This document discusses the rise of social influencers in online marketing. It defines influencers as people with the ability to affect others' beliefs and actions. Brands are increasingly identifying and engaging influencers through social media to spread word of mouth. The document outlines factors driving this trend, including big data and social media usage. It provides two case studies on successful influencer campaigns and discusses applications in various industries. The future of the trend is predicted to include more sophisticated analytics tools and focus on relevant niche influencers over popularity. Brands must identify and engage the right influencers to maintain a competitive advantage.

1. Trend
Assessment
I
MRKT
7546
Digital
Marketing
Dr.
Eric
Ty
Brey
Date:
14th
Feb
2012
Submitted
by:
Deepti
Dhiman

2.
Trend: Rise of Social Influencers Engagement in Online Marketing
I. Introduction and factors shaping the trend
A trend that has gained considerable attention in recent years is the rise of influencers
engagement in online marketing. Firms are making efforts to find, reward and recruit their most
influential consumers. “Influencers” are people who have ability and power to affect someone’s
beliefs and actions. In other words, they are “special” people who have the power to affect the
opinions of “ordinary” people. In the online world, these influencers are bloggers; however, we
also have a new class of influencer that may not be a blogger or may be more than a blogger
(Keath, 2011). The new media influencer could be family, friend, expert, customer or colleague
who has large followers on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube,
forums and more.
Currently, influence marketing is a hot topic, but it is hardly a new concept. Brands have been
engaging opinion leaders, mommy bloggers, and celebrity power to promote their product. The
influencers concept was introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point: How
Little Things can Make a Difference”. He called influencers as “Connectors”, who link us up
with the world ... people with a special gift for bringing the world together. These people have
extraordinary knack for making friends and acquaintances; and have social networks of over one
hundred people.
In today’s social landscape, the role of influencers has become really important in shaping public
opinion and consumer’s choice. Due to the confluence of several factors, influencers discovery
and engagement is relatively new. Firstly, we have big data especially on social web that we can
play around to find the perfect influencer. Also, there are a lot of tools available to measure
online influence such as Klout, PeerIndex, Twitter Analyzer and more. According to Klout,
everyone who creates content online has some influences. Klout gives a score from 1 to 100
based on your activity on user’s Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Foresquare activities. Even
though none of these tools are perfect, but they do provide some standards that can be used by
brands for identifying influencers who can spread their word of mouth to their followers.
Secondly, brands are beginning to understand the importance of being talked about both online
and offline. The way people use Internet has changed. In the past, brands used to build optimized
website and create strategies to bring visitors to their web site. They used to controlled the
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3. experience, managed the message and determine what content should be promoted about the
brand. Now, brand’s website is not the sole place of information as customers are spending more
time and finding information on social networks such as Google +, Twitter and Facebook, and
pinterest. Before buying anything from food to cars, young consumers discuss and read reviews
from blogs on the social media websites. Thus, there is no one place to get brand experience.
Research from JWT Intelligence, the data arm of marketing communications company JWT,
further demonstrates millennials’ aptitude for shopping-related social media activities. As of
June 2011, 63% of millennial internet users had asked for opinions on products on Facebook,
60% had purchased a product based on a social recommendation and 57% had posted a status
update about a product (emarketer.com, 2012). Brands are slowly beginning to realize the
importance of reputation that is created based on what other people are saying about their brand
rather than what the brand says about itself. In addition, those influencers may not be a small
group of selected A-list reporters responsible for bringing content to audiences. These
influencers can be anyone in the online world who has created interesting, engaging and relevant
contents, and has built authority and social influence by interacting socially to increase
following.
Lastly, brands wants to reach beyond the numbers as have understood the value of engagement
with their customers. They have started questioning the hype of having 100,000 Twitter
followers or "likes" on a Facebook page (Mtati, 2012) Quantity of followers are important but if
that’s the only thing a firm is doing, then, there will be no call-to-action possible.
The trend has significant impact on PR and marketing efforts. Firms are actively finding,
engaging and rewarding their influencers. They are rewarding them from a giving a free flight to
honor badges. Casie Stewart, a 28-year-old social-media consultant from Toronto, earned a free
Virgin America flight, a shopping splurge at Mark's Work Wearhouse and an all-expenses-paid
trip to New Zealand fashion week due to her prolific tweeting and blogging about her life
(Vascellaro, 2011). She has a Klout score of 74 and more than 5,000 followers. Being dubbed as
“networker” by Klout, she gained the attention of a range of brands and public relations firms
who hooked her up with prizes.
