Disqus - Latest Comments for pierreloic

Re: In Defense of Uber: An Objective Opinion

pierreloic — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 20:31:55 -0000

Though I'd consider an "unbiased opinion" an oxymoron, I like that your piece brings a counter opinion to the discussion. I do agree that much of the sh#!storm Uber is facing is vastly exaggerated. I'm quite sure that some of the worst critics of the service have actually never used it; I even wonder to what extend, some of the controversy is being fueled by taxi companies as it happened in the past.

Like you, I love Uber, the service. It's improved my commuter life in more ways that I can count. Cars show up, drivers are courteous, and often have interesting stories to share; they also don't complain if your destination is too close, too far, not in the general direction of their ride home, as too many cab drivers do - we (I) tend to forget life before Uber and dealing with cabs and cab companies...

With that said, even if blown out of proportion, many of the issues Uber, the company, is facing, are telling of a systemic cultural problem in the company that seems to behave more like a dominant taxi company than a successful start-up. As Uber strives to kill the competition (be it other ride sharing services or cab companies), if what we're seeing today is a glimpse into the future, I don't want to find out what these cultural flaws become once competition is eliminated.

So I won't be deleting my Uber app and won't stop using the service but I did download Lyft and took my first ride this weekend :)

Re: “The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated” – Influencer Marketing

pierreloic — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 01:08:14 -0000

Thanks Roxane! Happy to help make smart marketers smarter :)

Re: Traackr Meets Marketo

pierreloic — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 21:14:45 -0000

Thanks Sam. Lots of opportunities to combine the 2 products for sure.

Re: Traackr Meets Marketo

pierreloic — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 21:13:35 -0000

Thanks Danny. Very excited about the prospects as well.

Re: 10 Tips for Modern Marketers to Thrive

pierreloic — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 15:42:23 -0000

Thanks Judy. There's no question that much of the principles of modern (read post-mass media) marketing come from PR. For that matter, PR practitioners who have re-channeled their core competencies are striving in this new world. We know because many of them are customers of ours :)

Re: A Case Against Facebook IPO and for GM Pulling Out of Facebook Ads…

pierreloic — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:35:51 -0000

Thanks for stopping by Dominique. I agree that Facebook has a lot of the bricks in place to do something extraordinary for brands (that I don't think I would call reinventing ads). Based on the (real) image in my post, it's fair to say they haven't quite figured it out yet... My concern regarding the IPO move is that it really cripples a company's ability to experiment as they become much more accountable to (and penalized by) quarterly results.

As for GM or any other brand, different things work for different brands, products, industries and I wouldn't be too quick to judge whether they did the right thing for their marketing. What I called the "social media echochamber" is really this microcosm you and I belong to of people who built businesses powered by social media. It was so hard for so long in the early days of the industry that we still have this gregorian instinct to "stick together" when someone says or does something "against social media" (whatever that means). I think we're way passed the phase where we have to remind people and businesses that social is not a fade. So I guess what I'm saying is that if the experimentation in social media for GM is to pull Facebook ads because they haven't seen tangible benefits, I'm good with that.

Re: A Case Against Facebook IPO and for GM Pulling Out of Facebook Ads…

pierreloic — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:04:19 -0000

Interesting... I think it would be tricky for Facebook, especially as they are publicly traded now. Clearly investors value Facebook massive user base more than their revenue (otherwise its valuation would have been 1/5th of what it is...) and they'd be hard pressed to do anything that could jeopardize their number of active users.

That said, doing something a la LinkedIn for prosumer access may be worth a trial...

Re: A Case Against Facebook IPO and for GM Pulling Out of Facebook Ads…

pierreloic — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:02:38 -0000

Thanks Ralf. Yes, it's too easy to criticize GM for going against the Facebook hype, but as you say, you have to look at their decision in context. That said, though GM probably made a rational marketing decision, they made a major PR faux-pas announcing it as Facebook was going IPO.

