Social media has opened many opportunities for businesses, such as direct communications with customers and prospects, peer-to-peer support groups, improved customer service channels and real-time reputation management.
This new communication channel has proven valuable to the sales, marketing, customer service and PR functions of businesses large and small.
Yet, as more consumers grow their social graphs, access social networks through mobile devices and engage in more brand discussions online, the increased noise has also added many new challenges.
Influence Marketing Today
Among the social media marketing tools created to better manage and drive greater value from this over-populated communication channel are social influence scoring applications.
They?re designed to collect and analyze a person?s social media activity in order to determine the influence he/she has over others on various topics, and then use that person as a conduit to deliver a recommendation or brand advertisement to prospective customers.
As the public?s penchant for social media communications grows, these tools have become more popular with new start-ups joining the fray every few months.
Yet this growth has not been without a fair amount of criticism regarding the accuracy, methodology and ethics of those providing the service and those who participate in their scoring programs.
However, both advocates and pundits agree that we?re just at the beginning of this growing marketing practice. A lot of growth is still expected and required among software providers and marketers alike.? Still, the question remains: in what direction will it go?
The Next Wave of Influence Marketing
Sensei Marketing and ArCompany have partnered on an initiative that seeks to better understand the attitudes and forecasts of surrounding this hot topic.
The first part of this effort is survey of international marketers and public relations professionals, which will provide additional data for a planned whitepaper on the future of influence marketing.
If you work in marketing or PR ? as a consultant, for an agency or employed by a brand directly ? we invite you to participate in this short online survey.
It?s completely confidential and takes less than 5 minutes to complete. The data collected and the subsequent analysis will be shared publicly in a whitepaper to be released this spring.
Note: No personal information collected during the completion this survey will be sold, shared or made public at any time.