Reading today’s Telegraph over breakfast this morning, I opened page 6 to see a large display ad by Barclays Bank, pictured, containing an open letter of apology signed by its chairman, Marcus Agius. The apology is to do with the […]
Category Archive: Investor Relations
What a destruction of trust in this report of what people in Barclays Bank have been doing behind the scenes and for which the bank has been fined £290 million. […] Former City minister Lord Myners told the BBC that […]
The Tom Wolfe novel from the 1980s that’s the title of this post – along with the movie of the same name – comes to my mind when reading media reports and online commentary and punditry this morning about the […]
What a kerfuffle Klout has stirred up! The US company that offers a service to “measure influence online” made changes last week in the technology it uses to calculate an individual’s influence rank known as a Klout Score.
One of the results of the changes – all to do with improving the algorithms that calculate an individual’s Klout Score – is that “a majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop,” the company said.
My bold emphasis in that quote highlights what rapidly escalated into howls of protest by users as people’s Klout scores tumbled showing lower numbers – dramatically lower in some cases – which the formal posts on Klout’s blog did little to help people clearly understand why.
I’m a Klout user and, like many people I know, one who spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it works and whether it has any measurable value. As a user, I still don’t know for sure (give me a marketer’s hat, though, and it is clearer). But it doesn’t matter: I came to a conclusion a while ago that the value of services like Klout is more in the eye of the beholder, as it were, than in the subject’s eye.
It’s what others believe to be the value of a particular Klout Score to them. That requires a considerable amount of earned trust – and that, it seems to me, is where Klout has now got itself into some serious hot water.
The foundation of Klout’s business is the scoring system and some clever technology that runs it. But closely linked to that is a pure-play marketing programme that offers perks to users if they meet specific criteria connected to their score and their activity in the social spaces that Klout tracks, notably Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Foursquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm and Flickr.
The Klout Perks programme has attracted some big-name brands in the US such as Audi USA, Red Bull, Axe, Chiquita, and more.
And that’s where the cosy informal social-ness of a ranking or score hits the hard reality of marketing in a company that is attracting interest from investors that could give it a valuation of at least $200 million. And it looks as though the marketing is very hard nosed indeed as Ike Pigott’s experience clearly suggests.
US securities regulators have formally asked public companies for the first time to disclose cyber attacks against them, reports Reuters. The US Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidelines on October 13 that sets out the kinds of information companies should […]
It’s probably no surprise to anyone that Oswald Gruebel, the CEO of Swiss bank UBS, quit his job on Saturday in the wake of the rogue trading scandal at the bank’s London office. That alleged crookery looks like will cost […]
I’ve been following developments today in the UBS $2 billion rogue trades scandal – and the latest news re an arrest of the alleged rogue trader in London today – which could lead the Swiss bank group to report a […]
The announcement this morning that News International CEO Rebekah Brooks had resigned provoked near-universal applause on Twitter, from what I could see in my content stream. It was also reported in mainstream media around the world, illustrating quite clearly how […]
If you want to get a rich snapshot view on what many of the FTSE 100 companies are doing with social media, look no further than "The Communicators’ Guide to FTSE 100 Social Media Use" published last week by the […]
Social media offers a better user experience than investor relations websites, says Dominic Jones in a compelling post in which he argues that social media investor relations has reached a tipping point: […] company disclosure channels that once seemed innovative […]
Yesterday’s announcement that Salesforce.com has offered to acquire Radian6 for $326 million strongly suggests that an embryonic social media ecosystem is evolving from a monitoring/analytics tools and services landscape that, broadly speaking, is immature, fragmented and piecemeal and ripe for […]
A corporate video with over 9.6 million views on YouTube and more than 23,000 likes? That’s what the stats show today for A Day Made of Glass, a near-6-minute video from Corning, the American manufacturer of glass, ceramics and related […]