This is a cross post with the Influence Marketing blog.
Since Sam and I announced our book at the end of last year, many people have asked us one primary question about it:
Is it for people looking to increase their social score, or is it something different?
The one sentence answer to that is fairly simple:
This isn’t a book about improving your social score; instead, as you’ll see below, this is a business book around the topic of influence and how it shapes marketing as well as other business verticals.
While today’s influence market is (arguably) led by social scoring platforms, we see things very differently.
We’ve already shared where we see the future of influence marketing and which platforms will be leading the way.
With regards the audience best-suited to the book and what it offers, below is the full overview.
Influence Marketing: Why You Should Buy This Book
The practice of influence marketing, popularized by Daniel Edelman in the late 1960?s with celebrity endorsements, is enjoying a renaissance in the social media era.
As more and more consumers migrate to online communications, the concept of branding and advertising has been democratized.
Increasingly, consumers are making decisions based on the attitudes and recommendations expressed by the masses and their peers, with whom they now have immediate and around-the-clock access to.
Businesses are now competing with ? and often losing to ? ?the wisdom of crowds? in the branding battle.
Therein lays the opportunity that has spurred on the growth of modern influence marketing: identifying individuals who sway consumer opinion and solicit them to advocate on your behalf.
Yet the early adopters attempting to capitalize on this opportunity by offering influence scoring platforms have been marred with criticisms of faulty algorithms, unethical behavior and lack of measurable impact on the bottom-line.
Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing analyzes the renewal of this marketing practice, the factors that impact how consumers are influenced to take action and the challenges faced with current software solutions and strategies.
With that analysis, it builds a new methodology for how businesses can evolve this practice from a promotional and branding exercise to a measurable lead generation and sales conversion effort.
Key lessons in this book include:
- How to identify at what stage in the purchase life cycle target customers are at;
- How to identify the micro-influencers who directly impact purchase decisions at each stage;
- The situational factors that contribute to derailing brand recommendations in social media.
With this methodology in place, we provide a blueprint for predicting and managing influence paths that generate measurable action and impact on the business? bottom line for both B2B and B2C organizations.
This book heralds in the next phase of this evolving industry and provides actionable strategies that will define how influence marketing is executed for the next 10 years.
The Next Wave of Influence
As you can see by the overview, this is a business book in the truest sense. Much of the criticism around influence marketing at the moment is that there are no real measurable metrics being shared.
It’s all well and good raising buzz and awareness but if there is no real action happening behind that buzz, where’s the return? Likes and retweets will only keep you in business so long.
Influence can be used for so much more than just initial buzz and awareness.
The book provides a defined framework of how to identify the end result; where that brand message tipped from awareness to intent to action; and how to build true long-term advocacy across multiple verticals, including marketing, service, HR, non-profits and much more. Exclusive online components offer webinars, one-on-ones and lesson plans for executing and measuring your own influencer program(s).
We look forward to sharing our vision soon.
Pre-order your copy of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing from either Amazon or Barnes & Noble today.