Achieving relevance should be treated like achieving any other necessary balance: constantly approach the limit of perfection, and you’ll be fine.

Although we think that piece of advice is sufficient, we’re going to hedge our bets and give you five types of relevance, also known as “things”

1.  Social fitness
2.  SEO-friendly content
3.  Web functionality
4.  Word-of-mouth
5. General authenticity and accuracy

Social Fitness: Being socially fit involves more than occasionally (or even always) piggybacking off of a Twitter trending topic—such a “strategy” is ad hoc, superficial, and will guarantee you a spot among the other noise.  Instead, your brand can exercise social fitness by generating and emitting content that genuinely interests your audience.

Specifically, this means refraining from scheduling a barrage of self-promotional Facebook updates, or updating more than three times a day.  Break the rule, and no one will “like” you.

SEO-friendly content:  While it’s not breaking news that a well-optimized site makes your brand “more Googleable,” search engine algorithms aren’t concerned merely with load time or outstanding meta data, but instead are inherently based on what humans would deem relevant.  This correlation—technically beneficial as proportionately related to actually useful—implies that all of your digital content should cater to your audience, vertical, and offerings specific to your brand.

Web functionality: We’ve stressed the importance of being earnest as well as of being adaptable and generally not-broken, and we’ve yet to change our stance.  If you have invalid HTML, broken links, or a site you wouldn’t consider beautiful, then your digital real estate isn’t as functional as it should be, and you could very well end up MySpacing around until you’ve lost funding, credibility, and the ability to avoid turning into a marketers’ meme.

Word-of-mouth-ness:  It’s great that your brand has a hold of its internet relevance, but is this doing anything for your business?   Successful online marketing should impact your bottom line if you’ve properly connected your goals, objectives, strategy, and tactics.  The Holy Grail of online marketing accomplishments—aside from, say, increased sales—is offline mentions and purchases.  If consumers actively seek out your brand in stores (“willingness to search”), mention it to their friends (“willingness to recommend”), you’ve earned both on- and offline loyalty.

“To thine own self be true”: Shakespeare said it, and now we have, too.  Relevance is a two-way street: your digital properties need to be relevant to your audience but also to your brand.  More precisely, true relevance means showcasing your brand’s products and beliefs.

Thank you once again for reading another 5 Things.  This is our 15th post–you are now 75 Things smarter than you were before we met.

The clients I was able to work with were great people who are very passionate about their business and supportive of Transmyt’s ideas/efforts.  I was able to interact with these clients, learn from them and provide actionable strategies to help their businesses.  This was definitely a highlight of my internship.

Transmyt provided me the opportunity to apply what I had learned in the classroom setting to the real world.  However, early in my internship it was apparent that I did not know everything I needed to.  Everyone at Transmyt was very gracious in helping me understand best practices and showing me how to do things the right way.  The Transmyt team is awesome and it shows in their interactions with colleagues and success with clients.

I cannot thank Transmyt enough for the opportunity to spend the summer with them.  The journey from passing Transmyt everyday on the way to school to meeting with Jeremy and now the end of the internship was an amazing experience; I could not ask for a better place or people to share it with.

First, businesses must figure out the end goal of the gamification strategy.  Setting key performance indicators of the strategy can help to guide their marketing efforts in order to accomplish the end goal.  Also, setting the end goal and KPI’s of any gamification strategy helps businesses obtain a more clear idea of the odds of success.   In addition, a game or contest by itself will not immediately result in increased user interaction with a business.  Online users, like you or I, need an incentive to do so.  Meaningful prizes and discounts provide the impetus for users to perform the actions of a game or contest that businesses want them to do.  Lastly, merely promoting online games will not build a user following.  Businesses need to close the online/offline loop by interacting and promoting these games in the offline medium.  Users, who are not used to interacting with a business online, can learn about these games during visits to a store or via status calls and follow up online.

Utilizing these tips in order to focus a gamification strategy should help businesses decide if gamification would work for their company, product or service.  Just because a lot of companies are using games, does not mean that it will work for everyone.

The question regarding accurate measurement of social media presence and the return on investment from social media strategies for businesses has yet to be fully answered.  A company called Klout is attempting to measure these metrics based upon a user’s online “clout”.  So, is it accurate?  Does it matter? Will it affect you/your company?

What is Klout?

