Influencer Marketing Channel

 Labor Day 2010 will forever be remembered in Boulder as the day the Four Mile Canyon fire began to burn. Today, two days later, at least 7,000 acres and 140 structures (including 9 homes owned by fire fighters) have been consumed by the fire that is still burning.

In a sign of a tech-savvy community, residents immediately began flooding Twitter with the hashtag #boulderfire to share information. This proved to be most helpful as we discovered the failure of the 911 callback system designated to alert people to evacuate their homes. Boulder authorities used Twitter as the main way to reach people in the evacuation area quickly.

There are many ways that consumers and companies are cashing in on the escalating frugality trend.  This is a direct effect of the increasing use of both social networking platforms and of smart phone use.  As the population continues to talk on the phone less and less, we are also welcoming using our phones (and email) to receive notifications of deals on products and services that we like.

Geo-location or Location Based Services (LBS) are gettting more press all the time.  In the same way we have heard for a few years that mobile computing would be the next huge thing, we are now hearing about Foursquare, Gowalla, Wrrrl and Brightkite.  On a side note, only 42% of Americans currently use smart phones.  This doesn't mean that mobile computing won't eventually be predominant, but that people ususally overestimate how quickly adoption rates of new technology will reach a mainstream tipping point.

Isaiah, the new Old Spice pitch man, makes the men laugh and the ladies swoon.  His commercials generated so much heat that television could not contain him.  Now Isaiah and Old Spice are social media darlings spreading viral smiles across the globe.

Isaiah is now in the pantheon of commercial celebrities like the "What's the Beef?" Wendy's Lady and the Burger King King who most recently showed up on chat roulette giving away coupons in a smart social media play. While Isaiah is at his peak, and after the World Cup domination of Twitter has ended, Old Spice rolled out this campaign that everybody's talking about.

We are all influencers.  We don't realize how much we affect those in our lives and how much our social networks affect us. In this Ted Talk video you'll see how important your offline networks are.  As you watch Nicholas Christakis explain this, think about how your online networks affect you, and how you affect them.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  Influencer Marketing is the 'new black' in advertising because it meshes the trust that influencers have built over time with ad dollars from brands who don't have that level of trust with their audience.

If a person has over 50,000 followers on twitter or over 10,000 fans on Facebook does it mean that they are effective influencers?  Not necessarily.  It does mean that they're good at pumping up numbers, but looks can be deceiving.  Luckily, there are ways to determine who is an influencer and who is only an intermediary.

There are two ROI measurements to consider in any marketing campaign, especially online marketing campaigns: Return on Investment, which will always matter most because without profits you won't have a company for long, and Return on Influence, which is not measured nearly enough.