The Social Executive: How to Master Social Media and Why its Good for Business

CHAPTER 8 Set the bar: social media benchmarks

People like benchmarks — they’re a way of assessing where we are. Usually we do this through an annual performance review or other indicators (such as a bonus).

If you think about the performance measures you use at work, you know they’re impacted by memory, bias, prejudice, personal opinion, relationships, politics and even the mood of the person doing the assessment. But they’re still useful as a guide, for example on where to spend training dollars.

As in real life, so in the online world, the tools here provide useful and imperfect insights on influence. Therefore as part of establishing your Professional Platform I want you to benchmark your online influence scores. You will probably enjoy the sense of satisfaction when you come back a year later and see how much you’ve progressed.

There are hundreds of online analytics tools that can tell you everything from how a keyword you used in a tweet resonated with communities to how your blog ranks worldwide. But this is not a path for us. It’s technical and can be overwhelming. Digital marketers, communicators, or customer and community managers should use them.

The measures we’ll use are:

• Klout — which ranks you between 1 and 100 for how much influence you have on social media
• Kred — which measures the likelihood that someone trusts and will act on your posts, as well as how much you reach out to others.

Klout and Kred offer ‘social proof’ about your standing online. They should ...