Last week we held another webinar in our Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of What's the ROI of an Influencer? The webinar included three speakers: Leslie Ament, the Senior Vice President of Research and Principal Analyst at Hypatia Research Group; Sam Fiorella, a Partner at SenseiInc, a customer experience firm and co-author of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers; and Tami Cannizzaro, a Global Director of Marketing at IBM Social Business.
Leslie Ament from Hypatia Research Group started us off with some research they completed that illustrated where Corporations feel they should be investing in social media and where Marketing feels they should be investing in social media. It should come as no surprise that corporations felt that social media was most important to the customer support function where as social teams felt that social media was most important to harness the propensity for influencers to recommend brands.
Tami Cannizzaro from IBM Social Business then took us through how IBM built an influencer strategy for the IBM brand and set up their influencer community. She showed how they identified industry influencers based on custom scoring and rankings systems, in order to identify the most impactful influencer to target for the brand or industry.
Sam Fiorella the co-author of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers then showed us how to put the customer at the heart of your influencer strategy something that is so often overlooked.
If you have been on a SocialMediaToday webinar before you know they are very "participant driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics like: Are there tricks to building up a group of influencers inexpensively? Is it easier for B2C rather than B2B companies to gather influencers? Is there a right way and a wrong way to build a group of influencers? What do we think about providing rules for engagement for your influencers?
If that piqued your interest and you want to hear the replay of this webinar please check out this link. Otherwise please join us for our next webinar on Native Advertising: Latest Ad Fad, or the Future of Publishing? starting at noon eastern on November 14th.Register here.