Would Your Company Benefit if Your Marketers Had Superpowers?

 In Medical Product Design

If my hunch is correct, most of MPE (Formerly Mindflow Design) ’s clients would probably shout “Yes”! With that in mind I attended CommNexus’ Social Media SIG titled 10 Social Influence Campaigns That Give Marketers Superpowers. According to the keynote speaker Mark Fidelman, CEO of Evolve!, traditional PPC (Pay per click) and banner ad advertising is dead or at least becoming less and less effective. That is, unless you have multiple full time people dedicated to the task. If your company does not, please read on.

I’m going to explain the premise behind Social Influence Campaigns as I understand it. Then I’ll discuss my favorite three examples that Mark used last night to hammer his point across.

The internet is a crowded, noisy place. Apparently the same amount of information created from the beginning of time until 2003, now gets created every two days as a result of the internet. How do you get your customers’ attention in this exponentially rising sea of data? According to Mark, recommendations by friends, family, advocates, and influencers help to filter out 90% of the noise and raise your product from the abyss to the sunny zone.

That top 10% is what he calls “the circle of trust” and looks something like this: Buyer) Friends & Family))Advocates)))Influencers. If you go to the right of Influencers you’ve dropped off a cliff and are looking for a needle in a haystack.

Using influencers is not a new concept. Think about Michael Jordan and shoes or Oprah and books. Each time Oprah holds a book up on stage a Best Seller is born. Oprah’s trusted, loyal following becomes a powerful force for lucky authors. Unfortunately most companies can’t afford to hire MJ to hawk their goods.

The concept behind Social Influence Campaigns is to get the most influential people in your industry to talk about you. Forget Hollywood, think bloggers, people with huge Twitter followings, kids with a million plus YouTube followers , etc.

Here are my three favorite examples of the 10 Social Influence Campaigns Mark presented.

The first one is Viral Awareness: Quickly promoting through awareness. Identify the 25 most engaging influencers on Twitter in your industry. The people who your customers trust and follow. Create an infographic that illustrates how those 25 people are the most influential people in X industry and send it out to the media. Once it’s picked up and published those influencers will be pretty happy and want to do something for you. They’ll most likely publish to their loyal following and give you credit, driving your targeted customers to you.

My second favorite is Sponsoring Viral Content Video Shows: On YouTube for example, look for unsponsored programs that have created huge followings through viral videos. There’s a teenager (missglamorazzi) that posts a daily video of her applying makeup to herself. Apparently 1 million people watch her do this and 1.7 million people have subscribed to her YouTube channel! A company like Revlon could have potentially sponsored her to use their products in her videos and reached millions of their targeted audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

My third favorite is Getting Influencers to Promote Products (your products) That They Like: They used nodexl.com to create an influencer map for Guy Kawasaki and found that his social network reached their prospective customer base. They asked Guy to promote their product and he agreed since he liked and used their product. If I recall correctly, the company bought 250 of Guy’s books that he was promoting at the time and in exchange he promoted their product through his social network for one month. It was a win-win for the company and for Guy.

If you’re not getting the results you desire from your marketing campaigns you might want to give Social Influence Campaigns a shot, with the goal of getting the most influential people in your industry to talk about your company.

If just one of MPE (Formerly Mindflow Design) ’s clients uses this approach and increases sales of the products we helped them design, I’ll consider this blog a success.

For more information about Social Influence Campaigns contact Mark Fidelman and his company www.evolvesinc.com.

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