Klout was launched in 2009 and measures a user’s online “clout” through 35 variables across three main categories: True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score.  True reach is a measure of how large a user’s engaged audience is (spam or inactive accounts are not taken into account).  Amplification Probability is a measure of how likely a user’s posts will generate actions (comments, likes, retweets, etc).  Network Score is a measure of how influential the user’s engaged audience is.  Klout then adds in these three scores from Twitter and Facebook and computes a combined Klout score based upon a 1-100 scale.

Why is it Important?

Klout’s ranking is interesting and important for a few reasons.  First, the score allows users to see how “influential” they really are in the social media space.  In this way, users can measure how a social media strategy is actually faring.  Let’s assume that a user who has a Klout score of 7 sets a goal to increase their online following and over three months, this same user reaches a Klout score of 25.  The user can relate the increase in Klout in order to determine that the social media strategy is working.  Secondly, the Klout score can be a quick way to verify a user’s credibility.  For instance, if a user wishes to follow news on twitter, it can be a daunting task to sift through the plethora of information.  However, by following one person with a high Klout score, the user can be somewhat confident that the news and links they click on will be useful and interesting.

Does it Work?

Klout works, in the same way any ranking system works; the ranking can provide a sense of a user’s social media clout in relation to other users.  However, as is common with ROI on social media, the larger a user’s Klout score is, does not necessarily correlate to an increase in conversion rates.  For example, if a business invests in a social media campaign and increases their Klout score, it does not mean that their followers will purchase more frequently from the company’s website.  The Klout score may indicate how far a business’s online marketing campaign can reach, but will those users who read the messages act upon them?  Klout does a great job of trying to materialize the social media space for individuals, but still falls short in figuring out how to measure the effectiveness of social media on businesses’ bottom lines.

Social Intelligence collects up to 7 years of data on an individual, but does not store information into a database.  Also, the potential employee must consent to the search before it can be completed.  When Social Intelligence researches a consented potential employee; the most recent data (7 years’ worth) is audited and provided to the employer.   The search can include any public information from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and blogs; basically anything tagged/posted in the online domain that can be traced back to you.  Therefore any wall post, Facebook group, tweet, photo or blog entry can be scanned for information that could cause you to fail a social media background check.

There are a few interesting details that are incorporated into a Social Intelligence background check.  First, race and gender information is not provided to the employer.  Even if incriminating photos are found, your race and gender will not be identifiable.   Second, Social Intelligence is not looking for the photo of you inebriated and twirling your shirt over your head.  In fact, that picture will not cause a “fail” rating, but a discriminatory or sexually explicit photo will.

Since the FTC approved Social Intelligence, employers that utilize Social Intelligence for a social media background check helps these employers avoid discrimination suits and privacy issues that could arise from “Google-ing” an applicant.  This decision also further emphasizes the importance of maintaining a proper online presence.  No one wants an offhand status update from six years ago affecting their ability to obtain a dream job.  Would you pass your social media background check?

Just kidding: it is.

But instead of focusing on why Google created Google+ or the myriad other sub-topics already beaten to death, we’ll tell you what you as a small business owner need to know about it.  Five whole things you need to know about it in, fact, are coming right up!  But first, some context:

Google + is the latest product from Google.  It has what many perceive as a confusing UI (user interface), causing most Google+ discussions to be very meta.  It’s also open to the public now, should you want to try it out.

Confusion and pimped-out profiles aside, Google+ may very well change the very nature by which consumers (also called “people”) discover and interact with brands online, by virtue of collapsing, sharing, and integrating personal web activity and preferences into the single portal that is your Google+ profile.

1. SEO
2. Social media
3. People vs. brands
4. Google’s history of such stunts/shenanigans
5. Big picture (including the fate and adoption rate)

SEO: At a very basic level, the first step to providing “Google-able” (see also, searchable) content is to optimize it for search engines.  This practice is known as search engine optimization (SEO).  Back in more simple times, a site would be most visible in search engines if its ranking factors were in check—relevant and well-placed keyphrases, crawlable sitemaps, and credible inbound links among several others.  Oh, and the increasingly-less important PageRank.

However, that the Google algorithm is both ever-changing and impossible to track down entirely means that Google+–and any [lasting] Google products, for that matter—affect the visibility of sites and therefore the consumer’s ability to find them.  Search engine results pages (SERPs) will in fact adjust to solve for more personalized results, such as those “added” by other users in your circles (and Circles).

