This post is about how social media marketing can help your business generate targeted, high quality leads.

Here’s what we know about the more traditional approach to lead generation:

• Somewhere close to you this morning, a group of small business owners will be attending an early morning networking breakfast, each hoping that someone gives them a lead.
• At another location, a small business owner is wondering what will happen, when her radio commercial is played today.
• Another business owner, will be standing by the phone, waiting for the response to his latest mail shot.
• Then there will be the business owner, waiting to see what happens when the magazine she advertised in gets published today.
• Finally, one business owner will be summoning up the courage to start making cold calls.

Those are some common ways for small business owners to try and get business leads.

Another approach – Social media marketing

Social media marketing allows us to network on a local, national or global scale. It allows us to build targeted networks of great contacts, based on our specific area of commercial interest. The cost is extremely low and there’s no cost barrier to building as big and successful a network as you can. For those of us who add blogging to our social media marketing mix, we can also showcase our expertise and knowledge to these amazing people, so they can get a real handle on who we are and the value we bring.

This blog and my other social media marketing accounts, generate sales and business leads for my business all day, every day. This means I have the freedom to run a successful small business, whilst living in a beautiful, rural location, with clients and customers worldwide, and never need to attend networking events, pay for advertisements or pay for any other type of marketing.

Online and offline – It’s all about people

If you’re thinking that social media marketing only works for businesses that are mainly based online, consider this. I was prompted to write this post after receiving 2 messages on the same day, from 2 totally unconnected people. They give a perfect example of the way online and offline have fused together.

• Irene Koehler wanted to know if my ears were burning, because at a meeting in California, Kelly Kim, the co-founder of Twylah, mentioned me to her. These professionals had never met before and I had nothing to do with their meeting, yet they both knew me because of my social media marketing. A great example of online merging with offline.
• Later that day, Shona Easton asked me if my ears were burning, because she was talking about me to a guy at an exhibition in London. Shona knew me initially via social media, but her conversation with that person at the exhibition, took my reach offline.

In short: Before you tell yourself, ‘I’m too busy to find out how to correctly use social media marketing’, it’s important you know the possible upside, when you discover how to do the right things, correctly.

As regular readers will know, I rejoined Klout back in April to see if the service had improved.

An apparent spate of stories earlier this year suggested people were being refused jobs for having too low a Klout score or offered better customer service, for having a high Klout score. I wanted to know what this was based on. I wanted to know if Klout had fixed the obvious problems with its influence scoring system, since I last used the service.

So, I rejoined Klout. Here’s what I found and why I elected to delete my account.

Klout feels like a game

The first thing you notice when you join Klout is that their website operates just like a game. With your score changing every 24 hours and badges and perks awarded for hitting certain levels of achievement, Klout’s team have really got the hang of gamification.

Of course, the game can’t be won, because your score changes daily and even a short break from social networking sites will result in your score heading south. A couple of weeks in the sun or even a period where you are too busy to constantly publish content across your social networks, will see the poorly developed Klout software assume you are less influential than you used to be.

Klout’s forums have many messages from people, explaining how they have ‘worked hard to get their Klout score to X.’ Instead of measuring influence as it claims to, it feels like Klout is awarding points to people who ‘work on their Klout score’.

Worryingly, many small business owners have told me that they feel pressured into flooding their social networks with updates, just to increase their Klout score. They do this, because it works. In my opinion, by creating a ocean of Klout-bait social network updates, you are more likely to damage your online reputation, than achieve something positive by driving your Klout score up in this way.

Klout was unreliable

Throughout the 6 weeks I used the service, it was unable to ‘see’ the vast majority of my Facebook Page activity. The highest number of ‘likes’ Klout was able to see was 11 in total – even though just 1 of my updates during that time had been liked 80 times!

When I deleted my Klout account, it took 2 attempts. A number of people told me they could still see my Klout account, so I checked it myself and it was indeed still live, though showing a score of 10, which is the usual score for a new account. I then made a 2nd attempt to delete the account, which seems to have worked. Almost 3 years after Klout’s launch, it was still frustratingly buggy to use.

Klout and influence

Ultimately, for a Klout score to be taken seriously, Klout needs to be able to do 2 things correctly:

1. It needs to be able to correctly identify accounts from people, who have online influence.
2. It needs to be able to correctly identify accounts from people, who lack influence.

In my experience, it wasn’t able to do either reliably.

The biggest problem I had the first time I used Klout, was that anyone could fake a high score, simply by publishing massive amounts of even low quality updates through their social networks and auto following thousands of people. There are people who have scores over 70, which is very high, who seem to do little other than play with Klout all day. They don’t get lots of retweets or ‘likes’ for what they share, but it seems Klout can’t tell the difference between someone with no influence, who shares 20 tweets and gets 1 retweet for each of them, and an influential Twitter user, who shares 1 tweet, which is retweeted 20 times.

Conversely, truly influential people online slip through the gaping holes in Klout’s influence measuring software. Ron Conway for example, has a lower score than most people reading this, even though he is extremely influential in the world of online business (online influence is what Klout claims to be the standard for!) Ron invests millions into companies like Facebook, Google and Paypal. Ron is also a business associate of Henry Kissinger, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods and Shaquille O’Neal.

When I researched Ron’s score, it was just 48 out of 100 and lower than most of the small business owners I know.

Why? Because Ron doesn’t play the Klout game or ‘work on his score’!

My own Klout score was 62 and totally failed to reflect my online influence, as someone whose work is read online thousands of times every day. However, the long term unemployed son of a friend of mine, has a Klout score of 71. It was as high as 74. It’s hard to take Klout seriously, when it scores that kid 23 points more influential, than Ron Conway!

Is a low Klout score really losing people job opportunities?

As I said at the start, one of the reasons I invested the time and effort to research how effective Klout was at measuring influence, was that reports were rife that people were being refused jobs through having too low a score. I spoke with the HR people at a number of companies, small and large and in every case they said Klout would be no part of the hiring process, regardless of the position. I then discovered that there were just a small number of verifiable stories of jobs being refused because of low Klout scores, but these stories were repeated and quoted over and over again.

Surely, common sense suggests that any company ready to refuse you a job, just because a piece of software failed to allocate you a high enough number, would not be worth working for?

I would be equally suspicious of hiring a consultant, coach or trainer who seems to have nothing of substance behind them, other than a high Klout score. One thing that has come back to me again and again, is that Klout is the darling of smoke blowers.

Goodbye Klout

Following my experiment, I chose to delete my Klout account and allow people the chance to judge me for themselves, just as they did before. Anyone genuinely interested in learning more about me can check out my blog or chat with me on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. They can then decide what they think of me and my work.

Even after supposedly improving the Klout algorithm, the service is extremely unreliable and too easy to fool, to be taken seriously. All the same problems I had with Klout when it launched almost 3 years ago remain, though at least today, they allow us to delete our accounts.