New Years & Christmas: In Photos

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I had a pretty good holiday break, with two trips to diametrically opposite climates. I took a lot of pictures, and some of them were too great not to share. You will find two sets of pictures below, so make sure to go all the way to the bottom. Some of the best pictures are towards the end.

The pictures from Lake Tahoe are my favorite. I have never seen a more beautiful place. There wasn't much snow though, which is very uncharacteristic for this time of year. Nevertheless, it was an amazing experience.

Make sure to comment if you like anything in particular. Depending on the interest, I might start a "posts-in-pictures" series to showcase more photographs. Also, check out my photography page for links to even more pictures.

Roger Federer: Five Reasons Federer Won't Make it to the 2012 Australian Open Final

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With his last win in Australia coming in 2010, and no Grand Slam titles since then, can we reasonably expect Roger Federer to make it to the Australian Open finals? Federer's last finals appearance at a Grand Slam tournament was at Roland Garros 2011; he lost in the semi-finals of both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 2011. 

While no one can doubt that Federer is among the greatest tennis players to have ever played the game, there are five important reasons that he will probably not make the finals of the first Grand Slam of 2012.

Read the rest of the article at The Bleacher Report

Brand Influence? Warm Metrics?

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Amy Jo Martin, principal at Digital Royalty wrote an article in Sports Business Daily about how she thinks brands can "turn the art of social media into a science." With a great title, and a nice list of media recognition to accompany it, Ms. Martin gets our attention. But here's the issue: I'm not so sure the 925 words she wrote actually said anything useful. In fact, some it downright doesn't make sense.

Let's take a look. Ms. Martin touts a metric she calls "Return on Influence," which supposedly captures the different ways in which brands influence. For Ms. Martin, different sports franchises have different influence levels, particularly when it comes to generating transactions. But, like a good scientist, Ms. Martin recognized that "she had to prove it."

Her solution? "Warm Metrics", which Ms. Martin claims she could use to prove that fans like a particular brand. What's more, Ms. Martin says that these can be tracked to demonstrate accountability for actual transactions resulting from brand influence.

In fact, according to Ms. Martin

"My findings, with brands varying from sports teams to individual athletes, show there’s a direct correlation between return on influence and revenue available per fan and follower. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship: influence increases, and subsequently revenue follows"

Unfortunately, after looking through all the "case studies" and media coverage listed on Digital Royalty's website, I didn't find a single piece of information that indicated how Ms. Martin and Digital Royalty were able to turn brand influence into a science. Even the article in Sports Business Daily that this post addresses, doesn't provide a single piece of evidence that suggests Ms. Martin was able to accurately measure return on influence.

Klout Matters, but to a Certain Extent

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Why do we care so much about our Klout scores? Some social media experts ask this question almost daily, arguing that Klout doesn't mean much outside of the social media savvy community because we don't actually know how Klout scores and styles are determined. What's more, according to some experts like Aliza Sherman, obsession with Klout may actually be distracting social media users from creating substantive and meaningful relationships within the communities they frequent.

While I agree with Aliza that in an ideal world, we shouldn't really care about influence metrics and should be more concerned about what we are saying, and more importantly about what people are saying about what we are saying, in reality we can't entirely disassociate ourselves from influence metrics. Yes, influential people in the real world such as celebrities and business leaders aren't using Klout to to augment their brand, but that's because the marginal benefit of a high Klout score is minimal to them; they are already important.

For the average social media user however, Klout can make the difference between getting a retweet and being ignored entirely. A person can talk about his retweets, mentions and clicks all day long, but unless he has some baseline credibility that people can easily understand, he will have a hard time getting anyone to pay attention. This is where Klout comes in.