Over the last few months, I have been working to develop a powerful new approach to marketing, called "Integrated Influencer Marketing".
In a world where owned, paid, earned and consumer-generated media have merged and the boundaries between online and offline are blurring, marketers don't need digital marketing, internet marketing, mobile marketing or social media media. Instead, they need Integrated Influencer Marketing.
The Integrated Influencer Marketing approach answers three key questions:
1. How to organize and energize brand evangelists to achieve business objectives?
2. How to create influencer platforms and programs that work both online and offline?
3. How to build strong relationships with influencers by integrating online communities and offline events?
I started thinking about the Integrated Influencer Marketing approach when I realized that face-time is more powerful than ever before, in our increasingly real-time world, and asked myself: how can brands scale real-time plus face-time?
My present hypothesis is that the solution lies in identifying evangelists on the social web, engaging them in conversations in real-time, organizing and energizing them by hosting them on an online community, and then spending face-time with them on a regular basis -
1. By organizing regular offline events for them, as an extension of the online community.
2. By giving them the tools to organize their own events and spend face-time with each other.
3. By giving retail staff the tools to recognize and reward them every time they walk into the store.