Oh, hey there.

If you’re a regular SNL watcher you would have seen this past weekend’s ‘You Can Do Anything’ skit, poking fun at “the incredibly high self esteem of the YouTube Generation.” They featured bloggers, an independent filmmaker, a popular tweeter and a YouTube personality in the skit. You can watch the entire skit below. (Our Canadian readers may not be able to view the video, I’m sure they’re savvy enough to find a screener online though :))

This quote says it all:

Roger Knight (Independent Film-maker): Tell us about yourself
Taylor Dawn (Popular Twitter Personality): Well, I’m what you would call Twitter FamousRoger Knight: Which means?
Taylor Dawn: Not famous.

Admittedly I did get a few chuckles out of it, but it made me think about how online influence is perceived not only to us in ‘the biz’ but to the general public, and how brands and agencies alike need to ensure they’re aligning with the right influencer partners when executing earned media campaigns.

Mark Schaefer wrote a post in March of last year about how important Twitter influence is (as it pertains to Klout score) and he basically told us there is little true influence on Twitter.

But wait, don’t freak out! That 2012 influencer campaign your client just approved isn’t about to fall apart. Twitter is just one (albeit integral) piece of the entire digital influence puzzle. Marketers should be looking at the whole picture when identifying influencers for campaign partnerships. What does that mean? It means Twitter, Facebook and most importantly – blogs.

A successful digital influencer campaign starts with top-notch high quality earned content—content that lives on the blog. Facebook and Twitter are both extremely important to amplifying that content and driving awareness, but it starts with the blog.

BlogHer’s April 2011 Social Media Matters report found that both blog readership and social media use are on the rise in the United States. BlogHer reported 40 percent of online Americans surveys said they read blogs (up from 37 percent in 2010).

In May 2011,eMarketer estimated the number of blog readers in the US would reach 122.6 million in 2011, representing 53.5% of internet users. Furthermore, they expect that number to reach 150.4 million by 2014, representing a whopping 60% of internet users.

Okay, okay, blogs are important. We get it, right? So how do we identify the right bloggers/influencers who will provide high quality content and increased reach through their social properties? Do your research.

Facebook Likes, Twitter followers and a high Klout score does not guarantee quality content or awesome ROI. It merely provides a benchmark for potential impressions and if the content isn’t good, the impressions won’t help. Influencers need to be able to offer companies and brands something of value in return for what they’re getting. For starters, they need to have awesome social media marketing skills, and know the rules of professional blogging inside and out.

Here are a few other rules of thumb:

1. What does their blog look like? Is it aesthetically pleasing to the eye? Does it look professional?
2. How active is the person? Do they blog daily? Weekly? Monthly? (Hopefully not annually!)
3. How engaged is their audience? Do you see the potential influencer engaging in conversation on their blog comments and/or Facebook and Twitter? Do they provide additional value to their readers through these conversations?
4. How relevant to their market is their content? Is your tech blogger writing about the new oatmeal recipe he’s trying?
5. Have they worked with competitors in the past? This is a big one. Be sure to inquire about potential conflict of interest, even if it was years ago – you need to be made aware.

You should have an evaluation system in place when it comes to identifying the perfect influencer(s) for your campaign. We use SMG Rank™ (SMG’s proprietary influencer identification and ranking methodology) when determining appropriate influencers for our client campaigns. It’s a pretty awesome secret sauce of metrics…not to toot our own horn ;)

So would Taylor Dawn, the SNL Twitter personality, make a good influencer? Not if his only claim to fame is a large Twitter following and his budding songwriting career.  Remember, when it comes to choosing influencers for your earned campaigns, look past the Klout score, Facebook Likes and follower count to see what they’rereally made of before you pitch.

Charlie Sheen’s Infamous Tweet

Have you ever posted something on Facebook or Twitter and felt immediate regret? Scrambling to delete something that truly cannot be undone? You’re not alone.

From Charlie Sheen tweeting his phone number, to Anthony Weiner tweeting a questionable private picture, down to the recent tweet from New York Times’ Brian Stelter leaking news of Christiane Amanpour departing as host of ABC’s “This Week.”

You know as well as I do that it’s not just the celebrities who have been getting themselves into social media hot water. I’ve seen people post the most ridiculous updates to their feeds, like the handful of Vancouver rioters posting Facebook updates bragging about the damage they’d done.  For a real head-shaker, type “I lost my phone” in your Facebook search bar and see how many people are publicly posting their contact details.

(No one was harmed during the faking of this FB status.)

Recently, a friend mistakenly tweeted his credit card number and expiry date. This happened because his tweets are delivered to his iPhone in the same format as text messages, so he thought he was sending an SMS. Interestingly, he noted a few new followers (within minutes), one of which was a self-proclaimed hacker according to his bio. Yikes!

