Web Marketing Wednesdays: Klout Reboot, Valentine's Day Research, Wharton's App

Welcome back to Web Marketing Wednesdays (WMW), Southwark Consulting’s weekly roundup of news and notes from the digital marketing world! This week we look at the Klout reboot, the science of Valentine’s Day (and how it relates to marketing), a few articles about the future of content marketing and social media, and Wharton Magazine’s new app. As our regular readers know, the aim of this column is to provide a regular rundown of key news items and tech tips for business school admissions and marketing staff. Read on for all the latest…

As many of you may know, Klout is a tool that calculates the influence or ‘clout’ that people have on social media by measuring their engagement across social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and more. If you aren’t already familiar with Klout it’s certainly worth setting up an account and checking up on how your various social media channels are doing by Klout’s standards. What brings Klout to WMW, however, is the fact that the service’s online dashboard has been changed to allow users the ability to curate content and share items they like from across social media. This article from Dashburst, explains why Klout’s new dashboard makes them a content marketing tool.

Speaking of content marketing, while many are claiming that the web is increasingly saturated with useless content (most of it veiled marketing attempts), Rebecca Lieb at iMediaConnection authored a great piece about why the cream still rises to the top. Just when we thought all the articles about predictions for 2014 had died off, this week saw a great piece from WeBlogBetter about why social media will continue to grow in the coming year – essentially boiling it down to the following: 1) continued facility of photo usage in posts, 2) the sheer variety of social media platforms – allowing marketers to reach into every niche, 3) growth in the use of video in social media, 4) social media’s absolute dominance on smartphones. Of course, before you haphazardly throw more of your marketing efforts into social media channels, we would encourage you to read Pam Moore’s piece about RAMs (Random Acts of Marketing). The article does have a corporate slant to it, but the general advice is applicable in the higher ed market too.

Finally, wrapping up this week’s WMW, we’ll look at news out of two leading business schools – Stanford and Wharton. Stanford has published a wonderful piece about the science of love in conjunction with Valentine’s Day. While it’s mostly just a fun read – and not 100% relevant to web marketing – there are some interesting kernels of truth on subjects like ‘playing hard to get’ that may resonate with those admissions officers who are busy wooing prospective students. Over at Wharton, the noteworthy development is the release of a Wharton Magazine app that is getting sound reviews and should be of interest to any business school or higher ed institution that is pondering the app space.