The firing of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich last week over a single sexual harassment claim shocked some people because the scope of the crime seemed out of proportion to the punishment. This articleby Agility PR makes the case that one harassment claim can do more damage to your brand than a charge of financial fraud. The Register suggests that the reason for Krzanich’s dismissal goes deeper, and if that’s true, it wouldn’t reflect well on Intel. Companies need to navigate these waters with care, making sure they are prepared for a harassment charge, rather than hoping for the best.

What you ask Google influences the results you get. That’s probably not news, but it has interesting implications when you consider the trust people put in search engines to deliver the truth. Francesca Tripodi surveyed two Republican groups in Virginia — a women’s group and a college group — during their 2017 gubernatorial election. Just by varying one word in the search box, such as using  “NFL ratings up” vs. “NFL ratings down,” proved to deliver two very different result sets. We discuss what marketers can learn from the exercise and how to craft better keyword collections and hashtags for your future campaigns.

You can listen to our podcast here.

Why isn’t marketing attracting more college grads? That’s the topic Paul Gillin and I explore this week, starting with the results of a study commissioned by Marketing Week earlier this year which  found that just 3% of undergraduates think marketing offers them the best career opportunities.

The publication held a seminar to try to explore ways to better engage Gen Z, and we have several thoughts on the matter too. Colleges need to have more focused marketing programs, and businesses need to show that a wide range of skills and talents can be put to best use with marketing programs. Certainly there are obstacles, such as CEOs who think they are good marketers when they aren’t, or conflicts between sales and marketing staffs. But with big data becoming an essential part of the marketing discipline, there’s more opportunity for marketing to impact a company’s future than we’ve seen since the dawn on TV advertising.

Listen to our 14 min. podcast here:

In my role as a journalist, I’ve been deluged with hundreds of pitches for GDPR-related stories, which went into effect last week. It didn’t help matters that on the first day the UK commissioner’s website was down for a couple of hours, an Austrian privacy advocate hit Facebook and Google with billions of euros in lawsuits and the privacy browser plug in Ghostery sent out emails about its change in policy, but inadvertently cc’d 500 user names in each batch of email.

In this episode of FIR B2B podcast (19 min.), I discuss the impact of GDPR with my partner Paul Gillin, who has seen his fair share of pitches as well. We discuss some of the best and worst PR pitches we received in the months running up to the launch of the General Data Privacy Regulation, and why a handful stood out.

Klout is dead. The news wasn’t a surprise, and the announcement from its current owners at Lithium didn’t leave anyone tearing up. The idea of boiling influence down to a single number always struck us as overly simplistic. And the tools to measure influence are so much more sophisticated now than in Klout’s heyday.

But we should pause and understand why Klout fell into disuse and what marketers can learn about measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. It’s also a good time to look at what other tools are available that are useful, such as LinkedIn Social Selling Index, (shown here) which gives your account various scores and then breaks them down into four components that have a little more meaning. You can see how you rank within your industry and within your LinkedIn network. There’s also Twitter Analytics, which tracks changes in your Twitter engagement through five different elements: tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and followers. Again, one number doesn’t really describe the range of influence that a social network provides, and you might want to focus on one or two elements as you measure your own reach.

I reviewed social media marketing tools many years ago and certainly that universe has seen some evolution, but SproutSocial, SimplyMeasured, Looker and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud are all still available and very reasonable measurement tools as you construct your campaigns. And as general purpose business intelligence tools such as Microsoft’s PowerBI and Domo become easier to use, they can be used for this purpose.

We also touch upon another looming deadline this week, with the GDPR regulations coming into full force. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin has written a piece about executives are turning more positive on its potential and also using the compliance deadline to effect some positive changes in their organizations’ privacy and data protection policies.

You can listen to our latest podcast (15 min.)here.

John Steinert joined TechTarget as CMO two years ago after a decades-long career in B2B technology at companies that included Pitney Bowes and SAP. So why join a tech publisher? Steinert actually doesn’t see TechTarget as a publisher, and in this recent piece he explained why he was so excited about the opportunity: product, purpose, people and potential. In this interview we discuss the differences between publishing and content marketing, how intent marketing can help provide insights into impending technology purchase decisions and how marketers can make their content more effective and targeted. 

TechTarget’s not-so-secret weapon is its lead generation and tracking mechanisms, which permit the company to see exactly what kinds of content is crucial for their visitors. Steinert describes what data is collected — with visitors’ permissions of course — and how it can be used by their advertisers and sponsors. He also distinguishes between visitors who are just looking to snack on information versus binge consumers, who are likely closer to purchase.

This all makes a difference in what kind of content is created and how keywords are chosen to bring in the right visitors. “You have to have strong SEO, people have to find your stuff and it has to be cross-linked and judged popular and valuable,” he says 

TechTarget’s distinction has always been its portfolio of microsites focused on technologies products or categories — such as SearchWindowsServer.com. But you’d be hard-pressed to find the names of those sites on the company’s home page today. That’s deliberate. Far from being a publisher, TechTarget is today a data company.

Incidentally, both Paul and myself have had a long connection with TechTarget: Paul was the company’s sixth employee and I have been a regular freelancer for numerous websites of theirs.

There is a lot of wisdom in what Steinert says, and he is worth a careful listen to our 25 min. podcast here.

Marshall Kirkpatrick leads influencer marketing at Sprinklr.  He and I worked together at ReadWrite long ago, and he subsequently started Little Bird, an influncer marketing platform that was acquired by Sprinklr in 2016. Since then, he has helped augment the combined platforms for the enterprise.

Marshall has been active in understanding how social media influence is acquired and measured for more than a decade, and likes to talk about this pyramid, in which influence is just one of several steps toward providing real insights into how a brand is understood in various media forms. While our discussion on this podcast is mostly about Twitter and measuring its influence and effects on marketing B2B brands, we also talk about how to find people within an organization that are more inclined to tell your story.

One key data point is to look at when someone started using social media networks: the earlier they did, the more potentially influential that person could be. It isn’t just about counting raw numbers of followers, Marshall says; an influencer has to be picky about who they follow. There are ways to suss this out. Social media is more about finding quality than quantity. 

You can listen to Paul Gillin and I talk about this here.