Get them to wear your Brand with pride

As follow up to my prior post I kept on thinking about the implications of what I called Influencer Marketing; clearly one of the key areas for marketers to master in the years to come is to understand what makes a normal person your best promoter, what is that makes them “wear your brand with pride”…

Think about it.. Mini Cooper owners boast about their cars every opportunity they have (and make the rest of us crave for one), Harley Davidson riders literally uniform themselves with the brand from head to toe every weekend and get out there to promote it, Football fans paint themselves to show their team support and wearing a pink ribbon fills us with pride because we understand the importance of its meaning.

What does it take to get to this point? And to stay there?

I don’t presume I have a recipe; but I think these are a few of the ways to go about achieving such an incredible result:

• Give a chance to those that want to be part of something bigger and more lasting than them…
• Find people with passion; give them an opportunity to express and display it.
• Create an opportunity for beauty to be displayed and boasted about in healthy ways..

What other ideas do you have? How would you get your customers to wear your brand with pride? (and by doing it help marketing your product / service).

What do you think?

Filiberto Selvas

Filiberto.Selvas@Gmail.Com

Intent versus Influencer Marketing

Quoting form a post I read recently: “A New Mindset is Needed” by Katie Delahaye Paine

“..in today’s environment, most decisions are influenced to a much greater degree by whatever your followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook recommend or what Google search delivers than they are by whatever ads pop up. Trying to decide what flat screen TV to buy, where to go for vacation, what movie to see, or where to make reservations for dinner, chances are you’ll either ask your friends on Facebook or Twitter for advice, or search on Google for reviews.”

While I agree with the above I think is missing a key point: in Social Media most of the time we don’t ask; instead we receive... our Facebook friends and the people we follow in Twitter or that we are connected to in other Social Networks bring information and product messages to us, and when they do it hits us at a completely different level because it is filtered and highlighted by the relevancy and context of the person that brings the information/recommendation forward. When my winemaker friend recommends a bottle, when my car fanatic neighbor recommends a set of snow tires, when my Science Fiction fanatic friend recommends a movie… you get the point… I know what to take from whom, because I have entitled them with different levels of authority in different areas of life.

Intent Marketing leverages the fact that I already had something in mind; and puts it a click away for me (most of the times through Keyword Advertising, or SEO). Influencer Marketing leverages the fact that people that share a relationship and a context likely share needs and desires as well, and this increases the power of the messages they deliver to eahc other (given the right context).

This is influencer marketing: it is not only about the person that has more friends or followers.. it is about finding those that are relevant to carry your message because they have the right context and relationships (a Mom with other moms, a Doctor with patients, a Computer Science Student with relatives that know nothing about computers), and it is about finding ways to entice them to carry that message for you (it is also about measuring the effectiveness of this operation and optimizing, that is a whole topic on its own).

What do you think?

Filiberto Selvas

Filiberto.Selvas@Gmail.Com