mid-term exam digital marketing
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The Social Influence MarketingTRANSCRIPT
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DIGITAL MARKETING MID TERM EXAM
16th
of March 2011 By Lauriane Laurent, MBA 2 A
1. In YOUR own words, what is the difference between traditional word-of-
mouth marketing and Influence Marketing?
Traditional word-of mouth marketing is different from Influence marketing because Influence
Marketing involves the brand. What I mean is that, while in Traditional word-of-mouth
marketing the brand launches a message, buzz online or offline and relies on its customers to
talk about it around them, to their friends, family, colleagues etc., Influence Marketing is
about sharing with your customers, involve in the conversations on social media and monitor
them, intervene and mostly, find your key influencers. Key influencers are indeed those who
are the most influent on the social media and who are trusted by the whole community, a sort
of reference. The difference then between Traditional word-of-mouth and Influence
Marketing is that the marketing funnel is upside down: in Influence Marketing, you count on
a few people to spread your message and convert new customers, in Traditional word of
mouth, you reach a large community of customers without really targeting specifically the
individuals and hope the message will spread and convince a few.
2. Post a link to the article you read, in addition to the Slideshare. Highlight
the key quote. How did the article expand your understanding of the
assigned presentation? Support - contradict? Please be specific.
The article I read can be found at this address:
http://fluent.razorfish.com/publication/?m=6540&l=1
It is a very interesting article that was written by The Razorfish company in 2009. It is a good
resume of what Social Influence Marketing is and, while it was written a few years ago (and
technologies are evolving very fast!), many information are still useful and true. It well
explains what Social Influence Marketing consists in, what influencers are, how to measure
your company SIM score, who the key influencers are at the different steps of the purchasing
process and what will be the new trends in this domain. Most of them revealed true.
It is hard to find only one key quote as the whole report is very full of information, all of them
as interesting as the others. Still, one sentence I noticed particularly is this one: “But their
control shouldn’t be a cause for concern — so long as you have a well-defined strategy to
engage with them in ways that do justice to the way they want to interact with you.”
I think this sentence really support the idea of the PowerPoint. It highlights that companies
should perceive SIM as a gift, an opportunity and not a threat. They should consider their
community as their allies and not their enemies. Even more: they should enjoy engaging with
their fans as it makes the relation between the brand and its fans more personal and so, more
loyal. If the brands do not make any effort to understand their customers and take into account
their comments, suggestions and ideas, then they should realize their failure is already
planned. You cannot escape this trend as we all see it is the future and that it is constantly
growing and evolving. They have to implement a new SIM strategy. Nobody says it is easy. It
is brand new for many companies. Still, your customers will not be angry at you for making
mistakes, only for not trying connecting with them truthfully.
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3. What is the relationship between communities and your social brand -
give your insights for Slide 23.
While a few years ago, communication between the brand and the customers where one way
(from the brand to the customers), it is not true anymore. Before the brand communicate its
messages and values to the guests and they had no power, almost no influence on the brand
decisions, if we omit marketing surveys… Now, people are involved in the brand strategy and
product design, at a level some of them may even do not be aware of. That is why I think the
slide 23 of the PowerPoint was very cleverly thought. It well illustrates how we passed from
the brand at the core of the marketing, spreading ideas to its community, to the brand
community at the center of the brand strategy and decision. Indeed, what happen is that
customers have become more and more powerful. People share on the net and trust more and
more the other individuals’ reviews than the brand advertising. They skip or ignore more and
more often this traditional marketing communication and brands had to admit that the new
marketing tools are…their communities themselves!
4. What is the relationship between Klout scores and Influence Marketing?
Is a Klout score meaningful?
Klout scores help marketers to find their brand followers’ degree of influence on the social
media like Twitter or Facebook. In that, it is linked to Influence Marketing as you can
measure the individual influence on the net, find these people and interact with them, the aim
being to engage them to help your brand spread its messages and gain more customers.
Klout scores are quite meaningful as they take into account many parameters. It gives relevant
and precise results which rather well represent the reality. For instance, it includes data like
the number of fans in your community, the number of “likes” and “tweets”, the degree of
influence of the people you reach and the value of your post (do they encourage interaction?).
