This Week in Relevance

Kim Kardashian is Over-exposed AND Over-priced?
An AdAge article authored a few months ago on to the economics of social influence caught our eye this week. Edmund Lee covered a talk by Yahoo “Principal Research Scientist” Duncan Watts at the Ad Age Digital conference where he presented a study on whether it made more sense to spend a big chunk of money to have Kim Kardashian send your sponsored tweet or to spread a budget across a bunch of smaller, but less expensive social influencers (short answer: Kim’s not worth $10k a pop). We have no idea if his methodology was sound, and even Watts leaves the door open to being off the mark (“I’m assuming a lot of things in this model”), but it sparked a fun conversation around the TWIR water cooler: what are all the ways we are going to measure and map influence in the brave new world of social media? How could you quantify the difference between Kardashian, Shaq O’Neal, and Barack Obama, for example? The tools are likely to be crude for a while, but we have no doubt that one day we will have all the necessary knobs and dials to ensure our messages are properly harnessing the power of all sizes and kinds of social network influencers.

In the meantime, we are hoping Watts takes the next logical step in breaking the problem down – a study on why Kim Kardashian is famous in the first place.

(Somewhat Related) Be Careful of Self-Inflicted Social Media Saturation
A short MediaPost piece by Kaila Colbin covered a few good points on retaining an authentic and personal social media voice. Colbin cites how easy it is to connect and combine content from all of your different social media channels, but notes that doing so can create a lot of noise and repetition. Instead, Colbin aruges, you should be figuring out how to create a more personal experience at all of your touch points with consumers. Clearly she is preaching to the choir – we are strong advocates for resisting the urge to carpet bomb your way to results in social media. But how to actually execute still appears to be an open question.

This sounds like it could be the start of something big…
As covered by Leena Rao at TechCrunch, TWIR idol and e-commerce juggernaut Amazon.com launched their first integration with Facebook this week. Obviously this could be really powerful if done well. We’re guessing even if they happen to miss the mark this time it wont be long until we see something pretty cool using collaborative filtering across your social networks to drive better personalization.

Search Still Moving Product
Enough about social media – let’s get back to a good old fashioned “why search is great” article. Matt McGee at Search Engine Land obliges with a look at how search dominates social media in online shopping. Not many surprises here (at least to us grizzled search veterans), but the compelling data referenced serves as a reminder of the importance of search.

Nobody “Messes” with the Jesus
Since you’ve read this far here’s a fun and totally irrelevant link for all the Lebowski / Turturro fans out there (note: The Big Lebowski is a TWIR Top 5 of All Time Movie). Hat tip to @pkedrosky.

Stop B.S.-ing:
And finally we will sign off with a quote of the week from legendary communicator and trailblazing former President of the Philippines, Corzaon Aquino:

“One must be frank to be relevant.”

Amen. (And yes, we are foreign policy buffs here at TWIR too.)