I’ve moved this blog to my new firm, Content & Social. You can find my future posts at SocialMediaToday, where I’m a featured blogger, or at contentandsocial.com.

And think of us when you have projects or other needs for content and social media strategy and production. We specialize in B2B clients who want to leverage their “owned” media into more “earned” connections with customers through social networks.

I can be reached at rohnjay@contentandsocial.com

If you’ve linked to one of the articles here, that link will remain in place and i’ll cross index this domain with the new contentandsocial.com domain.

Thanks, and good luck in 2012–RJ

Bookmark It

Yesterday was yet another milestone in the development of social networks as a political force.

After an enormous online backlash against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) elected officials in Washington DC scrambled to abandon their support for SOPA, which had been heavily supported by the entertainment industry and old media companies like News Corp.

A key defector was Senator Marco Rubio, a rising star in the Republican Party, who is at the top of the list of potential vice-presidential running mates with likely nominee Mitt Romney. Rubio was actually one of the sponsors of SOPA, and on the day that leading Websites like Wikipedia and Social Media today went dark, and Google covered itself in a black box, Rubio hit the ground running on Wednesday, announcing his change of heart at an early morning press conference. (See the NY Times article for more)

He was joined at 9am by Senator John Cornyn, a fellow Republican from Texas, who chairs the party’s campaign operations.  Cornyn’s defection was the official signal to the rank and file that SOPA in its current form is dead.  A huge number of elected officials had signed on in support of SOPA which was viewed as an obscure piece of copyright legislation being passed to help the entertainment industry (which, it should be noted, is a significant source of campaign contributions and endorsements.)  When the backlash hit—culminated by “Black Wednesday,” they were stunned.  And the smart ones–like Rubio–got out in front of the crowd by quickly turning against SOPA.

Former Senator Chris Dodd is now a lobbyist for News Corp and other entertainment companies and he released a statement calling blackouts like Wikipedia’s: “stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging,”

Curiously quiet were tech-savvy representatives like Senator Al Franken from Minnesota who is listed as one of the sponsors of the Senate version of SOPA.   It’s clear that official Washington was caught short by the breadth and depth of the opposition to SOPA from Internet users.

This battle is between old media—the entertainment industry as it grew up in the 20^th century—and new media in the form of the Internet.  The battle lines include specific problems like piracy of movies and music over the Internet and from piracy overseas.  But at the heart of the battle lies copyright law as it is currently written which is in no way capable of dealing with the Internet.

Silicon Valley law firms like Wilson Sonsini, who represents clients like Google, have made good money from their expertise in both the new and the old worlds of media that copyright is being stretched between.  They will be key arbiters with old media lobbyists like Dodd, as elected officials in Washington try keep campaign contributions from Disney and News Corp rolling in without pissing off most of the people who use the Internet, which is, well….pretty much everyone now.

But fundamentally some revisions in copyright law will have to be made to account for the new user models and the total lack of traditional choke points on the Internet.  You simply can’t stop peer to peer sharing in a world of social networks where everyone is a publisher.

Just ask all those former Presidents in the Arab World.

Rohn Jay Miller is CEO of Content + Social, a design and strategic firm in Minneapolis.  

Related articles

• Google Finds Way To Get On SOPA Soap Box Without Going Dark (paidcontent.org)
• Wikipedia, Craigslist, other sites go black in SOPA protest (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
• Online SOPA protest day begins (cbsnews.com)

Bookmark It

Tom Disch was my creative writing teacher at the University of Minnesota, a long time ago.  Disch went on to write acclaimed futurist novels like 334, and On Wings of Song.  At the time he was a struggling science fiction author, having just left a crummy job as a copywriter for an ad agency in New York.  I was a 19 year old knucklehead wearing John Lennon glasses who thought he was going to be a novelist.  What did I know?

In that semester’s course, Creative Writing 1-101, Tom said we could write any damn story we wanted, except he had two rules: no weather and no dreams.

Today I think those are pretty good rules, as was the other piece of advice from him I recall, that as much as possible we should “stick to simple, declarative sentences.”

I’m Sorry Mr. Disch.

This post is the story of a dream I had the other night.  I hope you’ll excuse me, Mr. Disch– because it’s not fiction.  It’s the true recounting of an actual, magical dream I had.

Tom Disch

The dream takes place in the present day at LBi US in New York City, where I worked for four years starting in 2006.

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m in the middle of a crowd old friends in the huge conference room on the 9^th floor of the Puck Building in Soho.  It’s the Friday afternoon beer bust, and the large conference room is crowded, with more and more people coming in.

I live in Minneapolis now, and in this dream I’ve been invited back to give a talk about my recent work.  Apparently I’ve published a book about marketing and it’s put me on the conference speaking circuit.   But this is a friendly gathering of lots of old comrades.  As I move through the crowd I’m stopped by friends along the way and we hug.  The room is filled with the din of chatter, and now and then there is laughter.

I see Cathy Chan, a peer of mine, who is the organizer of this Friday afternoon talk series.  She’s wearing a black dress and that silver medallion necklace of hers.  She smiles and asks, “Are you all set? We should get going.”  I smile and say something, and she leads me to one end of the conference room where there is a low stage and a microphone in front of a row of whiteboards on the wall.

I walk up to the microphone, and some people begin to turn to listen.  I see my old boss Tom Nicholson smile and indicate with his hands that we should talk after my speech.

As I look out over the crowd I suddenly realize I have no idea what I’m going to talk about.

I’m totally blank.  I’m breathing hard, my eyes glaze, and I panic. (This is I think a version of the old dream that you’re taking an exam and you realize that you haven’t studied all semester.)  I think quickly. I look to my right and see people crowding into the room.  I have to buy some time.  I lean into the microphone and say:

“I see there’re more people coming, so we’re going to wait a few minutes till everyone’s in, thanks.”

And I step down from the stage, into the crowd.   I’m in a cold sweat.  What a fraud I am.  I press my way in between people, and as I do I look down and see something amazing.

It’s a little piece of paper, a torn corner of something.  It’s silvery, and illuminated from inside so it’s slightly glowing and shining.  I bend down to pick it up.  I look at it, and then I see another scrap a few inches away.  As I pick the second piece up I see a third, and then I realize what they are.  These are torn pieces of a sheet of memo paper of the outline of my speech.   I’d written them on airplane flight coming in.