Social Media: Does the concept of personalized content aggregation sound familiar?  It should, because that’s a major premise behind social media. As first hinted at in the form of real-time search results—which were primarily tweets—Google (et al) have been working at merging search and social efforts and, if it catches on to a large enough extent, Google+ could seal the deal by [re]claiming traffic formerly directed toward discrete social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube, and several others).

In fact, Google is essentially doing away with Blogger and Picasa.

People vs. Brands: Right now only individuals can create (and keep) Google + profiles, but various large brands (such as Ford and MTV) have already jumped on the bandwagon.  Within the next two weeks, however, you, dear small business owners, should take a trip to the application page.  Otherwise, Fast Company has this premonition for you:

“Brands reluctant to do the hard work of defining what they stand for and integrating that within their organization, or brands that mistakes social technology as an end in itself rather than as tools to connect people emotionally, run the very real risk of becoming invisible and obsolete. Put simply, brands must accept that they are no longer the destination. Their customer is. And as such, self-definition is a critical tools through which your brand, and its products and services, can reach its target audience. “

Google Waved “goodbye” to Buzz so that + could live: We’re not going to make another joke about Wave and Buzz because—quite frankly—they’re getting old.  We will point out, though, that these jokes were initially really funny.

The Big Picture: Marketers and businesses alike need to take the advent of Google+ as a warning: don’t silo your marketing efforts, or else you’ll get fractured results that won’t affect your bottom line in the ways you would most appreciate.

SaaS is just as the name implies; the ability to access software in the cloud.  IaaS is the ability to utilize the computing ability of the equipment of the cloud rather than purchasing the infrastructure personally.  PaaS involves using the cloud’s ability to run software programs rather than owning all of the underlying hardware to do so.

The recent push by tech companies to offer more cloud computing services presents some great benefits to organizations.  First, the remote accessibility means that regardless of travel or location, employees can access their work documents from any web connected device.  Along with accessibility, cloud computing offers scalability.  Since cloud computing is a “pay for what you use” service, companies can quickly scale up or down depending on their computing needs.  This ability helps avoid infrastructure issues where companies either never grow into or quickly outgrow their software/hardware purchases.  Third, cloud computing is relatively inexpensive since you pay for what you use.  In addition, since the infrastructure upkeep and service responsibility is run by another company, unforeseen costs are further kept low.

Figuring out whether cloud computing is the right move for your organization involves the acceptance of risks involved with moving to the cloud.  One issue with cloud computing is security.  Without control of the infrastructure, companies placing their data in remote servers are placing a large amount of trust in the cloud company.  Also, placing data outside of your company is a potential privacy risk to confidential information.  Another risk associated with cloud computing is that the information is only accessible online.  Hence, if an issue arises with the cloud or with the internet connection, your stored cloud data is inaccessible.

Given the benefits, cloud computing is an exciting option for companies to consider.  Individual users can experience the cloud first hand through Google’s newest offering; Google Music.  You have to request an invitation, but the service allows you to access your music from any web or android enabled device.  Happy cloud computing!

What does this all mean? Well, for one, there will certainly be benefits.  Companies can now register their brand names which should help increase the effectiveness of their branding efforts.  Also, companies that missed out on their “.com” name can acquire a more appropriate or desired domain name.   The expanded TLDs offer companies the opportunity to delve deeper into their product silos by creating communities.  Instead of Nike having a running section, training section and golf section on their website, it can develop specific communities with separate domains such as “www.training.nike”.  These communities may be able to even attain specific email addresses such as mike@football.nike.  The opportunities and combinations are endless.

Along with the benefits, also come concerns.  Cybersquatting, which is the act of purchasing sought after domain names that belong to someone else with the intent to profit from the re-sale, should increase.  Also, in order to register one of these new TLDs, the cost is a whopping $185,000 registration fee. Today, someone can register a “.com” for around $30, depending on the name.  Couple the new registration fee with annual fees of $25,000, and companies/individuals will need $200,000 just to register, let alone build a website on their new TLD.  Lastly, the competition for generic names could lead to nasty legal battles.  For instance, should Nike be allowed to register .running or should Saucony?  Similarly, should CCN or Forbes be able to register .money?   These are questions that ICANN will need to address once the applications start rolling in.

