Trend Assessment - Rise of Social Influencers Engagement

Rise of Social Influencers Engagement Trend Assessment I

Feb 14th 2012

By: Deepti DhimanUniversity of Memphis, Memphis TN

What is the Trend?• Rise in the involvement of influencers in

online marketing.• Firms are making efforts to– Find– Reward– Recruit

What are Influencers?• “Special” people who have the power to

affect the opinions of “ordinary” people.• New Class of social influencers

What are Influencers?• Malcolm Gladwell - “The Tipping Point” – Connectors

• Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) – 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your customers.

Why Social Influencers?

• Big Data to play and find the perfect influencer

• Tools to measure online influence – Klout, PeerIndex.

• Most interactions are taking place in social media.

• Influence is more important than sheer numbers of followers.

Case 1 : USA for UNHCR

• Blue Key Campaign – “Tweetathon” to reach 6,000 people– Blue Key Champions –”Influencers”

• Result– 1,524 tweets with the #bluekey hashtag– 169% increase in traffic – 50% keys purchased due to Tweetathon

Case 2 : BillMyParents

• 3-months campaign to reach 600,000 moms – Niche community - Vocalpoint– Engagement of Influencers – Good content - Attention grabbing message– Engaged customers using “try and tell” model– Focused e-mail communication– Encouraged moms to share experience with 5

members outside the community.

Other Applications

• Finance Industry– Leverage the influence of existing

clients • Fashion Industry– Rise of fashion influencers – Different roles - advertising,

promoting and styling.

Interview

• David Mercer– Located South Africa– Founder design-a-webpage

company that provides webpage design services.

– sitePrebuilder – Intenet marketing and online business blog

– Featured on Wikipedia as a renowned technical writer

Future of the Trend

• Impact on Business Landscape– Quality will be more important than quantity– Search for meaningful engagement and insight– Justify spending by measuring their reach and ROI

• New Business Models – Wahooly – give equity to influencers

Future of the Trend

• Specific Industries and consumer segments that will be impacted – Any sector that has 1:M relationships– PR and Marketing– Benefit to small businesses– Retail and Technology– Gaming sector

Future of the Trend

• How the trend will change moving forward– “It is very difficult to predict” – David

Mercer– Expect it to become lot more digitized– More and more interactions in social

sphere– Sophisticated tools to measure social

influence– Analytics more accessible, easy to use and

low-cost

Future of the Trend

• To stay ahead of competitors –– Create social influence– Identify right influencers, engage and built

relationship.– Engage in activity and establish credibility by

creating interesting and compelling content.– Deeper understanding of data and analytics