If Sunday night's Super Bowl commercials were any indication of where branding is headed, the proverbial door has now been open for any company to compete.

Clearly the 30-second spot isn't going away anytime soon, especially during the Super Bowl. But, without a doubt, the intention and strategy of the spots have shifted dramatically.

Radio, print and TV are no longer one-way, stand-alone assets. Over the past eight years, we've seen a shift in how brands are driving continued social engagement through these mediums.

It used to be that an ad would be the beginning and the end of a conversation. Ultimately, that conversation either led to a product sale or not. Advertisers would then rinse and repeat.

Slowly, social media has become an integral part to each message (i.e. Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter). But today, brands have shifted social media to be at the beginning and throughout the lifecycle of a marketing campaign as evidenced leading up to this year's Super Bowl.

So, why the shift?

The biggest reason is that today, more so than ever before, people trust people over brands. It's no longer enough to just show and/or tell. You need the credibility of someone else doing your showing and telling. As a brand, your job is now to embrace your advocates and participate in the discussion. There is nothing more 'native' then a one-to-one conversation.

Essentially, every consumer today is a brand marketer with the aide of a smart phone and Facebook or Twitter account.

This is the new standard.

There is no better example of this then the Coca-Cola #ShareACoke campaign. If you're not familiar, the company launched a brilliant strategy to increase their soft drink sales by printing names on their bottles and cans. The message encouraged their avid drinkers to #ShareACoke (click here) with the individual named on their soft drink.

This past summer, WSJ reported that over 500,000 photos of their soft drinks had been shared across social networks, each donning the aforementioned hash tag. As a result, Coke has seen a 2% increase in over soft drink sales. At first glance, this may not seem overly impressive, until you consider that this is a reversal of a decade-long decline in product sales.

When you're a company that can afford to start a conversation with a 30-second $4.5M Super Bowl ad, or have an annual advertising budget north of $1B, it's easier to get the advocates talking.

Fortunately, with the help of just a few tools that exist today, you can rally advocates and influencers like the big brands, without the need of the big budgets.

Identifying the Right Influencers

There are several tools in the market today to help you find the best potential ambassadors for your brand. In my book, one of the best options is Little Bird:

LittleBird: Much like Klout, Little Bird is also considered an influencer discovery platform. However, they believe that " the loudest voices are not always the most influential". So, rather than a score, they match you to people that are the most relevant, regardless of their popularity.

Creating a campaign and rewarding Influencers

Now that you have your influencers defined, you need to provide them with tasks that are both engaging and rewarding. Depending on your strategy, if looking for wide-scale reach and high volume participation check into Loot! or if looking for a tightly coordinated campaign with only high-level influencers look into Triberr.

Loot! - Loot! is a powerful mobile platform that enables you to connect, engage and reward influencers for creating and sharing branded content at scale. The campaigns can range from high-volume content generation and/or social burst, to targeted guerilla-style marketing pushes. They not only facilitate the campaign, but they also handle the reward fulfillment.

Triberr - Triberr connects brands directly to 'high level' influencers (bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, etc.) to form paid brand ambassadorships, where the content creators act as spokespersons for the brands while Triberr helps brands to scale and manage those relationships. A brand can hire up to 100 influencers, each of whom is both creating content and sharing content created by other brand ambassadors.

Measuring the impact of your campaign

While Loot! offers robust analytics for measuring each campaign, you'll also want to track the results of your overall social presence. This includes not only the clicks you received, but also your reach, amplification, value of the earned media, etc.

Social Chorus: In addition to being a complete end-to-end solution for enterprise companies, working with 60 of the Fortune 500 brands, Social Chorus offers a real-time performance analytics product for measuring your overall business impact while your social advocacy campaigns are underway.

With the tools mentioned above, you'll be able to effectively run small budget influencer campaigns at scale without breaking the bank.