I’m saved! Flushed with relief, my mind now recalls everything about what I had written, and I walk along picking up the little pieces of glowing silver memo paper until I have them all.  I stand beside the stage and push them together.

In crude pen I have written:

• DRIVE DEEPER INTO THE PRODUCT.
• BRAND DESIGN = PRODUCT DESIGN
• PLANNING COMES FROM THE PRODUCT DESIGN
• BUILD AND ITERATE

I remember now!  I remember what I meant to say.   I’m ready, I totally get it, and now I’m ready to throw it down.

I step back up onto the stage and I notice everything: ceiling fans,  large sheets of brainstorming paper stuck to the side wall.  I see some friends in the mass of faces.   I see Ann Nielsen, and she smiles and gives a wave.  As I approach the microphone I shove the silver pieces of memo paper into my coat jacket pocket.  People turn and begin to quiet down, some are saying “Shh.”  The microphone is a large announcer’s mike, styled like ones from the 1940s.  I look down at it.  With every breath more confidence and eagerness fills my body.

I look up and smile.

And just as I was about to begin….my alarm clock went off.

I swear.

I was jerked awake.  I was in the guest bedroom because I had a cold and my wife was waking up very early to get into work.  Reaching for my iPhone, I found the Notes app and starting writing as fast as my thumbs could move.  I laughed, and thought “maybe it’s an effective dream,” like poor George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven.

Those notes are the silvery gossamer of this blog post.

John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, has become a serious student of dreaming.  He’s convinced that if you’re working on a problem and you leave it at the end of the day, then go to sleep, when you wake up the solution will be obvious to you.  He claims this is the key to all the great comedy he’s written (including my favorite Python, the Dead Parrot sketch.)  Maybe that’s true, at least once and awhile.  It might be a good practice to try, eh?

I think what I meant in my dream about “driving deeper into the product” is that the answers to marketing and sales problems are found at the heart of the products and services we sell.  We often get lost in all the silly tin foil and Christmas lights we drape around a product, that stuff we call branding.

Examples: people loved the Saab because of its design, not the commercials that Saab ran, and now we mourn Saab’s passing.  UnderArmour makes better base layer clothing for winter than anything else I’ve worn, and I love the stark, black design of it.  I wear Warby Parker glasses because I love the retro look, they cost $99 and they donate a second pair to someone who can’t afford new glasses–great on all points!

Here’s another: I drink Starbucks French Roast coffee at home because the taste is unbelievably delicious.  I’m surprised frankly, because I don’t particularly care for Starbuck’s–I don’t like the stores, nor their barristas, their grande non-fat lattes, not even the damn mermaid logo.  Starbucks is like the 21^st century McDonalds to me.  But there you go.  I love the coffee beans, not the bag they come in.  Today product design is 80% or 90% of the matter, and advertising and trade dress is 10%.  That’s used to be different, but in this century it’s all changed, and I think for the good.

I’m fascinated by the idea of building services for customers as a form of marketing.  Let’s take all the money spent on the annoying radio advertising (the worst, most irritating form in my booklet) and let’s spend it on something useful for the customer, something that says something about our values, design philosophy, and our product.  People will use it and it will make them love our product even more.

That’s why I love, love, love the Dyson hand dryer, the Dyson Blade.  It’s the best ad I’ve seen for a Dyson vacuum cleaner (which by the way is the workhorse vacuum cleaner of choice in the Miller household.)  From the moment you stick your wet, dripping hands into a Dyson Blade you totally get what Dyson is about as a company.  This works 10X better than those little white boxes on washroom walls that ineffectually breathe warm air for a few moments and then die.  This is a hand dryer!

And with subtle grace Dyson connects the hand dryer to their big product line, the vacuum cleaners, by using the same soft silver/grey finish with bright gold/yellow trim.

They should hang a sign over every Dyson Blade that says, “If you like how we dry your hands, you’ll love how we clean your floors!”

My father was a salesman for IBM for much of his career.  He left me a small IBM notepad, which I carry around in my coat pocket.  On the inside front cover are written the IBM company values:

• Dedication to every client’ success
• Innovation that matters—for our company, and for the world
• Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

Is that grand?  Clear, high standards for making decisions.

IBM has lost its way from time to time, most notably when the era of “big iron” mainframes was disrupted and devastated by the rise of the PC in the 1990s.  But with the help of great managers (including Lou Gerstner, but also many others) it’s remained the most relevant business computing partner a corporation could choose.  Today they are maybe the best example of a social enterprise working to make every client successful.  I think they’re great at creating innovation that matters.

It’s not the IBM logo, or their commercials that sell IBM— it’s leadership in the marketplace on behalf of their clients.

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is a mantra of folk wisdom made up by customers long ago–and not by IBM.  Think about that.   Would your customers say that about your company?

As marketers we get stuck on being marketers.  We’re people who make marketing deliverables like marketing plans, market research reports, and social media plans.  We build advertising campaign briefs, and broadcast flight plans, and so on.  Now we fight for control of online, mobile and social strategy–but why?  So we can create more deliverables to our bosses that will prove we’re being great marketers.  We write stuff like power points and Brand Lift reports, PR media mention reports and Golden Lion awards, and….  We create the deliverables we created last year, and we try to make them a little better.

Farrah Bostic said in a presentation at Planningness this year that as planners, as marketers of any description, the hardest thing for us do is give up making our deliverables.  How will anyone know I’m great if they don’t see my brilliance in my strategic plan?

Of course, that’s about me, not the client.  And this has be about the client, and most of all about the client’s product.

Real “brand equity” is grown and is sustained by customers finding ways to bring a product into their lives in a valuable way over a long time.  Marketers, sales people, product designers and CEOs all have a collective obligation to deliver the greatest value in their products.  That’s the first thing, and that’s the last thing.

We can use marketing as a framework to explain the product to the customer so they understand and are reminded why its valuable, and why they’re part of the group of people who use that product—Starbuck’s people, or Mini-Cooper people, or Guinness drinkers?) But we can also break away from marketing as we understand it and join with people across the company to figure out new ways of proving to the customer what our products do and how they can be valuable.

I just wrote a column about how Coca-Cola did that in Portugal.  So if people who sell sugared water can do it, I think almost any good product can.

Adrian Ho tells the story of when he led account planning at Fallon and they worked on for United Airlines.  United was in a terrible slump, but working with Fallon they repositioned themselves as the best airline for the business traveler.  The results were amazing, and United made a major financial turn-around.  The result? They were very grateful to Fallon and Adrian’s team and all the tremendous work they had done capturing the imagination of the business traveler and allowing United to focus on serving them well.

