Posts Tagged ‘Influence’

A new infographic from KISS Metrics is a one-stop-shop for everything you need to know about how online influence is measured and how to increase your Klout.

AllFacebook Marketing Conference returns to San Francisco on June 28-29! Join us and get a how-to guide for marketing to Facebook’s 800 million users. A full agenda will be announced soon. Keep an eye on our event site for more information. Special early pricing is available for only $249 until this Wednesday, February 15, so register today.

As marketers struggle to define the value of social media to their brands, new Knowledge Networks findings demonstrate that consumers are much more likely to discover new products and brands or refer to social media before making purchase decisions than they were just a year ago. In fact, the purchase decisions of 38 million 13 to 80 year olds in the U.S. are now influenced in various ways by social media — up 14% in just six months.

But that’s not all the research reveals. More, after the jump.

Guest blogger Julie Walsh was pleasantly surprised when she sent a tweet out to no one in particular and received a bounty that not only got her though the day – it earned the gifting brand a loyal customer. After the jump, how one-to-one marketing can harness social media and influence Millennials.

Can you measure influence by Twitter followers, website hits, and Facebook “likes”or does the definition of influence run much deeper? We take a look at how influence can be gauged on the social web, as well as in the real world.

The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through social media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. How is it that certain topics manage to get more attention than others, thus going viral and changing the agenda of an online community? A [...]

An interesting study was published today suggesting that “so-called ‘influencers’ might have less clout than some marketers think.” This is not really surprising but I would suggest that there is a spectrum of influence in marketing and advertising. Along that spectrum is our close friends and family which provide the most influential personal recommendations and at the other end of the spectrum would be advertising such as billboard ads.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick suggests, this means that the infamous “Tipping Point” that Malcom Gladwell created may not be accurate. To suggest that the majority of people make decisions based on a select group of people is somewhat ludicrous. The study stated that:

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

So does this mean that there is no point in investing in the “well-known bloggers” when executing a marketing campaign? I don’t think so. Ultimately marketing and advertising is about diversification so spread it out based on the impact of each of your marketing investments. This study also shows that Facebook’s SocialAds system could theoretically have a substantial impact. If our close friends and family are using something we are more likely to buy it.

Leveraging click-thru data of individual advertisements on Facebook to monetize our influence makes a lot of sense. Why not get paid for something that you’ve worked hard to build?
The study adds that determining influence is not simple though:

“Understanding real influence, you have to look at a number of factors from the type of audience someone attracts, where their expertise lies, and the context in which other sites are linking to them.”

While it’s not easy to track all of the factors of influence are, I would say that Facebook is currently the closest to calculating our digital influence. Do you think there are other companies that will succeed at this sooner? Do you think monetizing influence makes much sense?