How to Promote with Brand Ambassadors Using Visual Content Marketing. Passionate brand advocates can provide marketing on steroids. On a social web they boost sharing, enable crowd sourced marketing and they do it for free. They are your online tribe of brand ambassadors…. Brand ambassadors are people, customer advocates and fans who represent and talk about your brand with passion. If they are also passionate about your brand then that can provide powerful crowd sourced marketing that can amplify brand awareness. Because they love your products and services… You should make sure that they have conversations in front of as many potential customers as possible. Bigger can be better. Those conversations can be offline and online. When you need an authentic promotional boost, you need to recognize and leverage your brand ambassadors. People like to buy from people In the past, businesses have enlisted logos, symbols, key colours and slogans to build their brand awareness.
Traditional brand ambassadors Image Source Fans love talking about brands they love 1. 2. 3. Welcome to Forbes. No Klout No Job. Why your social media profile might be your next credit score. This is a guest post by Bill Clerico, the CEO of payment processing service WePay. Social media has created a vast amount of data and every second we add more information. Consider that in a single day we send 400 million tweets, share 985 million pieces of content on Facebook, “like” 50 million brands or organizations on Facebook, and post 40 million photos on Instagram. Many have argued that sharing so much personal info in such a public forum can leave users open to identity theft and fraud, but I’d argue that it may also help prevent it. From VentureBeat Companies such as Kabbage, Affirm, and WePay (my own business) have begun using social data to understand and measure risk and help save millions of dollars in fraud.
In addition to money stolen, online fraud costs payment companies, small businesses, and consumers a lot of time and grief. By analyzing years of social data that is difficult to fake, we can more intelligently combat ever-more-sophisticated cybercriminals. It works. How Social Influence Can Manipulate Online Ratings. How to Understand B2B Social Media Influence with Klout. Chatting with Jon Dick and Matthew Thomson from Klout With social media, your words are amplified and you harness the power to influence. Even more, you can tie metrics to influence. And that’s where Klout comes in. Klout measures influence across several social networks and develops a Klout score.
Their motto? “We come to work every day inspired to help people understand the power of their voices and democratize influence.” As a brand, you’re interested in how your content influences your audience and you want to know who’s influential in your industry. I got answers to these questions and more when I sat down with Matthew Thomson, VP, Biz Dev & Platform, Klout and Jon Dick, Biz Dev, Klout. How has Klout grown and changed in the past year? Matt: We’ve invested in science and engineering to be more transparent with our score. Matt: Salesforce is CRM, we are IRM – Influencer Relationship Management.
Are there any new trends of how influence benefit brands? Jon: Should I consider influence? Understanding Influencers and Building Social Media Engagement. Dreamforce #DF12 is just a few days away, and as usual, the agenda is packed with great social media sessions featuring best practices, expert speakers and more. Navigating the schedule can be dizzying with so many exciting sessions to choose from, but if you’re a marketing professional interested in developing and maintaining a successful social strategy, you don’t want to miss the Marketing Cloud Session, “Understanding Influencers and Building Engagement,” led by Jim Tobin, from Ignite Social Media. The session takes place Friday, September 21 from 11:30am to 12:00pm PST. If you’ve yet to register for Dreamforce, you can do so here.
As a brand, understanding influence and building engagement is a critical part of creating a digital strategy that will put, and keep, your brand top of mind. It’s a way capitalize on word-of-mouth communications traveling at lightning speed through social media channels. About the author: Report: The Rise of Digital Influence: A “How-To” Guide for Businesses. Research Report: The Rise of Digital Influence: A “How-To” Guide for Businesses Author: Brian Solis Publication Date: March 21, 2012 Overview Digital Influence is one of the hottest trends in social media, yet is largely misunderstood. The Rise of Digital Influence, the new report by Altimeter Group Principal Analyst Brian Solis is a ‘how-to’ guide for businesses to spark desirable effects and outcomes through social media influence. The report helps companies understand how influence spreads, and it includes case studies in which brands partnered with vendors to recruit connected consumers for digital influence campaigns.
Read the Report: View more documents from Altimeter Group Network on SlideShare. Above is the full report; feel free to read, download, and share. Open Research This research report was 100% funded by Altimeter Group and published under the principle of Open Research. Get Paid for Sharing Ads on Your Social Networks. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Wingsplay Quick Pitch: Earn money to share ads with your social network Genius Idea: Wingsplay gives average people incentive to share ads with their social networks to drive product or service engagement and increase buzz. Advertisers are sneaking into your Twitter and Facebook feeds — with help from your social media connections.
Wingsplay, a startup that launched last month, pays its users to share video ads on their social networks. Even though you may not Like or follow advertisers, ads could trickle into your feeds via a friend who is trying to make a quick buck or just likes to watch funny ads. “The Web made it almost impossible to reach people with boring ads,” Lasry said. For example, Major League Soccer is promoting the April 14 Philadelphia v. Klout In The Airport: A High Score Gets You Into Cathay Pacific’s SFO Lounge. Last month, Klout launched its iPhone app. Today, it’s announcing its first big mobile partnership, one that should make app pretty appealing to any air travelers in San Francisco.