But United cut Fallon’s budget completely the following year.  Why?  They needed to spend the money on renovating the interiors of the airplanes—replacing the seats with better ones, re-doing everything inside the airplane.  And that was more important to United than more great advertising.

What’s the lesson?  It’s about driving deeper into the product—don’t be satisfied with building incremental versions of what you did last year.   Think about your customer, not your role. Innovate. Think of services, content and other valuable ways we can help the customer.  These new valuable ways have to extend from the core values of our company and therefore from the design values of our products and services.  Without that “true north,” we’ll just keep lathering on crappy ads with weasel words and clever animations, and we’ll “spray and pray” our marketing budget as best we can.

And if these new forms of marketing/customer service look more like a product extensions than a marketing campaigns, that’s fine.  Break down the silos.  Built and iterate.  Social media is integrating good products and services deeper into the lives of customers, and if you look closely you’ll see some brands are growing stronger identities, built on value and expressed in valuable exchanges with customers.

That’s how you build and sustain a brand.

That’s my speech, more or less.  So thanks for inviting me.  It’s so great to see friends I’ve worked all those long nights with.  Hey, I think I could use a glass of water now. Thank you very much.

Oh, and I’m sorry Mr. Disch. I apologize for the dream sequence.  I was sleeping when I wrote this.

And then I woke up.

Related articles

• “As the noted SF writer and poet Tom Disch made clear in his 1999 book The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made…” (stoweboyd.com)
• A sad end to Saab’s story (bottomline.msnbc.msn.com)
• Marketing As A Service: Stop Selling and Start Doing Fast Company

Bookmark It

Coca-Cola Portugal’s team came up with a brilliant social experiment that it conducted last month in Lisbon, and it’s a brilliant example of how “social” isn’t defined by Facebook and Twitter, it’s defined by people.

A soccer match was coming up between the two biggest teams in Lisbon, arch-rivals Sport Lisboa and Sporting clube del Portugal.  Obviously tickets were at an absolute premium and almost impossible to get.

The Coke team planted a wallet in a busy shopping center with a hidden camera.  In the wallet was $200 and sticking out of the wallet was a ticket to the soccer match.

How many people took the ticket?  Or the money?  Or both?

The answer is that 95% of the people who found the wallet checked inside for identification, saw the money and the ticket—and turned the wallet in with both the money and the ticket.

Though all these good people probably expected nothing in return, Coke gave them a splendid reward: they each received a ticket to the soccer game of their own, courtesy of Coke.

They sat in their own section during the game.  At halftime the video of what happened in the store (in Portuguese) ran on the stadium’s video screen and the good Samaritans were given a standing ovation by the crowd.

How’s that for “feel good” social marketing?

There’s a lot to like in this idea, and frankly almost any company could have gotten great props for running it.  But what I love is that it re-enforces the major values of the Coke brand.

Coke is all about fun and enjoying life.  What better way to express this than to tap into how good we feel about the community we’re part of?  And into our passion for fun?  The same experiment without the soccer ticket doesn’t work nearly as well.  By making it about the soccer ticket Coke had people laughing along from the first second of this video.

It wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect half of the people to return the wallet with the money, but keep the soccer ticket.  Playing off the mischevous fun of spying on our fellow soccer fans, seeing their reactions when they realize what the ticket is for—and then to see them turn this precious ticket in.  Well, that makes the story-telling itself so fun.

Without the soccer ticket we would have been cringing and uncomfortable from the begining.  The soccer ticket made it fun.  And Coke joyously finished the story off by sharing the store video with the crowd at the game.  In this video we get to see the experiment, the fun of surprising the people who returned the wallet, and the joy of them being recognized by the soccer game audience.

I think examples of “brand alligned” out of the box marketing like this remind us that there’s more to social media than social networks.  More broadly it’s about how we share information socially, and that includes face to face.

Oh, and this story did pretty well on social networks too,  especially in Portugal.  The last time I checked more than 200,000 people had visited the Portuguese language version on the Coca-Cola Portugal channel on You Tube.

Enjoy:

Related articles

• Coke’s Honesty Campaign And What it Means for Marketers (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Coca-Cola Encourages Honesty In New Campaign (psfk.com)
• An Ice-Cold Coke Melts an Ice-Cold Heart in New Soccer Ad (thecoca-colacompany.com)

Bookmark It

Before moving on to more pressing issues in social media—like Google+, Facebook and the emerging Social Enterprise, just to name a few—let me nail to the wall this one final post about the disaster called Klout.

After I wrote my initial post “Delete Your Klout Profile Now,” last week I offered up a dozen questions and an open mike to Klout CEO Joe Fernandez (“Klout CEO Responds to Critics”) which he graciously stepped up to.

Except, well, Joe didn’t really answer the big questions that were asked of him by myself and many other bloggers after revelations that Klout was tracking friends from Facebook with private profiles, sweeping up minors and publishing Klout scores on them, and generally prevaricating about the real purpose of Klout and how it deals with the clients who pay the bills—advertisers like Chevy and Virgin.

Here are five questions that remain unanswered by Fernandez and Klout.  And I don’t expect clear, accountable answers on any of them any time soon:

1. What is the precise number of profiles Klout has in its systems of people who have never registered with Klout or opt-ed in to Klout in any way?  And are you deleting  these “unrequested” profiles from your database?

Klout sweeps the Internet for public social media messages—right now that’s from Facebook and Twitter.  (They also will allow people who register to add links to their LinkedIn and Google+ accounts.)  Klout claimed in September to have more than 100 million profiles.  How many of these are people who never registered at Klout, and never asked for a Klout score?

This is an easy question to answer (subtract total profiles from total registered profiles) but not easy to make public.  If Klout admits that 90 million of the 100 million accounts are people who never asked to be rated by Klout, privacy issues here and in the European Union become a very public issue.  Klout doesn’t want to talk about who’s in their database and how they got there.

Think of Klout as “anti-social media.”  It’s not about sharing and building organic networks of relationships using social media.  It’s turning social media into a popularity contest, claiming a Google-like right to mysteriously—and publicly— rank your “influence.”  They might succeed at this if they go unchallenged as they amass information and use it for a proprietary public ranking.  They’re aiming to define and own a space called “public social influence ranking.”  But their lack of transparency and  accountability in publishing public rankings of people who largely haven’t opted-in will be their un-doing.