II. Case studies
Case Study 1 – USA for UNHCR Campaign
In May 2011, USA for UNHCR with the help of Shonali Burke consulting company launched
“The Blue Key” campaign for people to show their support for millions of refugees around the
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4. world leading up to World Refugee Day on June 20th. To spread the word in short period of time
and with limited budget, the company adopted the Blue Key Champion strategy, which was to
bring on board a selected group of influential “champions” to spread the word and get more keys
ordered. The champions were asked to commit to buy the $5 blue key and to write a blog post on
their websites explaining why they support the cause. Their goal was to get 6,000 keys ordered
within a period of one month (from May 9 to June 20 2011). On June 13th, the champions
contribute to a “tweetathon” which turned out to be a huge success. Based on the analytics, they
were 1,524 tweets with the #bluekey hashtag circulated in one day; a drastic increase from the
daily 50-tweet average throughout the campaign. There was 169% increase in traffic to the Blue
Key website (Traackr, 2011). Based on results of Google Analytics, it was found that Twitter
was the main driver of web traffic; this was not the case before the tweetathon. In addition, more
than 50% of key purchases during that week were a result of the tweetathon.
This case study is a very good example that shows the benefit of involving influencers to spread
the word of mouth. The reason for the success goes to identifying right champions and to
communicating with them throughout the campaign. Burke’s consulting company created a
private Facebook group to facilitate champion’s support for the campaign (Kanter, 2011). They
engaged them at every stage of the campaign. Before the campaign, they worked closely with the
champions to organize the “tweetathon”. During the campaign, they kept them posted with the
trends, which motivated them to achieve more and to keep the momentum going. They measured
their success based on the number of tweets that used the hashtags and keys purchased on weekly
basis. In addition to the number of tweets, they also tracked the outcomes they were trying to
achieve. They did real time tracking to see what was being retweeted and the type of responses to
the tweets. These observations were posted on the Facebook page, and were seen by the other
champions who used this information to make any adjustments to their tweets as needed.
Case Study 2 – BillMyParents Campaign
In August 2011, BillMyParents, a teen prepaid debit card firm, launched a three-month major
word-of-mouth marketing campaign with help of Tremor, a P&G-owned marketing firm. The
campaign was successful in reaching 600,000 highly interactive moms in just three months.
Tremor helped the brand to create social influence by creating an attention-grabbing message
“Plastic that actually reduces teen spending!” and utilizing “try and tell” review model. The
critical part in the success was the use of dedicated microsite “Vocalpoint “ , which is a massive
online community of engaged moms . The brand engaged frequently with the influencers in this
community with several surveys and focused email communications to drive trials and
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5. subscriptions to BillMyParents. In addition, each registered mom in the community was
encouraged to share her product experience with five friends outside of Vocalpoint; increasing
the brand exposure to reach to more than 2.5million moms nationwide (McCracken, 2011). In
conclusion, rather than looking for numbers of “likes”, the brand identified niche community of
moms and then engaged them. The case study is a good example that shows the power of niche
influencers who may not be as broadly known.
Other Applications
The trend has application in every industry and business, especially in the business-to-customer
marketing as compare to business-to-business marketing. In the financial service sector, most of
new business comes directly from existing client referrals. If business development people can
identify their influential clients and know which are most likely to share their experience, they
can maximize their efforts in making new clients. In fashion industry, bloggers play an important
role in forming opinion and influencing people. Recently, fashion bloggers are grabbing a lot of
attention because they can get news, trends and updates out to audiences online quicker and more
effectively than traditional glossy magazines. In addition, fashion industry has realized the other
roles that these bloggers can play including advertising, promoting and styling.
Section 3: Future of the Trend
Business Landscape Impacts and Potential Changes - According to David Mercer, an on-line
business specialist at Site preBuilder website and founder at desing-a-wepage.com, the trend is
going to have a great impact on business. The rise of social influencers is going to change how
brands conduct social media marketing. In 2012, quality will be more important than quantity
for brands. Brands will be more focused, look for more meaningful engagement and will search
for relevance and insight, rather than large several twitter followers and random chatters. Firms
would want to justify their social media spending by measure their reach and return on
investment.
In addition, I believe new business models will come up that will leverage social media
influence. One such example is a Minneapolis-based startup firm Wahooly launched in late
2011. The firm aims to match a start-up with influencers who can propel the company's name
into the social media stratosphere (Rubin, 2011). In Nov 2011, the company partnered with
Klout and would invite those with Klout scores of 45 or more to join Wahooly. In return, the
influencers will get equity in the start-ups.
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6. Consumer Segments and Specific Industries Significantly Impacted - According to David, any
sector that has one to many relationships will find social influence more and more useful. The
reasons are - low barrier to entry for business and their customers, no technical expertise required
and minimum input in terms of resources. Influencers involvement is rising in many industries,
especially retail and technology sectors. I believe that small businesses will be impacted the
most. Since they do not have grand budget and expertise they can definitely get benefited from
the social media influencers if engaged properly.
In addition, the trend has also impacted gaming industry. For example, Empire Avenue game is a
popular “social influence” stock market game that lets you buy and sell shares of social media
users. The ‘market value’ of player is determined by three factors – activities on social channels
(facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and so on), audience size, and their engagement. The user’s shares
are measured in “eaves”, which is a virtual social currency.
Potential Future Changes in the Trend - “It is very difficult to say. I am really looking forward.
