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.