2. How many minors under the age of 18 have Klout profiles?  How many under the age of 13?

Klout can’t answer this one because there’s no way to automatically identify these profiles.  There are still underage kids getting Klout scores and being identified as experts with “social influence.”

Fernandez’ answer was mush mouthed political candidate-speak:

“This is a challenge that every company doing business on the social web faces. We work closely with the platforms and their trust and security teams to share insights and best practices. I think there is also a role we can play here in helping parents understand how data is spread on the social web so they can be more informed about what their kids are doing.”

In other words, “we don’t know, but  that’s really a problem for parents, not us.”

3. How can anyone trust Klout scores when you keep your algorithms secret and you won’t allow an independent third party to audit their accuracy?  How can you claim transparency when you’re not transparent? 

These people want to be “the standard for influence.”  Everyone from the Gallup Poll to Neilsen to the American Bureau of Circulation provides clear, unambiguous information about their processes for polling and reporting and the raw data used to compute the results.   There’s a dozen ways to game the system and there’s no discussion about how Klout proposes to police the “black hat” and “grey hat” tools and techniques to goose your Klout score.

4. What’s the specific number of people who have opted out and deleted their Klout profiles? 

Joe won’t answer this other than to say “it’s less than .01% of all profiles.” So there’s no hard numbers.  But note how he answered the question.  Klout has developed profiles on 100 million people, mostly using public data and without their knowledge and opt-in permission.

As small as .01% is, out of 100 million profiles that still would represent 10,000 people who have deleted their profiles since November 1^st, and I think it would be a reasonable guess that most of those came after the fusillade of articles and blog posts in the middle of the month.

Klout could be losing 10,000+ profiles a month—and among the most active people in social media.  A study by Cornell University and Yahoo in March 2011 pointed out that 50% of all tweets on Twitter are sent by just 20,000 people.  Think about those numbers for a moment.  Even if the Cornell-Yahoo study is wrong by a factor of 10, that still means a few hundred thousand people make up the majority of tweets on Twitter.   How many of these “super users” are among the 100,000 or so who have deleted their profiles?  That specific question goes unanswered.

5. Why is Klout hiding the “delete your profile” option so that it can’t be found? 

There are only three hidden ways to delete your profile on Klout.  The easiest is to follow this path:

1. Log in.  If you don’t have an opt-in account, you’ll have to create one using your Twitter or Facebook profile.
2. Go to”profile settings.”
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page, which is hidden below the fold.  You’ll see these words: “Klout values your privacy. Click here to learn more.”  Click on that link.
4. You’ll arrive at the “Privacy Policy,” which is three screens of boilerplate privacy verbiage 1,259 words long.  At the very, very, very end of the Privacy Policy it says: “If you are not a Klout user and wish to opt out of Klout, please click here.”
5. You’ll finally arrive at a three page dialogue to delete your profile. 

A second way: In the footer, under the heading “KLOUT FOR DEVELOPERS,” click on “Privacy,”  and you’ll go to step “4.” above.  (“Developers?”  Why only “Developers?” unless you’re deliberately trying to make the link hard to find?)

The third way: In the “Help” section, under “Your account” there are five help articles and then a link to “more.”  None of the five articles are about how to delete your account.  If you think to click on the “more” link you’ll come to a page of ten help articles, again none about deleting your account.  Finally if you click on page “2” you’ll see the final three articles, one of which is about deleting your account.

Tricky, huh?

By contrast, to delete your Facebook account you go to Home / Account Settings / Security and there is a clear link at the top of the page that says: “Deactivate your account.”

My point is if you brought 100 users to the Klout home page for a usability test and gave them the task to delete their account, I bet 90+ wouldn’t figure out how.

It’s this kind of sneaky behavior plus the weasel words that undermine any message Joe Fernandez and Klout are trying to send about transparency and authenticity.

Ugh, Enough! 

It’s time to get back to work.  I’ve got better things to do.

Going forward Klout will or will not implode as the forces of economics (and Google, I expect) work in the marketplace.

I truly hope Klout goes away, but maybe it won’t—maybe Kleiner Perkins will get their $100 million paydaywhen Klout is sold.   Who knows?

But if you can’t figure out how to delete your Klout profile, then do yourself (and all of us) a favor and please, please at least ignore Klout.

Go out and engage with interesting people on social networks and give out more than you receive.  Try to help build communities, and make them better and more valuable to everyone.

You don’t need no stinking Klout score to tell you if you’re doing the right thing in social media.

Related articles

• Klout: 2.5 Million Profiles Deleted? Maybe 10,000? Who Knows? (take5interactive.com)
• Delete Your Klout Profile Now! (take5interactive.com)
• Klout CEO Joe Fernandez Responds To Critics (take5interactive.com)
• You Can Now Delete Your Klout Profile (lockergnome.com)
• Klout Still Suggesting Users Invite Minors (mizzinformation.com)

Bookmark It

Dutch blogger Martijn Linnsen has reviewed 18,000 Klout profiles captured prior to November 1 and found approximately 2.5% were no longer active as of December 1.  This could mean hundreds of thousands of Klout profiles have been deleted by users since the “delete your profile” option was finally offered by Klout on November 1.  I was going to add this as a comment on Social Media Today, but I think it deserves a post of his own.

Linnsen has published his results on his blog this weekend, in a post e  ntitled “Klout-O-calypse-2.5 Million People Can’t Be Wrong.”

Assuming Klout’s claim of 100 million profiles is accurate (and who really knows if that’s true?) this would mean something on the order of 2.5 million accounts of real people were deleted form Klout in November. Of those with Klout scores between 50 and 80, 4.5% of accounts were deleted by Klout–all of this despite Klout hiding the “delete your profile” function four levels deep in their site with no obvious link to it.

In an interview with me two weeks ago, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez said that since the “delete your profile” option was first offered on November 1  ” total opt-outs (were) less than .01% of our registered base.”  Note that Fernandez said, “registered base,” which I take to mean people who actively signed up for a Klout account and connected their social media networks like Twitter and Facebook voluntarily.

Klout also creates profiles of people without their knowledge or opt-in.  No one outside of Klout knows how big the number of registered users is versus these “non opt-in” profiles.  But even if it’s 50% of the 100 million Klout boasts, Fernandez was saying the total number of “opt-outs” was less than 5,000.  Linnsen’s review suggests the number might be 100 times larger.