Overall, I think that the expansion of domain names will benefit everyone.  Companies can better maintain their online brand through personal TLDs and consumers will be able to more specifically identify with the communities they want to.

Audi is among the first brands to do so, reports CMO.com:

Visitors to Audi USA’s Facebook page will be given the option of finding out their Klout score at the click of a button, similar to the manner in which users currently ‘like’ pages.

Upon choosing to find out their Klout score, Facebook users will then be granted access to otherwise unavailable content which could range from videos to free downloads – ringtones, for example; this content will differ depending upon the visitor’s Facebook Klout score.

What does this mean for the future of digital consumer-brand relationships?

The induction of Klout on Facebook can be seen as an evolution of the current ‘fan-gating’ or ‘like- gating’ policy where viewers must first ‘like’ the brand before being granted access to certain content. (CMO.com)

But is it a good idea to limit content access to consumers who evidently spend a lot of time networking socially? After all, this new “gatekeeper” idea doesn’t save on R&D (or therefore the denominator of a brand’s “ROI”) and, furthermore, could turn away potential customers—the opposite of this whole “online marketing” game, one would think.

Klout is, after all, just a number.  And unless Audi has proven definitively and incontrovertibly that people without Klout accounts—or with low Klout numbers—will never (ever) buy an Audi, this may be a bad idea.   (If anyone finds a link between Klout and “willingness to spend,” please let us know.)

More to the point, this bad idea is symptomatic of a larger set of bad ideas, or, being driven [crazy] by numbers.   At the hilarious risk of coming off as hypocritical—or worse, Alanis-style ironic—Transmyt will now present five things your brand needs to know about numbers.

1. KPIs
2. Google Analytics
3. Social Analytics
4. Klout
5. Dwelling (don’t do it).

1. Key performance indicators.   Also known as KPIs, these metrics can include goings-on across a brand’s entire digital real estate, including the brand’s main website, microsites, Facebook Page, Twitter account, and YouTube channel.  (And much, much more!)

2. Google Analytics. Google Analytics allow you to see how (and if) people find your site, how (and if) they interact with it, thereby supplying you with concrete information about your business’ online presence.  In an eCommerce context, well-interpreted analytics provide data surrounding which products sell, how many visitors abandon their shopping carts, and if your testimonials strike a nerve (and perhaps which one).

3. Facebook Insights & Twitter metrics. Facebook, by way of Facebook Insights, has made reporting almost as seamless—and overwhelming—as Google has: you can see how many people view your brand’s page, how many comments take place (daily, weekly, or monthly), and how many “Likes” your content receives, among other KPIs.  Twitter KPIs—which comprise mentions (@replies as well as retweets) and followers—are slightly more work to tally using the Twitter interface, but that’s why God (or maybe someone else) invented Backtweets.

4. Klout. Named after its alternatively-spelled common-noun equivalent, Klout scores connote how influential you are [online], as well as how evidently-influenced you are [online].  It’s no surprise then that brands and marketers everywhere have started to build this data into consumer demographics but, as we’ve hinted at, Klout isn’t and shouldn’t be the sole defining factor of any brand’s audience segmentation practices.

5. Don’t dwell on any of these things. At the risk of sounding redundant, we’re going to say this: The key component of key performance indicators is what’s key.  That is, if half of these exported spreadsheets don’t provide much insight as to how or why your brand is hitting it off with your online audience; it’s worth taking time to figure out which numbers tell a story, and then what the Cliffs Notes are.  Placing too much emphasis on these silly little numbers by making them the bottom line will prevent even the most visionary of brand managers or business owners from seeing the big picture.

Truly, the only thing we want you to dwell on, if anything, is this article.  Using math to draw conclusions is crucial, but worrying too much about numbers creates a risk-adverse environment, and not nearly enough room for embracing failure or interacting with the fans you have.  Or so we estimate.

I am currently pursuing my MBA at Boston College with a focus on brand management and marketing informatics.  I became intrigued with online marketing through my studies and wanted to apply what I have learned in the classroom, broaden my skill set and provide real value (I hope) to a company through a summer internship.

Each Monday throughout the summer, I will be blogging, so stay tuned for more posts.  I have never written a blog before so feel free to provide some feedback on my posts or maybe even “like” them. J  Looking forward to a great summer!