Recommended Viewing

What’s the Return on Influence Marketing?

For many brands, gauging the return on influence marketing has been one of their sore points in recent years.

While social scoring platforms like Klout, etc, can help identify who could potentially be influential from a brand amplification standpoint, the business return – dollars in the cash register – has been more problematic to solve.

Likes, shares, blog posts and more are discussed abundantly when it comes to reviewing a campaign using social scoring as the lead means of influence identification. But likes and shares don’t pay the bills.

This was one of the key reasons Sam Fiorella and I wrote Influence Marketing: as marketers and users of influence campaigns ourselves, we knew the real return on influence had to be lead generation, customer acquisition, and moving the customer along the purchase life cycle.

With that approach, brands could better understand where their customers are, and how they could help solve the problems they faced.

Essentially, we take influence away from the superstar bloggers and social media rock stars, and place the emphasis squarely back on the customer, and work back from there.

To give you an idea of how this looks, this second teaser video from our upcoming video series to complement the book looks at what happens when the customer is placed at the centre of the marketing circle, and how that leads to financial and customer return on your brand’s influence marketing campaigns.

[vimeo width=”600″ height=”400″]http://vimeo.com/66128219[/vimeo]

Why Platforms Like @Traackr are Leading the Future of Influence Marketing

In about 11 weeks time, Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing (affiliate link) will be released. 11 weeks – that’s kinda scary!

While Sam and I will have some cool stuff up our sleeves for anyone preordering the book (and if you send your receipt to us, you’ll get something personal today), we’re still in the final stages of writing and talking with brands and platform developers.

One of these platforms is San Francisco-based Traackr, which I’ve featured on this blog previously. What I like about Traackr’s approach is their goal to make influence truly contextual, and not be reliant on a score that can be gamed.

Earlier this week, Sam and I chatted with?Traackr?founder and CEO?Pierre-Loic Assayag?and VP, Marketing?Evy Wilkins?about why Traackr isn?t your ?typical influencer platform?. Some of the topics we discussed include:

Pierre-Loic’s dislike for social scoring platforms and algorithms that claim to measure influence but only measure popularity;
The current limitations of Traackr’s platform and where it’s going next;
Why attempting to game Traackr’s algorithm would simply be a waste of time;
Why Relevance and Resonance are so important to Traackr and their clients as data points;
The role of influence marketing as a lead generation tool as well as a community one.

One thing that you can see when watching the video is both Pierre-Loic and Evy’s passion for their platform and the different approach they’re trying to take with Traackr.

Having spent a lot of time with the platform and seeing some of the stuff they’re working on has – along with some other platforms – restored my faith in the influence marketing space, as well as validated the methodology and new influence model Sam and I lay out in our book.

It’s a long video, coming in at just under an hour, but when you have the time to watch it, it’s definitely worth it and full of great insights.

Here’s to the next wave.

Influence Marketing – This is Where the Fun Begins

As part of the run up to the launch of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing, Sam and I have decided to do things a little differently.

We want to have some fun and really involve you.

To that end, we have something for everyone (hopefully) based on where you are.

Facebook

If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t apart from Tipper Gore, probably), you can catch us on the official Influence Marketing Facebook page. Here we’ll be asking your opinion via polls as well as discussions on the latest influence solutions and technologies, and sneak peeks at some of the interviews we’ve carried out. There may also be fine cigars.

Google+

How the heck I got dragged back onto G+ I’ll never know. Oh, wait – it was the very cool Communities addition which allows for a much more cohesive experience. If you’re on Google+, join the Influence marketing community and take part in Hangouts, access Sam and myself as we brainstorm the book’s topics and direction in daily Hangout snippets, and generally join in a vibrant discussion on all things influence, current and future.

Some Pre-Order Fun

Normally, pre-order offers include “Buy so many books and we’ll do this” and, while we will definitely have bulk specials on the way, in the meantime we want to thank folks who pre-order now on their own. I can’t say what it is, but it’s definitely very personal to you, the buyer.

Want to find out what it is? Hit up the link in the special box below this post, pre-order the book, then email a copy of your receipt to info@influencemarketingbook.com (or just click this link here).

You can also find us over at our soon-to-be-launched website, as well as Twitter (this will just be a curated feed), and we’re going to be popping up in some other unexpected places too, so stay tuned.

We look forward to welcoming you at your favourite online watering hole. 🙂

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgkSKFsptKY[/youtube]

Justin Bieber, Green Bananas and Upsetting Canada – All in 30 Minutes

It seems strange to think that?Jugnoo?s Social Mix event?was way back in July.

It still seems so fresh, and we?re continuing to get great feedback and praise today, almost two months later.

There?s no doubt it was an incredible day, with lots of lessons learned and shared.

On a personal level, I feel really fortunate to have been able to speak and share the stage with people I both admire and look up to, as well as long-time friends and peers.

So what did I talk about?

Your Business Is Not The Story

People often credit social media for making businesses realize they?re not the story ? but good business owners have known this all along.

You are not the story. You never have been. Not even in the ?bad old days? before social media were you ever the story.?But the story? That belongs to the customer. Every time.

This would ? to me ? seem obvious, and yet you see examples every day of where businesses take their customers for granted, fail to address issues and plough on the path they want, as opposed to the path their customers need.

And then they wonder why their sales are down?

Think like a customer, be the customer, and you?ll get and keep the customer.

Being Human in a Non-Human World

While the tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc ? as well as more advanced?Social CRM platforms?? allow us to connect and engage with our customers like never before, we?re still human beings.

Automated systems and the bits and bytes that make up these social platforms are all well and good ? but it still takes the handshake (real or virtual) of human-to-human connection to solidify the relationship that leads to the sale.

People are not conducive when it comes to creating an ideal world for brands to operate in. We?re too human for start.

Instead of canned responses and sterile corporate voices, we need to bring the human aspect of our offline personas online to our business ones. After all, who ever bought from a diode?

My talk is below ? I hope you enjoy, and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments on the bigger picture the video discusses.

Cheers!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUGH_rGC7h4[/youtube]

Using Social Media to Manage Relationships Through the Sales Funnel (jugnoo.com)
Who Shouldn’t Worry With Social CRM (socialcrminfo.com)