Blink:
Positive (Oreos during Super Bowl 2013) or negative (United Airlines and Pepsi earlier this month), it has become obvious social media is ubiquitous and has led to real-time brand transparency. Welcome the rise of influence marketing. Consequently, smart marketers are adapting to a new level of social listening.
Read On:
Fact: In 2005 5% of adults in the U.S. were on social media. Today it is approximately 70%. As a result, buyers thanks to the collaborative tools of Web 2.0 now have greater influence on purchase decisions. Consequently, brand marketers recognize the need to identify brand ambassadors/key influencers, a concept I read about back in 2016 in a post written by social marketing leader Steve Goldner titled Brand Ambassadors and Influence Marketing.
How do you find brand ambassadors? For starters, real-time social listening. Brands will have to develop the resources that will be listening to conversations around keywords or trending topics on all the different social platforms. Furthermore, in the future AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be utilized to interpret relevant brand content. Finally, smart marketers will take the information they monitor, get proactive and craft their brand’s conversations to achieve greater buyer engagement.
In closing, I have detailed how social media has impacted consumerism. In my next post, I am going to share how social media has ushered in an era of global negativity.
Smartketing 
AI (Artificial Intelligence) was something that was discussed quite a bit at the Social Media Marketing World Conference last month. It is going to be a term that is going to be widely used and misinterpreted, many speakers said.I would agree with that, at least for the next few years.
Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, said that this first decade of social media is just the beginning and that we are still at the baby stage of it all. So anyone reading this post who has not embraced social media to its fullest should not feel overwhelmed. However, just as you write here, the time to get going is now! The amount of data that is at any marketer’s disposal is amazing from brand impressions, to product launches to competitive intelligence.
Looking forward to your next blog about “global negativity”.
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Kathy:
A lot to think about here.
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Hi, Jimmy. Important topic and well done. Interesting to go back to the 2016 article. Ironically, social leader Mark Schaefer – @markwschaefer – wrote on this topic today regarding how influence marketing can go wrong and the importance of choosing the right type of influencer for the situation. Ultimately it’s all about trust. Here’s a link to his post. https://www.businessesgrow.com/2017/04/17/influence-line/
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Ellie:
Thanks for sharing the article. Interesting thought: the influencer line.
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