How to find the right network opinion leader for the brand?

This article is from Socialbeta content contributor @s1984, original author: Macala Wright Lee, who published the Fashionablymarketing.me book, a professional marketing consultant for fashion, luxury and beauty brands. Twitter at@fashmarketing

Simply put, there is no simple way to measure the impact of the web. In the past, the judgment of influence was based on fame. In a recent announcement, Altimeter Group boss Brian Solis wrote: "It's hard to measure the effect of the word influence." However, I believe that we are better at measuring social capital, at least at the digital level, than we are at measuring results. In other words, online influence has nothing to do with fame, but in seniority.

For businesses and brands, it is important to focus on the experts in a handful of industries. First, Traackr, director of BD's vice-president, Derek Skaletsky, said, don't take online opinion leaders as media contacts, and online opinion leaders don't care about the news. They care about the experience-especially the unique experience that makes them look different. Pierre-loic Assayag, chairman of the Traackr company, said, "Why focus on a handful of relevant opinion leaders, not the most popular social media elite?" This can be explained in three ways:

The relevant opinion leader makes the signal, "big man" makes the noise.
For more than more than 10 years, advertising has told marketers that noise is success. That is not the case. The most effective approach is to gain the attention of relevant opinion leaders. What is correlation? They have established prestige in the target group and have gained trust in industry-related communities.

Focus on relevant opinion leaders can significantly increase the "participation rate".
Talk to people who are genuinely interested in your topic, industry, and product, rather than blindly pursuing media coverage.

The so-called "big man" is actually affected by the target sound.
The "big boys" are more likely to report your story and be interested in your product after they have gained street cred with relevant opinion leaders.

To successfully attract relevant opinion leaders, brands must:
1, select the relevant opinion leader according to experience value and expectation;
2, around their own story rather than the brand of the story dialogue
3, invite them in as early as possible and establish a more lasting relationship than brand activity
4, honest and trustworthy. Not just stay in conversations with people who already love brands.
5, give up control of the information, let your opinion leader in his own words to tell the brand story

Why

Why do brands need to lock in a handful of industry opinion leaders rather than blindly follow big/online celebrities? Because of the investigation you will find that locking the right 7 people can cover up to 350 million of the audience.

David Meerman Scott, author of the new rules for Marketing and PR (Marketing & PR), shared with us the story of the new media and marketing VP Cindy Gordon of the Universal Studios resort.

Gordon was ordered to plan a global marketing campaign for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. can spend millions of dollars, but Gordon has succeeded in finding and contacting 7 of the most influential bloggers and Harry Potter fans. Gordon and the new park developer prepared a private image for these people. The 7-person task is to stir up topics in their base and thousands of bloggers. Gordon expects 350 million people around the world to hear that Universal Studios will be building a theme park, all from the 7 bloggers.
Before you lock online opinion leaders, you have to figure out who they are and listen to their conversations. About your products, services, marketing, branding, what they like and dislike. How they compare you with competitors, attensity company chief marketing officer Michelle de Haaff said.

Admittedly, there are a number of free paid social media surveillance programs that help businesses select opinion leaders. I recommend a few of the most effective:

1. Traackr

A good tool for measuring online influence. Brands, businesses can find the most relevant to the brand, products or activities of several opinion leaders. Traackr don't pay attention to URLs and focus on people. Its algorithm analyzes the individual's arrival rate, resonance (the ability to stimulate the topic) and relevance (the ability to relate to a topic/market). The number of online participants in the conversation is only a small fraction of the audience. According to Traackr's data, less than 2% of participants had more than 90% of the influence in the conversation, and 2% were definitely different from each other. Traackr charges range from $499 to USD thousands of per month.

2. attensity
Above we said Traackr is concerned about the individual, attensity is concerned about the URL and brand products and activities where. It provides a set of opinion leader reports and analysis applications in the field of social media monitoring, covering 75 million data sources. The report includes a list of key opinion leaders and their arrival and impact scores, the release of the site's analysis map and all the relevant information about the individual. Attensity also melted quantcast and klout into their reports. One of the simplest and most comprehensive reporting software. The whole set of attensity is spent $5,000 monthly.

3. Facebook

As long as the Facebook community is monitored, the brand can identify opinion leaders. Equestrian goods retailer SmartPak Equine has made good use of its Facebook community to identify opinion leaders who affect equestrian professionals. Of the 12 athletes singled out, 3 were industry experts and were more active on social networks. These people are SmartPak's brand ambassadors, bringing the biggest return on investment to the brand.

These brand ambassadors, together with community competitions and Facebook strategies, have created accurate social marketing for SmartPak, eventually winning a 600% annual sales gain. Facebook has become the seventh-largest user of the Web site, with a much higher price/performance ratio than hard.

Facebook is now free. The average brand of each application is put into $2,500 to build a fan page, Redfoot Social, the boss of a social e-commerce company, said.

How do you think brands and marketers will track the influence of opinion leaders over the next few years? Do you think they would want a one-stop data service point or continue to rely on a range of sources? Welcome to comment and talk about your opinion.

This article links:
Http://www.socialbeta.cn/articles/how_to_connect_your_brand_to_the_right_online_influencers.html
Original：
Http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20110509/tc_mashable/how_to_connect_your_brand_to_the_right_online_influencers_1
Translator: S1984@socialbeta

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