Incorporating Social Data To Determine Your Influencers

There is plenty of data available to marketers today. Some even believe there is too much. The variety of ways consumers interact with brands and companies has created a world filled with endless data and the management of that data.

While it is one thing to aggregate data across multiple channels, it is entirely different to do anything with it. Modeling data from traditional sources such as offline/online transaction history, website analytics and email analytics is a time consuming process that requires effort and patience. In our never-ending quest as marketers to better understand customers from a transactional and behavior standpoint, we often look past incorporating additional social data elements that can help us understand the influence level of a potential or current customer.

Social media has created an incredible and unique opportunity for marketers to gain additional insight into their customers’ behaviors. This new opportunity is the measurement of one’s influence. Today we have the ability to append social data to a customer profile with details such as:

• Number of Followers on Twitter
• Number of Facebook Friends
• Inbound links to Blog/Blog Site Traffic

Each of these data elements can be used to create an “influence score” which can be modeled using any specific set of weighting and scoring that makes the most sense to your brand.

For example, if you know Twitter is your best performing channel, Twitter followers can weigh more heavily in your scoring model.

Why leverage social data?
It’s no secret that more and more people are spending their time on social networking sites: Facebook this past April had a staggering 570 billion page views, according to Google. This new reality has serious implications to your business. Here are three reasons why you need to collect standardize and leverage social data:

1. Customer Service: I think we all remember Kevin Smith’s squabble with Southwest Airlines via Twitter. Place his situation in the context of a call center. I call up Acme & Co to complain that my widget is a lemon because I opened the box and the darn thing never turned on. Now this could go one of two ways:

Scenario 1: The customer service rep asks for my name and information, then looks me up in their CRM tool and finds that I am an “Average” customer (in terms of my level of spend). The rep then tell me that they can’t do anything and I must have broken it during setup. Little does this rep know I have 20,000 Twitter followers and I am considered to be a “widget” expert in the social community. I then take this customer service experience and proceed to wreak havoc within my sphere of influence, doing considerable damage to Acme & Co’s brand reputation.

Scenario 2: The customer service rep asks for my name and information, then looks me up in their CRM tTool and is immediately alerted of my “influence score.” Accordingly, they go above and beyond to fix the issue for me. Furthermore, rather than me setting off in a firestorm of negative PR, I post to my sphere of influence about how helpful Acme & Co is, and I actually help them drive incremental sales.

This is the world we live in… VIP tables, comps for high rollers and discounts for family and friends. Money and influence get you more, simple as that. It’s time we applied this same mentality to social influencers as they continue to have a greater impact on your bottom line.

2. Consumer Marketing: Just as highly influential customers need to be treated differently by customer service representatives, they also need to be marketed to differently. By increasing exposure to your brand and having a profound impact on your customer acquisition success, customers that are highly influential become our best marketing tools. If you understand the level of influence of your customers, you can then create specific communications and marketing strategies to make that influence work to your benefit.

3. Customer Value: We often focus on the value of a customer based primarily on transactional purchase data. Then we model that data to determine values such as:

• Lifetime value of a customer
• Value of an email address
• Value of a unique visitor to your site

While these values are still relevant, it is becoming increasingly important to factor social influence data into these calculations. It might be far more valuable to your organization to acquire a single subscriber who has 15,000 monthly blog readers, compared to acquiring 100 new email subscribers.

Under the old model of customer value, the 100 new email subscribers would be seen as more valuable. However, in the real world, the blogger with 15,000 readers has far better odds of helping boost your sales if treated well.

As the world becomes increasingly social, these data elements will become a crucial part of your marketing/CRM strategy and success. The good news is that the data is out there! You can work with third-party data providers to plug this data into your customer profiles. Knowledge is power…and in this case what you do not know might just end up haunting you in the future.

It’s time to alter our current perceptions on what data is truly valuable and actionable.
Questions? Shoot me an e-mail at skrauss@zetainteractive.com or find me on Twitter @scottkrauss.

No related posts.

Tagged as: ROI of social media, web analytics