Some profiles could have been deleted by Klout because they were private Facebook accounts un-intentionally grabbed from posts by public Facebook accounts.  Maybe some deleted profiles were minors, though Klout has not specified if and how they can identify accounts of people under the age of 18. (See my post, “Five Questions Klout Can’t Answer.” November 29)  But even discounting the raw numbers 10 times you still get totals vastly larger than what Joe Fernandez claims.

Linnsen acquired a list of 20,000 Klout accounts from University of San Francisco marketing professor Christopher Penn.  Linnsen first  deliberately eliminated any profiles with a Klout score of 10 since many of these “10s” are phony or abberant–so his sample of 18, 523 included only those with scores of 11 or above–in other words, active accounts.  (You can see a graph of how many scores per number from 0-100 in his post.)

These 20,000 scores were captured prior to Klout’s October 26 algorythim update, hence the scores are higher than we see post October 26. This explains why 17% of the scores were above 50, versus Fernandez’s statement only 6% of Klout scores are 50+ today.

But the important point is that Klout scores in the 50-80 range shown in Linnsen’s research are the most active individuals in social media outside of those named Obama or Gaga.  And Linnsen shows 4.5% of those profiles turned into puppy dogs by December 1.

What’s the truth about the number of people who have deleted their Klout profiles? Who knows?  Maybe even Joe Fernandez doesn’t know.

But it’s not “less than .01%of our registered base.”   And now there’s evidence the number could be  much, much larger.

Related articles

• Klout CEO “We Messed Up On This One and Are Deeply Sorry” (blogworld.com)
• The TRUTH About Your Klout Score: How Your Phony Number Is Calculated (businessinsider.com)
• You Can Now Delete Your Klout Profile (lockergnome.com)
• Klout’s CEO issues an apology for creating profiles of minors (thenextweb.com)
• Klout’s Automatically Created Profiles Included Minors (nytimes.com)

Bookmark It

Two weeks ago I wrote a post here called “Delete Your Klout Profile Now!” 

So far more than 10,000 people have read it on Social Media Today and another 2,000 on this blog.    It’s been shared and re-tweeted more than 2,200 times.

More important, several other bloggers and journalists have come out with posts and articles critical of Klout’s business model and privacy policies, including the New York Times.

My post against Klout was not a work of balanced journalism—it was a passionate editorial.  I do consider myself a blogger-journalist and most of my focus is on researching, interviewing and presenting new ideas about customer experience on the social Internet.  I do express my opinions at times, sometimes as an agitator.

In the spirit of fairness I asked Klout CEO Joe Fernandez if he would be willing to answer questions.

“Skeptical” was his response, but he gave it a go.  He wrote: “I am guessing you probably know that I’ve generally always made myself available and participated in the discussion around Klout even with people who have very different points of view than I do. I get that we are doing something that can be controversial and think that discussion around it is healthy.”

I said I would submit a list of questions and I promised that I would run his responses verbatim.  In addition, I offered him the chance to close by saying anything he wanted.

I will take an opportunity to write more about Klout some other time, but not here, at least not beyond this introduction.

Here are my questions and Fernandez’ answers:

Q: Assume for a minute I’m someone new into social media who’s new to the Klout concept.  I’ve read about the concerns people have, but I want your side.  What’s the argument for someone to register and participate in Klout?

A: The goal of Klout is to help people understand and maximize the impact they are having on the social web. For people who are just establishing their presence on social media, Klout is a valuable tool to benchmark their effectiveness. If you think about the amount of time we all spend on social media it’s really helpful to know and understand the impact we are having. When you see your Klout score go up you will know what activities and content your network is the most engaged with.

Q: Let’s go through some of the concerns and objections to Klout.  The New York Times on Monday published an article about the Klout practice of establishing profiles for people who haven’t registered at Klout, using their public data from Twitter and Facebook.  What’s happening with those existing profiles and how will you handle profiles of non-registered users going forward?

A: First, I want to take responsibility for screwing up here. We made a mistake by not thinking that people may be interacting with their kids on Facebook and that they could end up in Klout. Within hours of realizing this, a change was introduced to fix it. Our only intention here was to show users cool data about their influence and while we did not violate any Facebook policy we definitely learned a lesson on this. In the future we will do a much better job and we are proactively engaging the community to get a broader set of perspectives on this.

I have detailed our privacy standings here - http://corp.klout.com/blog/2011/11/we-value-your-privacy

{RJM NOTE: I’ve added the gist of the post from this link, as it relates to creating profiles of people who have never registered, and who may not be aware they have a public Klout profile:]

“I think it’s important to be specific, so here is how Klout thinks about and has always thought about social data:

• Klout analyzes public data to measure a person’s influence. The best way to think of this is in relation to how Google analyzes public websites to generate PageRank.
• Klout respects the privacy settings of all the networks it measures. If you have a private account on a social network and you have not explicitly given Klout access to your data it will not be analyzed.
• If you are creating public data but do not want it measured by Klout you can opt-out by going to the privacy page.
• Klout has no interest in understanding the influence of minors. We are working with Facebook and Twitter on this, as well as building our own safeguards to make sure this does not happen.”

Q: What is the specific number of non-registered profiles have you deleted?

A: Not going to share specifics here but I will say that total opt-outs is less than .01% of our registered base.

Q: How can you stop the profiling of kids under 18 years of age? Under 13?

A: This is a challenge that every company doing business on the social web faces. We work closely with the platforms and their trust and security teams to share insights and best practices. I think there is also a role we can play here in helping parents understand how data is spread on the social web so they can be more informed about what their kids are doing.

Q: You create public Klout scores for individuals, and you say Klout is “the standard for influence,” that is, Klout is the most important way that social influence can be measured.  (If it wasn’t the most important, then it wouldn’t be “the standard” would it?)   

But it’s very easy for people to game their social media use to get their Klout scores higher without really being more influential.  There are thousands of people who find a trendy topic (Demi divorcing Ashton, Black Friday, Taylor Swift vs. Adele, the new Twilight movie, etc.) and tweet about it, knowing they’ll get re-tweets.  If I follow Jeff Jarvis and keep saying proactive things about his books, he might RT me.  I can find people on Twitter who re-tweet everything I write in hopes THEY’LL get re-tweeted, etc.   

In other words the score is being easily gamed and there is a small faction of people who do it aggressively.  Doesn’t this inherently corrupt the “standard” Klout claims to set?