Still, we should be cautious with these data. Of course, there are valuable information and we
can use them but we should not ignore that some parameters are still not included like
bloggers’ influence (journalists and experts for instance) and only the main social networks
are integrated. As a result, while we should not hesitate to use these metrics, we should not
forget that it exists other key influencers on the net that we probably have no idea of. In
addition, we should also remember that all the networkers are social influencers and may turn
into key influencers one day. We should not neglect any of our followers, even if it is correct
to focus more on some than others.
5. Choose one of the two hotels below:
I chose to work on the Missoni Hotel.
a) Create a SIM action plan
We can notice on the Missoni hotel group that they have already set up the links to share
about their sites on the main social networks. Still, the hotels of the group do not have a page
of their own to share with their guests. Consequently, below is what I would advise the group
to do:
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Create a page on the main social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr for instance
(as we know how important visuals are these days), as well as a blog. Set up these
pages and customize them, make them attractive and welcoming.
Set up a social marketing plan! Do not think you can succeed with no objective and no
clear view of what you will post, or how you will engage with your customers, what
the tone of your pages will be and what your contents will consist in.
Post regularly and varied contents. You should alternate your contents and try to bring
fresh news all the time to encourage the customers to come back. Remember that
content should not focus on your brand or about selling! You may talk about it
sometimes but you mostly have to find how to make your fans share, interact, speak
about them! What you want is learning about them and establishes trust. It takes time
so do not be too impatient. SIM requires time and efforts but it is very rewarding if
you are very committed.
Post pictures and videos as it makes your pages more attractive and UGC are always
very successful.
Interact with your fans. At the least occasion, do not hesitate to intervene to help your
community, answer the questions, give additional information and just thank them or
greet the more loyal fans!
Set up a booking engine on your social pages as well as an interactive brochure. Social
Commerce is the new trend of 2011. Do not miss the train!
Post special offers and contests on your social sites.
Develop a Social Loyalty Program on your social sites.
Use Klout to determine who your influencers are, “use” them and reward them for
instance when they book at one of your hotels (including Klout data in your
reservation system).
b) Clearly state your objectives
The objectives here are to:
Develop your community by establishing trust and hopefully loyalty. Treat all your
flowers as equal and, even if you can focus on the most important, show them the
same respect.
Improve your brand image thanks to socializing and being more human
Increase your conversion rate (from followers to buyers)
Find your key influencers, enter in contact with them and make them contribute to
your brand development and success.
After finding the key influencers, reach their communities and try to find our new key
influencers!
Develop new tools to attract your customers and make them become more loyal
(contest, LBS loyalty program etc)
c) Select at least 3 Social Media as tactics (no points for Facebook). Explain why you
selected these specific media
The 3 social media I would choose are:
Twitter because it is the place to be to receive information from all around the world
in real time, post last news, comments, contests, links to your videos, blog articles etc.
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Foursquare because Location Social sites are becoming more and more important and
can help the hotel to develop LBS and loyalty programs.
Flickr, which is a Social site where you can share pictures of your hotels and engage
your guests to contribute and comment. It is becoming more and more important for
customers to be able to see what they buy.
d) Show how the selected Social Media have synergies
The social media that I chose complete each other, which results very positive. The
combination of the 3 helps us to be present on different kind of social sites and then to reach
different targets. As a result, it also helps us to have more key influencers, which results in a
growing community! Indeed, a presence on Twitter enables our brand to share quickly to a
large number of people, to share links and have a high return. You can link all your posts to
this site. It is more general. Flickr is ideal for sharing pictures. It may improve and reassure
people before booking and encourage them to comment and share their own pictures,
supporting the value of our brand. Last, a presence on Foursquare is perfect as we want to
follow the growing trend of LBS and the location loyalty programs based on check-in.
e) How will you measure the results of the Influence Marketing
The results of the SIM can be measured thanks to:
Tools like Klout that will give us our own score, our influence on the web and the one
of our key influencers to see how they succeed in spreading our message and image.
Use our social sites metric analytics to see how we do on Facebook, Twitter etc. It
includes the pages viewings, the time spent on our pages, the number of “likes” and
“tweets” etc.
The sales progression on the social media.
The ratio of positive to negative comments on our social media.