises, with speakers consistently showing diagrams and tools that were clearly hard-won lessons and valuable assets. I’m not one to take a lot of notes during sessions — I’d rather simply listen, or tweet a comment if it seems particularly insightful — but if you judge by how much I tweeted during a variety of sessions, you can tell that the content was striking to me.

But let’s get to the really important stuff: what’s a conference without a solid after-party scene? This event is no disappointment. Starting with a networking mixer in the exhibit hall, moving to a swank after-party with free-flowing booze, high-energy music, belly dancers, and a magician, and dissolving into after-after-party antics of various kinds, this group of marketers kept the party going late into the night.

During Tim’s welcome address, he mentioned that Conversion Conference will be coming to some new locations next year (including Chicago, my hometown!), so from almost anywhere you are, there will be a reasonably convenient location, or at least an affordable flight. If your job is to use data and good sense to increase your site’s conversion rate, well, then I look forward to partying with you at the next one.