A: It’s an interesting paradox with Klout. Change the scoring algorithm and everyone gets upset. Leave things the same and everyone talks about how easy it is to game (even though there is very little hard proof to back this claim up). I think it’s helpful to back up and think about Google PageRank. Here is answer from Quora that I came across that does a really great job of describing how we think of the Klout algorithm: (http://www.quora.com/Klout/Do-Klouts-changes-on-October-26-really-reflect-influence-more-accurately?q=klout+oct).

“Think of it this way: Google

Google does not make public the specifics of their ranking algorithms. Like Klout, they simply provide advice about the kinds of things their algorithms look for. (e.g. accurate page titles, clear copywriting, good URL structure, quality content). What many people take away from these tips is the idea that search engine optimization (SEO) is the end-game for a successful business, which of course results in attempts to game the system. Businesses rise up the ranks and achieve “success” by investing in SEO “strategies” instead of quality of content and services. Ultimately, this is the result of a flawed system, and Google makes attempts to disrupt such practices.

As search engines get better at quantifying quality, we will start to see ranking and “true” relevance converge (of course, they never will entirely, and as always “relevance” is subjective). In such a world, the only way to “game” the system would be to play fairly. The target metric would still be set by Google (or pick your favorite search engine), but the results would be more internally consistent and the rankings would more precisely reflect Google’s idea of relevance.

Klout’s goal is exactly that.

Today when Klout announced the updates to their algorithm (http://corp.klout.com/blog/2011/…), they got a good amount of negative feedback in the comments section. People claimed to have been “working for months” to increase their Klout score, that Klout was “playing games” with their reputation, that they have been “Netflixed” (betrayed) by Klout, and that Klout has been “lying to” and “misguiding” its users.

For anyone in SEO, these complaints should sound familiar. The outcry comes from the misguided notion that Klout score is the end-game. Users feel betrayed because the system in which they were succeeding was swapped-out beneath their feet. What they don’t understand is that, much like search engine ranking, the system must constantly change (in ways both big and small), else it will deteriorate. There is no way to “win” at Klout (or Google) — you can only try to keep up.

In 2010, Google made 516 updates to their algorithm, some larger than others. According to Eric Schmidt, they tested over 13,000 changes. I believe that the result of these changes, and the rigorous testing that goes on behind the scenes, has been largely positive, regardless of how many business were impacted negatively. We can only hope that, as Klout expands, it follows in the footsteps of its search engine cousins and realizes that it can never stop moving.”

Q: Klout’s tagline is “the standard for influence.”  But you don’t make your scoring algorithms public and your data is not audited by any outside authority for accuracy.  You’re not beholden to anyone to be accurate, or to be free of bugs that could be exploited to game the system.  Why should we—or advertisers–believe that Klout is “the standard for influence?”

A: Fair question. I believe there are a few things worth considering:

• I agree that we have not done enough to make it easy to understand what the score means and why a person has a certain score. This is something we are really focused on right now.
• While there is more we can do, I would argue that we are incredibly transparent from the standpoint that you can go to Klout and put in anyone’s name and see his or her score and data. Think about all the other data sources like Neilson or Comscore that act as standards and how they operate in the background  – only accessible to a few willing to pay high subscription fees.
• There is no centralized auditing committee to review Klout data but because we put the scores out publicly the whole world audits our work every day. If someone sees an issue with Klout data not only are we informed about it, but it is almost always then shared with the rest of the world through Twitter and blogs. I would bet that we are more audited than most standards.
• We have to earn being “the standard for influence” every day through the quality of our data. Again, because it’s all public we either past the sniff test or we don’t.

Q: You added an option to profile settings to “delete your profile” on November 1st.  Can you explain why, and how you feel about that option going forward?

A: Perhaps foolishly we tried to take a hard stance on this issue before Nov 1. Our position was that if you are creating public data we are going to analyze it, just like Google and thousands of lesser-known companies are already doing. At the same time our goal isn’t to be jerks and the day came when this felt like the right thing to do for the community.

I feel like we were probably being overly idealistic and I am glad we have the feature in place going forward.

Q: How do you react to posts like mine objecting to Klout or calling for people to delete their Klout profiles?

A: I started Klout almost 4 years ago.  Back then social media (and Twitter specifically) was basically a joke. Like most entrepreneurs I am no stranger to people telling me that what I am doing is impossible or just plain a bad idea. You develop a thick skin trying to create new things and take on the world.

I understand that what we are doing can be viewed a lot of different ways. My goal with Klout is to create something really empowering for the individual but I get why it can be controversial. I think conversation around what we are trying to do here is healthy. I feel like a lot of the conversation lately has been filled with misinformation around how the algorithm works, our goals, and what we do with our data though, so that has been somewhat tough to handle.  However, in the end it just means we need to do a much better job of being proactive about getting our message out about these things.

Q: What is the specific number of profiles Klout has deleted of people who did not proactively register at the Klout site?  Is it Klout’s policy going forward to publish profiles of people who have not opt-ed in to Klout by registering at your site?

We do not disclose opt-out (or registration) numbers but I can tell you the opt-out numbers have been small. Our policy on whose data we analyze is detailed on our blog - http://corp.klout.com/blog/2011/11/we-value-your-privacy/.

[RJ NOTE: See an excerpt from this link quoted above in response to question #2]

Q: Klout is competing with other companies in the “social influence” scoring business.  There’s a broad objection to the idea that social influence can be calculated in any meaningful way.  People can be seen and heard broadly but have very little influence, and visa-versa.  To me, it’s like trying to calculate “talent” or “beauty.”  How do you respond to that?

A: We believe influence is the ability to drive actions. For the first time influence can be measured through social media. There are a lot of nuances though. I often think about doing a Google search back in 1999. The results were better than anything else out there but if those same results were returned today you would laugh. This is the same journey we are going through at Klout. It’s very early but we couldn’t be more excited about the challenge ahead of us.

Q: Your business model, roughly speaking, is to evaluate people’s social influence, identify those people to advertisers who you consider to be most influential.  Clearly you have to sell an advertiser on the idea that this will be good for them.  What’s your pitch of how this works?

A: Actually this is the opposite of our business model. We never identify influencers to advertisers. We help individuals understand their influence and then identify brands that want to connect with them. The power is always in the users’ hands. They have the power to pick what, if any, brands they want to connect with and their information is never sold to advertisers.

