A Family of Influencers
Online social communities are powerful marketing allies! I’m currently surveying people registered for the Marketing Now! event in New Zealand to find out about the social communities they are interested in developing. Most of the responders so far reported that they are interested in developing a loyal community or community of influencers. Who IS this community of influencers and how do you find them? Well it may be that some of your best influencers are the ones close by in the gene pool — your family! Ah, do I hear you mumbling that mixing business and personal Facebook friends or Twitter followers is like blending oil and vinegar for you?
Well I have been recently enlightened by spending time this week with my family of influencers: my parents (in the 80’s age range just to give you an idea) participate in forums with their friends, use search engines for most of their info gathering, and check ratings and comments for most of the restaurants they try or videos they rent. They’ll probably read this blog post and send a link to their friends. My sister practically lives on her iPod – buys and comments on apps, contributes content to music communities (the group Cake in particular), downloads books and videos and follows on Twitter. My brother is a photographer and uses Flickr to post and get comments on his art. And the next generation of my family takes it to the next level! Faren has helped create an open source health research community and Lucille is building one up as a wellness examiner! And that’s just the start of it… My family is and has the potential of being a powerful community of influencers as I am for them. They are the first ones to think about for potential comments, diggs, bookmarks and community influence… and they may be the easiest to engage.
So next time you are on an airplane and the announcement reminds you to look around because the nearest emergency exit may be behind you, remind yourself to also look around because your nearest community of influencers may be right behind you, or sitting next to you, and they may know about sites with good floor lighting to help light your way.
Oh, and for the curious minds, I’m the one smack in the middle of the photo above. iPod girl (left) and photo boy (right) practiced influence skills at an early age.
I happened to see quite a few of these posters on my less-than-one-mile drive to the post office today. This definitely stood out to me. I was clearly impressed that someone did a wonderful job of word-processing this flyer. It had many of the makings of a good marketing campaign – a visual image of the object, technical details, a contact number clearly displayed and a call to action (reward). It also had the makings of buzz – unique, unusual, memorable. Somebody invested the time in distribution: printing and stapling many flyers to many phone posts around town. So I wonder??? if in a world not so long from now we could use social media to quickly and effectively communicate this problem and help the owner recover the stolen goods. Could we tag it, twitter it, microblog news to our local sheriff’s office? OK, granted in our community we still don’t have decent broadband access (which I’m working on), but to encourage demand and new participation in the web 2.o world, I’m always on the lookout for good uses of social media. But for now, I’m on the lookout for a Green and Black E-Z-Go Utility Vehicle…
