Your brand should be unlocking the reputation and trustworthiness of its power users
There is a plethora of services now exploiting peer-to-peer networks that remove the middlemen, drive commitment or enable a more democratised method of customer experience and journey.
Here are some of the heavyweights so you get what I’m talking about.
Then there are your aggregators who are ‘mapping influence’, they’ve made a start but have a long way to go.
Klout’s, Joe Fernandez has already publicly stated he’d love to map and score all this data to measure influence on the web, naturally that will eventually include the heavyweights above, presumably to quantify more of a reputation than solely influence.
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So how do we harness the reputation of individuals, collectively, to contribute towards marketing efforts and increasing user/customer acquisition?
Here’s the idea:
– Find your power, early adopting users
– Facilitate them distinction and notoriety (with their permission)
– Leverage that capital in showcasing and/or acquiring
– Harness the hubs of interaction
– Push through increased provocation
– Drive more sales/action
So you’re essentially allowing your most prolific, high net worth users to find a pedestal to promote or billow a particular brand image and you can do that without surrendering your entire influence over the dynamics of growth.
Why?
Not all of us are engrossed by the endeavours of our Facebook friends, we’re not all susceptible to being influenced by those closest to us or in our immediate graph and this has been one of the primers in propagating growth for twitter, linking topical influence.
It also supplants a driver to pull users through the inbound funnel once having signed up and hands them an immediate example of what is going on within the network. Quora and Rdio have been especially good at this, whereby it’s easy to follow users with great playlists or with great answers to questions on topics of interest, they’re leveraging the reputational influence of top users to push through adoption, interaction and retention. This is perhaps an area where pinterest could greatly improve.
Takeaway
You need to weave social levers into the fabric of your network (the fulcrum in this case), to hinge growth and dissemination of your product/service through the community, trust your early adopting, power users and allow their growing reputation to subtly push your brand forward.
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