I am really proud of this model and find it strange that it’s something we seem to get bashed for. Influence is the holy grail of marketing. Companies across the web make money off our influence every day as we are cookied and shown ads as we cruise the web. Klout is the first time that individuals directly participate in the value created from their influence. I love that over 250,000 perks have been given out this year. These are real people getting real products and then having the power to tell the world if they like them or not.

You asked about our pitch – it’s actually pretty simple. We get calls every day from brands that want to reach influencers. We ask them for the topics of influence they are interested in and what they are willing to give these influencers. If we think what they are willing to give the influencers is cool enough we will post it in the Klout Perks section of our site and users have the choice as to whether or not they want to participate. Again, this is very different than identifying influencers to brands and it’s important to us that the power is always in the user’s hands.

Q: Anything you want to add?

A: I appreciate you taking the time to have a conversation about Klout with me. If you are interested in hearing more about the vision behind Klout or some insights on our algorithm I would recommend checking out our blog at http://corp.klout.com/blog

Related articles

• Klout Score Cock Up! [Nic Oliver] (ecademy.com)
• Klout’s CEO issues an apology for creating profiles of minors (thenextweb.com)
• Sing Now The Praises Of Klout’s Klumsy Kludges (techcrunch.com)
• Klout CEO “We Messed Up On This One and Are Deeply Sorry” (blogworld.com)
• Three reasons I like Klout! (innovationslab.wordpress.com)

Bookmark It

Klout’s CEO Joe Fernandez gave an interview this summer—before the new Klout algorithm rolled out—in which he said, ““When you think about it, the idea of measuring influence is kind of crazy. Influence has always been something that we each see through our own lens.”

Don’t get me going, pal.

Enough people have flamed Klout for their scoring mechanics over the past three weeks that I don’t need to add my rant to that pile.  But I need to write this post to explain the ethical problem Klout poses for those of us who use social networks for a significant amount of connection, communication and information.  And to ask you to do something about it.

Please, when you get done reading this, go to www.klout.com and delete your profile from Klout forever.

Completely.  And don’t look back.  I did it this week, and so far my social cred has not come crashing down around my head.

The fundamental evil of Klout is that it’s a venture capital-backed company looking to leverage into a big IPO payday  and the only value proposition they offer is their ability to identify, train and exploit people they can sell to advertisers as “key influencers,” in a taxonomy of business interests.

What do these “key influencers” get for their efforts?  Pennies.  Swag. Little discounts.  These people are the entire sum of the Klout value proposition.  Klout exists for the benefit of advertisers, not for the people Klout measures or even those few chosen to receive their swag bags .

That’s the big inequity.   Other Klout-like start-ups like PROSkore exist for the benefit of the people being measured.  PROSkore is trying to match social scoring with LinkedIn-type connections, peer to peer.  Klout exists to exploit people who use social media.  And to disparage those it choses to rank lower, no matter how damn egalatarian Klout claims their system to be.

And the more Klout gains, well, clout in the marketplace, the more they will become the gold standard for identifying people who are great connectors on social media.

Beyond this fundamental sleaziness, there is a bigger issue that makes Klout wrong, and frankly all social scoring wrong.  Social communications should be for the benefit of the people doing the communicating.  Influence cannot be measured, just as beauty and cool cannot be measured.  Measuring “social influence” tries to sell the lie that such things as “social influence” and “connected-ness” can be measured quantitatively, then acquired, packaged and sold to the highest bidder.

I’ll completely ignore the problems others are having with the way the Klout score is calculated.  I object to the entire idea of a Klout score regardless of its accuracy.

What happens a year from now when you try to get a job in marketing and you’re rejected because your Klout score is only in the 30s?  Or when a bunch of black hat rats figure out how to game the Klout system and make their small fortunes selling you robot apps that will juice up your Klout score?

Fernandez may protest that none of this isn’t anything that Facebook isn’t getting ready to do with advertisers, anyway.  That in my book only means than Fernandez and his crew are only slightly less evil and creepy than Mark Zuckerberg might be.

The only answer—and it’s the ONLY answer—is for us to withdraw from Klout.  Unless a substantial number of us build a movement of people to quit Klout, they will become the 7^th grade cool kids of social media, determining your worth to their advertisers and your clients and peers.

It’s easy to do.   If you go to www.klout.com, just do the following:

• Go to Profile Settings and, at the bottom of the page
• Choose the option to delete your account

And then go on with your life.  You’ll feel so much better how you’ve helped make social media better, and perhaps eventually we can derail Klout entirely.

Or you can wait and spend $99 on one of those black hat robot apps to get your Klout score up to the same level as your next door neighbor.

Your choice, neighbor.

Related articles

• PubCon: Kristopher Jones on Increasing Klout Score and Social Presence (searchenginejournal.com)
• Size Does Matter When It Comes to Klout (thetechscoop.net)
• Thoughts on Social Influence (marissagagnier.com)
• You Can Now Delete Your Klout Profile (lockergnome.com)

Bookmark It

Malcolm Gladwell checks in this week with his appreciation of Steve Jobs in this week’s New Yorker (November 14th) entitled “The Tweaker.”

Well put.

Gladwell has written before about Jobs and his contribution to the art and science of  innovation, the evidence is what Apple developed across his four decades with the company.

Gladwell’s insight that Jobs was not an inventor like Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin–but perhaps he was something more important than that.

He was, to use the English term, “a tweaker.” Steve Jobs was a person who could take a pretty good idea from someone else,  and by the sheer force of his personality, turn it into a fantastic idea.

In the 19th Century in England there were several notable “tweakers” who vastly improved inventions spawned by the Industrial Revolution. This is why, according to some scholars, Great Britain was the engine of the Industrial Revolution, not France or Germany. Gladwell cites the example of the spinning wheel, invented nominally by Samuel Crampton in 1779, but tweaked by a half dozen people, including Richard Roberts, the master of precision machine tooling.

Precision idea tooling was, in a sense, Steve Job’s gift.

He forced his brittle, mono-maniacal sensibilities onto a series of consumer product ideas invented by others (sometimes stolen, he admitted, as with the infamous Xerox PARC visit of 1979) and made these products great, great works of collective genius.

He pretty much got the credit for these inventions and well, that was  also part of his curse/gift.