I once saw someone post that social media was like a needy girlfriend: “Facebook asks me what I’m thinking, Twitter asks me what I’m doing and Foursquare asks me where I am.” It’s funny, but does sharing your likes, interests and whereabouts present you as an easy target to cyber criminals? A recent survey cited 15% of respondents admitting to posting their current location or travel plans, 34% their full birth date and 21% had posted their children’s names and one in five said they hadn’t used Facebook’s privacy controls.

SMG’s Online Security Bad Habits

In 2010, Consumer Reports estimated that cybercrime cost American consumers $4.5 billion over two years. A few things to keep in mind when it comes to protecting yourself:

• Don’t use your full birth date in your profile (Or, if you do – utilize privacy settings to make sure it’s only available to those you want to see it)
• Utilize privacy controls (This applies to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, whatever network you’re using)
• Post your child’s name in a caption
• Don’t broadcast you’ll be out of town (Unless following it up with ‘And _______ is taking care of my place!’)
• Leverage Facebook Lists to control who sees what and when. I like to use them for industry-specific posts to avoid my mom replying with “What’s a Foursquare?”
• Do a good ol’ Facebook friend clean-up. With 23% of Facebook users admitting they didn’t know some of their “friends” well enough to feel completely comfortable about their own or their family’s security or safety and 6% admitting to having a friend who made them uneasy about those things, this is a commonsense way to protect yourself.
• Use a strong password

Let’s talk about passwords for a minute. Is yours painfully obvious? Does it include the name of your partner, child or pet? If so, give yourself a shake! You likely don’t use your birth date as your banking PIN, so why do it online? According to Consumer Reports, 75% of Americans don’t use the strongest kind of passwords for their most sensitive accounts. Here’s some more food for thought: 32% of respondents used a personal reference in their passwords, 29% store passwords on a list they carry with them, near their computer, or in an insecure file on their tablet or mobile device and almost 20% used the same password for more than five accounts.

Password 101: Strong passwords should contain at least eight characters and have a combination of upper and lowercase letters, a numeral and a special character.

The inadvertent posting of non-sensitive personal information may seem innocent but there is a dark side to sharing your interests, location, and even favourite local pub. Studies have shown that we’re not choosing the best passwords, and the likes of Charlie Sheen, Anthony Weiner and New York Times’ Brian Stelter have proven anyone can make a bad social media move.

Millions of people worldwide are constantly sharing personal and private information with friends (and strangers) on social networks. Think before you tweet and be smart about what you’re sharing.

(This post was originally published on SMG’s blog)

Community management is a hot topic in social. In fact, there are 48,258 people who list Community Manager as a title or Community Management as a keyword on LinkedIn.

So it’s a hot space – I know this because I work with clients everyday supporting community management. I’ve got a bird’s eye view, so here goes my rant about what is a community manager.

Community managers have been around for years. Really, people have been managing digital communities in some form or another since the dawn of message boards and chat rooms. Not until the mass adoption of Facebook, Twitter and the like has it become a defined profession – and rightly so.

An active social media program in an organization disrupts traditional departments and silos. No one feels this more acutely than the community manager. Everybody (and their dog) has their own definition of what a community manager does because there are a number of demands and responsibilities that fall within the community management title.

According to the Community Management Round Table (in their State of Community Management 2011 report), the top attributes of a Community Manager are “The desire to be helpful, someone who is concise and credible, a sense of humor, curiosity, fearlessness, influential, persuasive, diplomatic, patient and mature. The expertise required for the role of community manager is strategic business acumen combined with exceptional communication and people skills.”

What do I think?  A community manager is a passionate strategic thinker who is a content creator and a moderator, a listener and informer. Essentially, it is someone who encourages conversation and engagement around a product, brand, issue or cause. I asked my Twitter and Facebook networks to tell me their definition of a community manager. As expected, quite varied:

• @jeremywaite: A community manager should be in-house. No one else will be as passionate about your brand

• @Sparkle_Media: in-house community management is a goal: a person/role to add to client team; interim & freelance CM’s can add bandwidth

• @nav_een: CM should be patient, thick-skinned, creative, wordsmith. I agree with @sparkle_agency that CM should be in-house.

• @heyneil: The catalyst for conversation in brand social spaces, the moderator of objectionable content and the person who escalates questions or issues to appropriate people within the organization. Also, the person who filters the brand team’s request for activity in the social spaces using best practices.

There’s so much juicy stuff in those comments from folks in my network. What’s your take? Is Community Manager a profession that’s here to stay or just a trendy job title for something else? When should (could) Community Management be outsourced?

This post was originally published on SMG’s blog 11/21/11