Re: The Fallacy of Influence

pierreloic — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:24:44 -0000

Amen to this, Lee! As you know, we (Traackr) have been huge advocates of this approach. There are really 2 driving factors why engaging the 'right' people (aka niche influencers) most often works better:
1- Your ability to connect and peak their interest is much higher because they genuinely care about the topic/industry. All you need is a compelling story and personalized pitch.
2- THEIR ability to truly impact your business is also much higher very much for the same reason: they built an audience and trust around your topic. We have tons of customer case studies that show the same thing over and over again: influencers with smaller targeted audiences yield much greater results than the 'celebrity' influencer (large audience).

The cult of 'celebrity influencer' cult is comfortable among marketers because it feels like home (a 21st century version of mass media) but some (me) would call it lipstick on a pig...

Re: PR to Advertising: Bring it on!

pierreloic — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:32:19 -0000

Fair enough but couldn't you make the counter argument that Ad agencies don't (want to) understand earned media? My point is that the imbalance between paid/earned media is shifting in front of our eyes and that as earned media gets more attention, ad agencies lose. Ultimately I agree with you though that integration is paramount but brands are moving away from letting Ad agencies do it all as they place more value in earned media. Example: I was at a P&G alum networking event a couple of days ago in NYC. Bob McDonald, CEO of P&G, was talking to us about their more exciting campaigns. What does he pick for a topic? How they played off the success of Old Spice TV campaign in social media and generated an estimated 1.8B earned impressions, making their social media campaign way more successful than the 100 fold more expensive TV campaign. Trouble's ahead for ad agencies if the biggest ad spender worldwide is seeing better ROI outside of buy media...

Re: PR to Advertising: Bring it on!

pierreloic — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:03:39 -0000

I agree it's an oversimplification to say someone would 'own' Social. That said, if you look at the distribution of Marcom dollars between Advertising and PR, you wouldn't be wrong in saying that Advertisers 'own' Marcom (about 20 to 1). What I mean about Social is that this uneven distribution of budgets no longer applies. Meanwhile the Social pie is growing...

Re: PR to Advertising: Bring it on!

pierreloic — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:14:56 -0000

You're absolutely right about the propensity of PR to build and foster relationships as a great advantage they hold. Thanks for chiming in!

Re: Traackr Makes Influencer Identification Easy, But Not Cheap

pierreloic — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:54:34 -0000

Thanks for the review Jason. Great insights as usual.

On the automated influencer solutions: we really see ourselves as a powerful piece of capability that left in capable hands can yield great results, but thinking that Traackr or any other social media tools will substitute humans is like saying that MS Excel should have replaced accountants and business consultants... If anything, we enhance human capability by freeing our users from mindless repetitive tasks requiring tons of data processing, better handled by machines, so that they can spend more time on value-add qualitative tasks (analysis, engagement strategy, influencing outcomes), better handled by humans.

Re: Is Klout a Good Judge of Your Social Media Influence?

pierreloic — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:36:22 -0000

Thanks for the post, Elijah.

For brand managers and communication professionals who have been in the business of scrapping the web (on Google, Twitter, LinkedIn) searching for 'influencers', Klout offers a great complementary tool for them to get a feel for someone's clout.

Trouble starts when marketers see Klout as Gospel and its top users as the web's uber-influencers who can climb mountains bare hand and propel brands to new heights. Those marketers are in for a disappointing experience, leading to the wrong conclusion: influencer outreach doesn't work (see http://brandsavant.com/the-....

The problem is not that influencer outreach doesn't work but that Klout doesn't help marketers find the influencers they need because it's missing the most important ingredient that defines influence: relevance.

+K (aka crowdsourcing the tagging of Klout profiles) is an attempt at addressing this issue but, as you've already experienced, it's so easy to game that its success is questionable.

The answer to measure contextual influence (which is the only way it should ever be assessed) ought to be algorithmic to reach a scale that makes it much harder to game. This is the path we've taken...

@pierreloic / www.traackr.com

Re: The Future of Search: from PageRank to PeopleRank

pierreloic — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 15:03:23 -0000

In theory, you're absolutely right. In practice, in the world of unstructured online data, there only so much meaningful analysis one can conduct at the content unit level. Finding success patterns becomes much more interesting when bringing together data gathered at the post, channel and person levels.

Re: The Future of Search: from PageRank to PeopleRank

pierreloic — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 06:45:06 -0000

That's one way to look at it. You can also consider determining the value of the person and attaching the content units to that individual. Our experience shows that the more work you do at the person level, the better the results.