Malcolm Gladwell has written before about the changing nature of genius—that “inspired” individual geniuses like Einstein are being supplanted by geniuses who are “synthesizers.” These geniuses reach across several new ideas to pull together a single, synthetic idea bigger and more important than the combination of the parts.

One of my favorite Gladwell articles of all time is about Ron Popiel, the great TV pitchman and inventor of the Veg-O-Matic, among many other consumer treasures. Popiel reminds me of a friendly Steve Jobs—someone who loved taking other people’s ideas and making them much better. And both men really truly loved the art of presenting ideas,  of pitching ideas to the public.  Synthetic geniuses who knew how to pitch ideas to their audience.  That’s the future of genius, I think.  And Steve Jobs showed us the way.

Clearly there’s a lot of money to be made sharpening other people’s pencils—once you take the pencil away from them, and then sell it to others.

So what are the lessons to be learned by the start-up or the agile marketing team from Steve Jobs, Master Tweaker?

It seems there are at least these three:

1. Never fall in love with your own ideas. A VC friend of mine tells me that when he’s considering a business plan “the idea” ranks #4 among the criteria he judges it by. What’s #1? The quality and commitment of the executive team, especially the CEO. What’s #2? “The experience and ability of the executive to revise and change their plan when their big idea turns out to be wrong.”

2. Your process should be built around quickly identifying ideas that are working and building fast on those ideas. Agile methodology starts with a vision or direction, which I’ve heard called “True North.” True North might be “build a better smartphone.” Or it might be “bring our products into the Chinese Market.” There’s a lot of ideas you will come up with trying to solve these problems—big ideas, small ideas—and they all matter. You need to process them and figure out if they matter or don’t—fast. And keep building on success.

3. Details matter—a lot. In his appreciation of Jobs this week Gladwell re-counts the story of how much Jobs loved the personal jet owned by his friend, Oracle founder Larry Ellison. He loved every detail so much he had the same designer build exactly the same jet for him. But then Jobs noticed details he didn’t like and they started bugging him. He began ripping out pieces and having them re-designed and engineered. Once such detail was that Ellison’s jet had a door into the cabin that had two buttons, “open” and “close.” Jobs replaced it with a single button that toggled. Another was that all the buttons in the jet were polished steel. Jobs had them thrown out and replaced with brushed metal buttons. Ellison says, ““I look at his airplane and mine,” Ellison says, “and everything he changed was better.”

The best quality of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs is that it shows us a full 360 degrees around the man. He was brilliant, he valued simplicity and grace in design, and he was finally a great family man who died too young.

And he was a narcissistic, bullying perfectionist who would abuse his own people, screaming that their ideas were no good—no matter what they did just to goad them to do better.

Somewhere amid all of these powerful, conflicted forces was the man who defined innovation at the turn of the 21st century.  And this is a time when we need innovation desperately in our world.

Related articles

• The 630-page Steve Jobs biography in 3,000 words (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Steve Jobs’ Credo: “I’ll Know It When I See It” (techcrunch.com)
• Steve Jobs As The Rude Refiner (forbes.com)
• Steve Jobs and openness (johndcook.com)

Bookmark It

Here’s the fantastic satire of the Republican debates, featuring seven different impressions of candidates–including Alec Baldwin as Rick Perry.  I think SNL is hoping that Alec Baldwin as Rick Perry is the 2012 version of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.  Hysterical start to the presidential madness:

So why run this video on my blog?

I’m supposed to be blog about “customer experience.”

Two reasons.  First, it’s damn funny and I hope it’s the start of a year of political satire as rich as the one SNL delivered in 2008.  (I miss the Cheney imitations the most)

Second, I checked Google and one week after its airing there are now at least 800+ links to this clip.  That means there are at least 799 other Websites that have embedded this clip.   The “water cooler” popularity of Saturday Night Live continues, now well into its fourth decade, and the quality of the political satire on the show continues to be a big reason.

Twenty five years ago advertisers relished the water cooler effect because it meant that if they advertised on SNL huge numbers of people would have seen their commercials.  Now I can download it and once you get past the annoying Microsoft/Allstate/Action movie commercial at the front end, you get to see the same SNL that millions of people saw last Saturday or Sunday as they fast-forwarded through the commercials on their DVRs.

Selling commercial time on Hulu is bonus marginal revenue for NBC,  but it still points out how hard it is to get people to pay for quality content except through closed gardens like Apple and Netflix.

I’m less troubled by NBC’s challenges in finding marginal revenue than I am by the inability of brands to find a way to ally/sponsor/integrate effectively and honestly with quality content.

Maybe Pepsi ought to hire Dennis Leary to start a variety show that you can only watch on Pepsi.com.  And follow that with live broadcast of skateboarding/snowboarding competitions.  People could come see it for free, but only on the Pepsi channel.  The Pepsi channel could stand for irreverence–Leary could bring in Gen X and the snowboarding could bring in Gen Y.  They could find something for the millenials.  Maybe Kristin Wiig could be bought for a huge sum of money.

We’re wandering purposelessly in the wilderness of the post interruption/adjacency era.  The 4 P’s are now  the 4 D’s: dis-intermediated, disintegrated, disorganized and disconsolate.

I think there still exists a threshold for talent below which we the people won’t engage much. be it music, comedy, drama, or free-running.  So Alec Baldwin is much funnier much more often than that knucklhead on You Tube.  And there also is a threshold above which exist brands and products that are mass market enough they require engagement and consideration from large numbers of people in order to be profitable.  What’s fragmenting and eroding are the delivery platforms that can promise enough money from brands to deliver large enough audiences willing to be inter-mediated.  But I gotta think that some bright media executives are going to realize that there’s nothing stopping Pepsi or Coke or Veg-O-Matic from becoming their own television stations.

The Comedy Show, now on the Pampers Channel.  Or “FIFA Soccer 12″ on XBox360, live from Nike Stadium.

Meanwhile enjoy the SNL skit.  It really made me laugh.

Can’t wait to download the next one.

Related articles

• Alec Baldwin Plays Rick Perry For SNL’s GOP Debates (perezhilton.com)
• POLITICO Playback: ‘SNL’ tackles GOP (politico.com)
• ‘Saturday Night Live’ w/ Alec Baldwin & Radiohead Scores Preliminary 2.6 Adults 18-49 Rating (tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com)
• WATCH: Alec Baldwin’s Funniest ‘SNL’ Moments (huffingtonpost.com)
• SNL Still #1 On Saturday Nights! (perezhilton.com)

Bookmark It