By Guest Editor Ravit Lichtenberg (blog)
Last week, we attended Monitoring Social Media– a conference run by Influence People, a social media event and training company. Among the speakers were Radian6 CEO, and representatives from Seesmic , eBay, and Google. We found Klout and Constant Contact to provide some interesting perspectives and case studies.
Klout may be best known as the free online site that spews out your twitter influencer score (average Klout score is 11, in case you were wondering). But Klout also works with the big guys on influencer targeting. Klout’s thesis is that everybody is an influencer on some topic. Rather than focuse on the big guys, Klout focuses on the middle tail. Klout recently worked with Virgin America to help increase the buzz around the airline’s new direct route between California to Toronto. Klout identified 570 influencers based on Virgin criteria, who were offered a free roundtrip flight to Toronto. Of these, 264 people “clicked” on the link and 120 booked the flight.
According to Klout, the campaign resulted in 2,087 outside contributors who spoke about the campaign even though they weren’t offered the flight directly. This in return resulted in 41 million potential impressions and 1.9 million true reach (impressions) according to Klout. (The calculations were reached by adding up each member’s network.)
Constant Contact, a once gold-standard in email marketing, has since expanded into the social media world with additional products, and has refocused to address the needs of small businesses. We think this is a smart move for Constant Contact: Most small businesses today lack the tools to use the social web effectively. They don’t have the time and resources needed to conduct marketing efforts, and there is no real consolidated, comprehensive social media marketing solution designed (and priced) for small businesses.
In a research conducted by Constant Contact, 63% of the small businesses they interviewed said Word of Mouth (WOM) and referrals marketing are the best indicators of growth for their business. To help drive WOM results, Constant Contact is focusing on supplementing the physical responses of audiences (clicks, fanning, following) with emotional responses (likes, shares, retweets, mentions, and user reviews). Their research shows that by adding a social-sharing tool bar, they were able to increase exposure of content by 60% across audiences—a good result for those small businesses fighting for attention in the inbox.
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