I believe the reason we haven’t been able to effectively identify and engage with these bottom up influencers/advocates is because of the silos that exist inside companies. The answer lies in converging Paid, Owned and Earned media and collapsing the barriers between PR, Adverting, Marketing and Social. 

“There hasn’t been a scalable way to capture and use information about the ‘fans’ you’re engaging with on Facebook, Twitter and other social channels,” Wildfire co-founder Victoria Ransom wrote in a recent AdAge guest post “The End of the Facebook ‘Fan’ As We Know It.” “This will require new technologies that enable marketers to develop rich data profiles of the consumers they’re interacting with on social networks.”

Wildfire’s new study doesn’t tell brands how to find superfans, but it makes a compelling case for their impact. Based on 10,000 Facebook campaigns that ran over the past nine months, Wildfire determined the most active campaigns were driven by what it calls an advocate. An advocate is a user whose online sharing of content results in someone new engaging with a campaign. It’s the new “engagement” that’s worth a lot, and Wildfire claims for every 10 advocates who share, 13 entirely new people will interact with the brand by clicking a link, entering a contest, etc.

The problem I have with these reports that are coming out (SocialBakers had similar findings at LeWeb London) is what do they mean by customer feedback? Some of the reports I’ve seen use every brand mention as a metric for customer feedback and working on the agency side with large brands, I can tell you most of the mentions some brands receive don’t actually need follow up. Should Yahoo! reply to every mention of their name today (following the announcement of their new CEO)? I would say that no, they don’t need to since most mentions are just RT’s of news stories. 

I’m not saying that companies can’t do better but to make their point (because they obviously have a vested interest) marketing sponsored research goes on the assumption that companies should reply to everything and I don’t think they should. 

h/t to NevilleHobson

This reminds me of the draconian attitude “The Superbowl” takes. I understand the need to protect their brand; if they don’t then opportunistic marketeers will take advantage of it, but it seems like these companies could be a little more human about their approach. 

It’s interesting that for past events like World Cup, Facebook launched their own page with information on it and users could vote for their country. It seems like now that Facebook has reached critical mass and there’s so many celebrity and country pages, Facebook doesn’t need to do this but instead wants to  push people to the various pages through a directory style page. 

I think this is a direct move against Twitter which is viewed much more as a news source, especially for live sporting events. I’m also really curious to see how Twitter will leverage their new hashtag pages that are specifically for events. Their first(?) one was with NASCAR, they’ve got to do something for the Olympics, especially since Twitter is already very popular in London.  

It’s basically a directory page versus an aggregation page. From a brand perspective (brand being the athletes and countries in this case) I would value Facebook’s approach which will send fans my way but as a user, I much prefer Twitter’s approach. Who wants to go follow all of those pages just to get the relevant news. Plus I bet brands (and athletes) will will still benefit from Twitter’s hashtag pages by creating valuable content which get’s aggregated. 

I’m sorry to say but this has marketing abuse all over it. While it’s something that could be used productively, the desire to game trending topics is too great. 

I think the trending topic is not as important as it once was and I think a service like this will just kill it. 

This is smart. I’ve been super impressed with both companies over the years and this seems like a really good fit for the two companies. 

I once had a marketing intern that after working with us thought that the Marketing program should be renamed: The History of Marketing. 

rqtaylor:

This morning I read Javier Agüera article in Kernal magazine Don’t be Just Another Brick in the Wall. From the article:

“Our old education system hasn’t been able to catch up with the present, which is constantly evolving. Rather than providing children with the tools needed to tackle the…