Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

An interview of the CEOs of Gist, Viral Heat, and Klout.

The tsunami of data being created, collected and parsed every second of every day now makes influence identification instantaneous, and possible from the comfort of your desk chair. You just need to know where to find it.

Last week, I interviewed three men that are helping create an all-new field of marketing and customer service – the emerging discipline of influence mining. Influence mining makes the old school, direct marketing notions of sorting consumers by purchase history seem dinosaurian by comparison....

Recently, Burger King Norway purged its Facebook fanbase. They reduced it from 38,000 fans to 8,000...on purpose. Their stated goal was to encourage fickle deal-hunters to exit their addressable fan base leaving those who really cared and preferred Burger King (over McDonalds).

For a quick service restaurant (QSR) or a fast moving consumer goods company (FMCG) this is a radical move. Brand loyalty isn’t what it used to be and many of us are happy enough to ask for Pepsi as Coke. Can a Burger King fan also be a McDonald’s fan? Chances are there is quite a bit of overlap. Still, the move to be more intentional about who is in your Facebook fanbase and your Twitter follower-base is right minded....

While people are generating leads on all of the social media sites, LinkedIn is the #1 choice for business networking and business-to-business marketing. According to the 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner, 70% of marketers surveyed are using LinkedIn, and 64% plan to increase their use of the site.

In this blog post series about how social media and blogging work together, we’re looking at how blogging helps you make a valuable contribution to your social media communities in three different ways. Today we’ll apply these to LinkedIn:

1. Expand your mind

2. Expand your relationships

3. Expand your influence...

More than 90% of consumers report that a word-of-mouth recommendation is the top reason they buy a product or service, according to Nielsen. It’s partly why Angie’s List, an online aggregator of consumer reviews, now has a market cap near $1 billion — because consumers want and use reviews they can trust.

That’s the central theme of digital marketer Paul Rand’s new book “Highly Recommended: Harnessing the Power of Word of Mouth and Social Media to Build Your Brand and Your Business.” In it, he argues that the number-one thing that drives business today is recommendations. To win, he says every business, from the corner dry cleaner to a major corporation, should strive to become the most highly recommended brand in its category....

Any PR firm working with a big business client today will advise that client’s public face to become, well, more public. This means going digital, either on social media or in corporate communications designed to get internal teams and investors excited. But what about going a step further and creating editorial content in the interest of becoming a digital thought leader/business strategist a la Richard Branson or Tony Hsieh? (It’s not enough to write a book anymore.)

We ask because, before today, we’d never heard of JetBlue Airways chairman Jeff Peterson. But now we don’t just know who he is—we know that he has some ideas about how to make his industry more efficient. You can see by the numbers that his LinkedIn post on “A Common Sense Solution to Slow Airline Boarding” has been quite successful....