Re: Influencers Can’t Cure ‘Suck’

pierreloic — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:40:05 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Howie. Good insights.

The earned/paid media battle has already been fought and lost by mass media, they just don't know yet because TV ad budgets are still monstrously large. Influencers haven't been driving the change, the increasing inefficiency of ads has (call it Tivo, On Demand entertainment, media streaming).

So what do we have?
1- Massive ad market with huge cost structure associated
2- Rapidly decreasing efficiencies of ads
3- (Small but) booming alternative in earned media

Put these 3 things together and you have a perfect storm for market disruption.

Re: Who Are The Experts?

pierreloic — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:13:59 -0000

Scott, your approach to defining expertise is anything but BS; it's actually used in management consulting where all well-conducted content interviews end with the question: "could you mention 3 people in your organization/industry who know more about this topic than you do?". After 4 or 5 interviews, you see a very strong convergence towards the experts. My company has developed a way to automate this research. To Jason's point: an expert is 'elected' by his or her peers.

Jason, I'm 200% with you on the social media expert thing. I actually wrote a piece on this back in 2008 to caution our clients against self-proclaimed social media experts - http://bit.ly/ij7ASz (sadly) still very current...

Re: Five Ways To Improve Online Influence Measures

pierreloic — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:46:58 -0000

Great post, Tom!

I think that Klout does a decent job at measuring, well clout... on Twitter, not influence. I see a subtle but very important difference between clout and influence - and if I'm making it up, blame it on English being my second language :) Clout infers the notion of ubiquitous power of the person: a politician with Clout is a person you want on your side irrespectively of context because he/she is connected to other powerful people and institutions. Influence on the other hand is highly contextual: a person influencing another person is 100% about context and based on how much trust those being influenced place in the recommendation or judgment of those influencing them. How much is Chris Brogan, Klout score of 86, is influencing your stock investments, the music you listen to?

The idea of measuring influence without accounting for the richness of a person's contribution (ie. not just Twitter) and context is ludicrous and misleading. There's no short cut to handling this complexity and that's the challenge we've taken on at Traackr.

For more on the intricacies of measuring influence, here are a few slides I presented at a conference in Toronto a few months back: http://www.slideshare.net/p...

Re: Klout is a Good Start But We Need More Ingredients for an Influencer Recipe

pierreloic — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:05:40 -0000

Mark, excellent remarks. Here is (in part) the answer to your question on what the top PR influencer list would look like with more thorough metrics: http://lists.traackr.com/PR2dot0

One important precision: Traackr authority lists are generated based on topical areas defined by a set of keywords. In this specific case, the topic was "PR 2.0" rather than PR, and the keywords used had to people moving PR forward. Here is the post where we explain what that means: http://traackr.com/blog/2009/12/faq-for-the-top-25-pr20-list/

Re: Social Media ROI Can’t Be Measured!

pierreloic — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:51:49 -0000

You're approaching it from the right angle. I'd only add that the other benefit of consistently measuring success of specific initiatives is that you quickly acquire very useful and reliable trending information.

Re: Why The Revolution Will Start on Twitter (and YouTube and Blogs) and End in the Streets

pierreloic — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:43:26 -0000

Thanks for the link to the article, Carlos. Very interesting!

Re: HOW TO: Make Sure You’re Tracking the Right Data

pierreloic — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:30:27 -0000

Thanks for this refreshing perspective. Social media analytics is not a one-size-fits-all. The analogy I often use with new clients is to compare social media to the phone: it wouldn't cross anybody's mind to measure the performance of a phone system outside of a specific business context.

Re: Second Life Users File Class Action Lawsuit Over Virtual Land

pierreloic — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:34:25 -0000

Question: is this going in front of a real court or second life court?
Follow up question: anyone going to virtual jail over this?

Re: Who’s Driving Your Online Conversation?

pierreloic — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:19:33 -0000

very interesting point. we're actually coming across the questions you're raising while performing searches for our clients: many old media journalists now have a strong new media presence and get scored alongside the "new age" bloggers, twitterers, etc. for example, it wouldn't be unusual to see CNN's Sanjay Gupta in the results of one of our searches.

in the long run though, this artificial divide between on and offline expertise or influence is bound to disappear.