For the latest edition of Hip Hop Bytes, Mr. Shadeed discusses online influence. With the industry changing rapidly everyday, it is no question that online influence is becoming vital to a brands’ growth. This includes bloggers, artists, producers and all media outlets.
You can listen to the segment or read the transcribed version below. Go Digital or Go Home!
Mr. Shadeed’s Hip Hop Bytes Episode 14: Online Influence & Hip Hop Culture
Mr. Shadeed: Today with Hip Hop Bytes I want to deliver some info on online influencing tools for businesses and brands. The game is changing rapidly, and I want to explain how hip hop culture will be impacted by these tools.
Now hip hop as an art form, culture, way of life is less than 50 years old. From it’s inception into mainstream music, it has evolved into a billion dollar business. It has created more black, white, asian and latino male and female entrepreneurs than the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Liberation movement combined. The hip hop industry is a major cash cow, and if you aspire to be a major player within it, you have to understand online influence.
Online influence will be the guide that companies use to perform marketing campaigns and give exclusives to various outlets, and roles and responsibilities to those within the hip hop industry.
The main question that I received is “Why do I need to know about online influence anyway?” It’s a fairly new topic, so it’s a valid question.
Services that measure online influence will be the way the method that independent media, which includes bloggers, video TV shows, etc get their exclusives. It will be the way agencies use to partner, whether it’s marketing a product or service, with artists and producers. In short, it will serve as the digital credit score.
A way to boost your credit score is through your social network and usage, and your ability to drive engagement within your network, which I will explain. There are numerous tools that measure online influence. I’ll discuss within this segment the most dominant in the game today, which is Klout, and a new online influencing tool, which is set to be a game changer, Kred.
Klout is a service that measures the influence of social activity across the social landscape. Social landscape can include various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and so forth. Based on activity and actions such as Facebook likes, comments, @ replies messages on Twitter, and also re-tweets, YouTube comments, a score is compiled and assigned from 1 to 100. The closer that your profile is to 100, the more influential you are considered, which can open the door to numerous benefits, and additional perks and privileges through the Klout service.
Klout originally started with Twitter and Facebook measurement, and now it’s added up to twelve additional social networks, including WordPress.com, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc.
You can go to www.klout.com to gain more info on what Klout is and it’s purpose.
Now why is Klout important? It’s important to note that if you have an active social media account, it is being measured by Klout. Businesses, brands, marketing companies, you name it, can look at your effectiveness and choose to business with you or not. Without your knowledge. So if you’re looking to get an exclusive with a famous athlete or actor that marketing or PR firm can look at your Klout score and determine whether you are worthy of being included or being granted that exclusive. Klout tracks what the effectiveness of your Tweets are. Also your Facebook posts: does it drive action? Does it inspire discussion? That’s the whole gist of the Klout service.
Going into Kred. Kred is a very new service. It is a product from the social data mining startup, People Browser. It is being marketed as the first transparent social scoring system to evaluate influence within community. Kred has been indexing, or measuring, Twitter activity since 2008. It also pulls information from Facebook Likes and Google + mentions. It’s important to note that it [Kred’s] main source of information is Twitter.com. Some of it’s main features are communities. Kred identifies the communities that members have the highest scores overall, and it ranks those. It tracks influence by community; you can also search top influencers by community.
So if you have independent hip hop, for example, or you want to know who are the leading bloggers within the independent hip hop genre, or sub genre of music, you can look up those influencers within the Kred service. You also have outreach, which measures interaction or how active you are in re-tweeting and replying to others. The second criteria is influence, which your ability to inspire action. Which means, when you post something, does it get re-tweeted , followed or replied?
Some of the main differences with Klout and Kred: Kred has a score of 1 to 1000, where as Klout has a score of 1 to 100. There is greater privacy options with Kred, you can choose what is actually shown on your profile. Kred also allows you to drill down to every tweet and re-tweet and see how many points it was worth. A normal re-tweet might be worth 10 points, for example. A re-tweet from somebody with a high Kred score may be worth 50. Mentions have points on Twitter, and so on. Kred scores are calculated in real time, whereas Klout scores are calculated daily.
In terms of the future of social influence and online influencer, Hip Hop Bytes listeners and readers, social influence is here to stay. The spirit of competition will allow these companies, and propel these companies to get these areas right. Klout and Kred are the tools that will land your business and brand sales, brand influence and exclusives.
It’s important that you, Hip Hop Bytes listeners and readers, understand and began to leverage these tools for the growth and expansion of your brand within the hip hop industry. In terms of resources, sign up for Kred and evaluate it. Go to www.kred.ly and take a look. It’s free to evaluate.
If you have any questions on how to raise your social influence scores, send an email to hello@mrshadeed.com. We’re talking social influence. Go Digital or Go Home!
You can listen to past episodes of Hip Hop Bytes here.