Influencers

(Part 2? Yeah, check out Part 1.) In case you missed it, Ron Paul supporters, ASU students, and VFX artists were among those that joined the fray since my last post. The variations continue to proliferate further down the tail, satirizing - and entertaining - more niche audiences. What does this add up to? Segmentation.

It has taken the whole weekend to completely digest all the amazing learnings we gathered last week at the WOMMA summit. The WOMMA tagline is “Creating Talkable Brands Next and Best Practices” and they totally delivered. Great learnings from great brands like Mattel, Sprint, Intel, Unilever and Sephora just to name a few. But the most talked about sessions were definitely the keynote addresses that carried four themes that will help us navigate the social media industry over the next year.

The new era of consumerism is one in which each and every consumer has a powerful voice. It is one that touches brands across the spectrum, from the families of food, beverage and personal care brands within multinational CPGs all the way to modern B2B technology companies who are in turn focusing on the new voice of the consumer and how this affects their lead generation and sales cycles. As marketers working with social platforms we focus a lot on influencers and building influencer relationships.

Personal branding has taken kind of a bad rap over the past few years. As the overglorified “social media rockstar” label has been brought to life by people skilled in hype and little else, the idea of building a personal brand can seem inherently egotistical. Yet what if someone were to suggest that only egotistical companies need to worry about building a brand? Of course that would be silly, yet there is a double standard when it comes to individuals. In many cases, there is good reason for

What if, instead of targeting 5,000 people, you could achieve the same bottom line results by engaging 500 or even 5 people, at a lower total cost? That’s the potential of influence marketing.  Is it living up to that promise and how can this type of marketing be scaled in  2012? What we do know: So, do we then target all individuals engaged in social media?  Our thinking is that individuals who are influential can create outsized value. There’s been a lively debate around this (see, for example,

Chart by Leon Haland After launching Wave and Buzz to poor reviews and little pick-up in user base, Google had a low bar to clear with Google+. Now that Google+ has acquired 10 million users in 16 days and is receiving accolades for user interface as well as high responsiveness from the Google+ engineering team on the platform itself, the social media community is asking itself “what does the future hold for Google+?” Moreover, as social network users, we each need to ask ourselves on what

Fresh off the conference floor from this year’s School of WOM, it’s difficult not to feel conflicted as a digital communications professional. However, I’ve come to realize the true value of most conferences isn’t in the “Ah-ha!” moments, but rather the reflection. I don’t ever want to walk away from a gathering like WOMMA’s yearly event with notebook full of answers. If I did, I could have easily learned those lessons in a book or a blog post. A valuable