Category: Social influence marketing

This post was extracted from an article that appeared in the 2010 Outlook Report, which was recently released by Razorfish. It has been modified in part to make it more relevent for the Headlightblog.com audience.

There’s no question that Toyota is in deep trouble with its current recall crisis. But could these issues actually be helping its brand? Shockingly, an analysis of Toyota shows that its Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score saw an uptick in January. Who’d have thought that a crisis of such significant magnitude could actually help a brand’s perception? This seems to be true, at least in the short term, even though sales may be dropping. Let me explain how.

Fluent, a new Razorfish report, examines the rise of Social Influence Marketing – the method of employing social media and social influencers to meet a company’s business and marketing objectives. The report features a new proprietary survey that explores how social media informs consumer purchase behavior, and introduces the SIM Score – a new benchmark Razorfish developed to measure a brand’s social influence and favorability relative to its competitors.

We see a lot of auto companies jumping on the social media bandwagon and diving into Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube Channels and corporate and employee blogs –- but are they really thinking strategically about how social can impact their business? We encourage our clients to see social as a third dimension of marketing through which they can deliver on their business goals. Just as brand marketing and direct response marketing have specific objectives and measurement criteria across a brand’s marketing efforts, Social Influence Marketing™ should become a complementary strategy.

When it comes to shopping for a car, few things are more influential than the opinion of an actual car owner. A trusted opinion can instantly crush or inflate a consumer’s confidence in a vehicle. Third-party automotive sites recognize this influence by prominently featuring the opinions of car owners through features like user reviews, ratings and discussion boards.

Recent research from the Journal of Advertising Research highlights that offline brand advocacy is significantly impacted by online word of mouth for the automotive product category. We also know that a significant amount of the online word of mouth happens at social media destinations. So how can an auto manufacturer take advantage of social influence marketing, which is about leveraging social media at every stage of a marketing campaign and beyond, to harness the peer and anonymous influences?

A PR manager for a major electronics manufacturer once told me he was deathly afraid that members of a popular bulletin board would figure out that his firm was monitoring the forum. The company had already introduced a major product innovation that had been inspired by activity on the board and he feared a backlash if members connected the dots.