Are we thinking about Social Influence Marketing broadly enough? Probably not
Analysts agree that precious few dollars of a marketer's budget have been spent on social influence marketing. A JupiterResearch report in July showed that one half of all advertisers spent less than 5% of their online budget on social marketing. On the flip side, the same marketers plan to increase their marketing budgets by 25%.
While those numbers are probably accurate for marketers across the board, I wonder whether they capture the complete story. Social Influence Marketing (SIM) is not just about spending on a campaign that can be deployed through a social platform like YouTube or Facebook. It isn't even about building applications for these platforms or paying for "viral seeding".
SIM is a lot broader than that and can include site side activities like establishing a rigorous brand monitoring program, enhancing a retail website to include ratings and reviews from companies like BazaarVoice or Pluck, making all digital content portable using services like Social Notes and conducting primary and secondary research to understand how exactly peer influence works at every stage in the marketing funnel.
This last point is the most important and often forgotten. SIM is fundamentally about allowing for influence to take place both the anonymous and the peer influence. Understanding the anonymous influence is easier, that's where the brand and conversation monitoring tools help. You learn who is talking about your brand or product and where and then put a program in place to respond to that. Peer influence - knowing which peers of a potential customer most influence a brand affinity or a purchasing decision is harder and requires serious research, time and money. To do this right, you have to think more strategically than the context of a marketing campaign allows. Otherwise, you won't really be taking advantage of social influence marketing to get a leg up on your competitors.
The JupiterResearch study does end by saying that to support the needs of marketers, publishers must work with them to link behavior on their own sites, advertisers' sites and on search engines to capture engagement and understand influence, brand loyalty and viral behavior. That's very true.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Are we thinking about Social Influence Marketing broadly enough? Probably not.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://shivsingh.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1852
Leave a comment