It is possible a new technology could come along and completely alter the direction we take” ,
says Davis. He added that more and more interactions between entities would take place in the
social sphere. The trend toward digital automation will continue. Anything that can be
represented digitally will be a candidate for digital socialization. In future, I believe that more
and more companies will be adopting the social influence ranking tools. There will be focus on
developing sophisticated tools that will combine online and offline social influence; offline
factors are not taken into account in the available tools such as Klout and PeerIndex. In addition,
analytics is going to be more accessible and easy to use. I also see development of new easy to
use and low cost software for analytics and for managing social media for people. Hubspot is an
example of one such marketing software that serves basic marketing, analytical and publishing
needs.
Needed to Maintain a Competitive Advantage – According to David, Social influence will be
one of the most important factors for achieving success in online marketing. The brands that will
have the greatest reach will have a competitive advantage. To remain competitive, brands will
need to reverse their thinking from “Influence is when one person causes another person to take
actions” to “How is a consumer influenced to make a buying decision?”
The importance of social influencers cannot be denied as we engage more in the online world. It
will be critical for brands to identify the right influencers and to understand the context. Research
published by emarketer.com in 2011 shows that, on average, consumers trust their friends and
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7. family 73-per-cent more than they trust strangers, which includes delivery mechanisms such as
word-of-mouth, blogs, tweets and other social media posts (Healy, 2011). To have a competitive
advantage, brands will have to focus on relevant influencers rather than the most popular online
celebrities. The brands will have to look close and research communities to find relevant
influencers. The relevant influencers are people who have built authority with a target audience,
earned trust in specific business field, genuinely interested in brand’s product. Then, engage and
build relationships with influencers by consuming their content, participating and learning their
ecosystem. By providing the value first, the brands will have to just reach out to them to ask their
advice and to help promote their products.
In addition, for influencers and those who want to gain social influence, it will be important to be
a part of activity and establish credibility by creating content that is interesting and compelling. I
also believe that brands need to have deeper understanding of data and who their customers are.
Those brands will have competitive edge that understand and seek to analyze data.
References:
Dubios, Lou. “Why social influence matters to businesses”. Inc. 03/31/2011. Available at:
http://www.inc.com/guides/201103/why-social-influence-matters-to-businesses.html
eMarketer Daily. “Women’s influence on purchases decisions on the rise”. 02/01/2012.
Available at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008807
Healy, Mark. “Days are numbered for social influencers”. The Globe and Mail. 11/01/2011.
Available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-
marketing/advertising/days-are-numbered-for-social-influencers/article2220817/
Kanter, Beth. “Interview with Shonali Burke: Analytics tell stories”. Beth’s Blog. 08/23/2011.
Available at: http://www.bethkanter.org/un-blue-key/
Keath, Jason. “How to leverage today’s consumers influencers”. Socialfresh.com. 03/24/2011.
Available at: http://socialfresh.com/social-media-influence/
Lee, Macala W. “How to: Connect your brand to the right online influencers”. Mashable.com.
05/09/2011. Available at: http://mashable.com/2011/05/09/leverage-online-influencers/
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8. Mtati, Mongezi. “Influencers take the web and run the streets”. BizCommunity.com. 01/26/2012.
Available at: http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/424/69876.html
Rubin, Courtney. “Wahooly: Publicize your startup, pay with equity”. Inc. 11/07/2011. Available
at: http://www.inc.com/news/articles/201111/wahooly-publicize-your-startup_pay-with-
equity.html
Traackr.com. “From the frontier of online influence”. Traackr.com. 10/01/2011. Available at:
traackr.com/frontier-of-online-influence-2011.pdf
McCracken, Dave. “BillMyParents partners with Procter & Gamble’s Tremor, accessing more
than 600,000 moms”. Tremor.com. 08/16/2011. Available at:
http://www.tremor.com/BMPPressRelease/
Vascellaro, Jessica E. “Wannabe Cool Kids Aim to game the Web’s new Social Scorekeeper”.
Wall Street Journal. 02/08/2011. Available at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704637704576082383466417382.html#articleT
abs%3Dcomments
Biography: David Mercer Founder at design-a-webpage.com and Online business specialist at
Site prebuilder, Cape town Area, South Africa.
David is known throughout the world as a practical and knowledgeable expert in business and
technology. In 1999, he gradated from the University of South Africa with BS in Applied
Mathematics. He has almost 12 years of experience as an editor and author of programming,
web development and business books. He has been featured on Wikipedia as a noteworthy
technical writer and his works have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Polish, Greek
amongst other languages. Mercer has contributed editorially to a number of titles for the open
source community, including books on Linux, Perl, PHP and web technology. He has worked as
an editor at Wily, Pearson, Wrox press. His book on Drupal 6 was reviewed on Slashdot and
went on to become a best seller. He is a founder of design-a-webpage company that provides
webpage design services. In addition, he maintains an Internet marketing & online business blog
knows as Site prebuilder to provide supplementary skills and knowledge for his readership.
Currently, he is focused on business and the Internet, e-Commerce and entrepreneurialism with
an emphasis on strong web development skills and good analytical and online business acumen.
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