So Klout is launching a Perk with Hong Kong-headquartered Cathay Pacific Airways. Anyone in the international terminal at San Francisco International Airport with a Klout score of 40 or higher will be allowed into the airline’s lounge, which is normally limited to Cathay’s first class and business class passengers. Just use the app to show your score to the lounge receptionist and you’ll get access to seven workstations, three showers, and a noodle bar. The promotion, which starts today and runs through July, is another sign that whatever the haters say, companies are interested in exploring Klout as a marketing opportunity. That Cathay Pacific is willing to open its doors to Klout users seems like a real commitment, albeit one that’s limited to SFO, rather than all of its airports.
Using B2B Social Media to Create a Nation of Brand Advocates. Wanting to interact with brand advocates on social media, Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC), the global aerospace leader, and digital marketing leader, w.illi.am/, came together to create an online community of PT6 engine enthusiasts. Many organizations serve a niche market, such as the B2B space, leaving some businesses wondering if social media is the right fit for them. They question how many conversations are happening around their brand or products in the social space. The team at w.illi.am/ used Radian6 to discover that people were talking about the PT6 engines and they were celebrating their great experiences with the product with other fans of the engine.
After connecting with the key influencers discussing the PT6 engines, PT6 Nation was formed, giving fans a place to share their stories and interact with other loyal brand followers. The community currently links to numerous social sites, with more innovation to come in the future. About the author: Kiip will fill its digital wallet with rewards for your everyday victories. Connect with leaders from the companies in this story, in real life: Come to the fourth annual VentureBeat Mobile Summit April 14-15 in Sausalito, Calif. Request an invitation. Kiip released its own app today, charmingly called “Kiipsake,” which acts as a digital wallet where people can store all their Kiip rewards. Kiip is a mobile network that delivers rewards for achievements that occur within games and apps. This hot startup recently raised $11 million in venture capital and has gained major traction, providing over “100 million moments of happiness” a month. It’s part of a growing number of companies focused on “gamification,” or adding game-like incentives to ordinary activities.
While that sounds rather Pavlovian, gamification can be effective for marketers, and Kiip is betting that it can be effective in improving your real life, too. The idea behind Kiip is simple: users unlock tangible rewards when playing a game or engaging with an app, such as fitness app Map My Run. The Problem With Measuring Digital Influence. Editor’s note: Dr. Michael Wu is the Principal Scientist of Analytics at Lithium where he is currently applying data-driven methodologies to investigate and understand the complex dynamics of the social Web. Social media is a required avenue for brands to engage their customers. However, social media engagement is primarily based on conversations and personalized interactions that are difficult to scale. Influencer marketing provides brands with the leverage to reach many by engaging only a few illusive influencers.
This strategy depends on the accurate measurement of people’s digital influence, so brands can figure out who they need to engage. One of the reasons that brands don’t understand digital influence is because they don’t seem to realize that no one actually has any measured “data” on influence (i.e. explicit data that says precisely who actually influenced who, when, where, how, etc.). Build A Predictive Stock Model And Validate It So should you trust your influence scores? Agencies: Don't Get Scammed By Fake Influencers. Klout's Quiet Year Of Growth And Struggle. Klout Is Now a Content Marketing Tool. Klout has yet again updated and changed things around a bit.
This time, however, the changes are more than just cosmetic. Klout’s new dashboard lists Web content that users may be interested in. Users can share this content via Facebook or Twitter and even schedule the content to be shared at a specific time, similar to Buffer. The biggest difference between scheduling posts on Klout and Buffer, though, is that on Klout you can only share the content you find on your dashboard; you cannot share your own content. This change pulls Klout in the direction of being a content curation and marketing tool. Prior to this change, Klout was primarily a measure of online social influence with other small features such as perks, user-added and -answered questions and achievement badges.
It’s interesting to see that with this update Klout has effectively hidden your Klout community away for the time being. Overall I would say that now Klout feels like an entirely different pair of shoes. Lithium Confirms That It Has Acquired Klout. At a press event today, Lithium Technologies confirmed reports that it has closed its acquisition of Klout. Re/code first reported on the deal back in February, saying that it was “signed but not closed,” and then Fortune reported yesterday that the price was nearly $200 million. However, the companies didn’t confirm the acquisition until just now. Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff said that he doesn’t see the deal as just an acquisition, but as “redefining” what his company is about. Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez is joining Lithium as the senior vice president and general manager of the Klout business.
Lithium offers tools for companies to build online communities for their customers. Klout, meanwhile, has raised more than $40 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mayfield Fund, ff Venture Capital, Microsoft, and CrunchFund (which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington). Lithium is not disclosing the price of the acquisition. Klout Launches Redesigned iOS App With Curated Content. Klout released a completely redesigned iOS app Tuesday. The newest version of the app reflects the company's recent shift from focusing on measuring individuals' Klout scores, to actively helping its users raise their scores.
While the previous version of the app emphasized fluctuations in your Klout score and areas of influence, the updated app helps users expand their influence in topics they care about. The new app provides a platform for users to share relevant content with their connections. "We really want to be a utility that helps people," Klout cofounder and former CEO Joe Fernandez told Mashable. Users select the topics they care about and the app provides a curated stream of content they can can share with their followers.
Klout also added a new perks section to the app, enabling users to view and redeem perks from within the app. The update is the latest in what has been a busy year for Klout. Klout is available to iOS users. Have something to add to this story?