the influencer is you

Five Social Media Marketing Tips For Crafting Your Strategy

1.       Find and involve influential individuals that love your brand, product or service.

2.       Arm brand advocates with something to evangelize. My favorite example is when Disney gave a lucky fan the right to launch the world wide trailer to Pirates on her profile.

3.       Think long tail. The power of the long tail, whether it is on MySpace, Facebook or through Six Apart Media’s solution is that you are reaching consumers that have direct relationships with their friends, their network or their readership. The long tail consumer will be more intimate and genuine when talking to her network. Big bloggers have more filters.

Ask Motrin If Social Media Can Influence Perception

There is lots of discussion in the Ad Age article about evaluating the impact of this Motrin gaffe by a few simple metrics (i.e. YouTube downloads, etc.) The industry is sorely lacking the tools needed, but how about total exposure to the campaign? How about the influence of the dissenting voices? How about all of the negative buzz that was generated?(Case and point: I was walking through Target on Sunday and I heard people talking about Motrin right by the bottles of Advil. Guess which bottle of Ibuprofen they grabbed?)Word of mouth and the power of the long tail shape opinion and ultimately purchase decision.  Here's a good test

When you Google: Motrin + Mommy, there are 121K results.  123K different pages (most of them being blogs) that published a story on this topic. When you Google: Motrin + Moms there are 464K results

Wow. That hurts.

Crashing Motrin-gate: a Social-Media Case Study - Advertising Age - News

http://adage.com/...

Motrin-Gate: A Social-Media Case StudyJ&J Caved to a Vocal Flash Mob, but Did It ...

Social Media Marketing: Keep Talking To Your Consumer

Great article on the need for the advertising industry from Joe Marchese:

An except: "Put simply, Madison Avenue wasn't built to service brands in social media ..... The question is, can the system adapt, or will a new breed of agency be born in the vacuum of effective social media campaigns? ..."

I completely agree. Scores of advertisers run flight-based media campaigns aggregating a community of friends, neighbors or fans (depending upon the social media site they are advertising on) & then disappear.  To continue the conversation, advertisers could create a social media communication plan so they can evolve and amplify the right message to the right people at the right time.  There are some agencies like The Conversation Group that are recognizing this opportunity and filling a gap.

When will more agencies evolve to fill this gap? Here's one way to look at it: