Social Influence Marketing Report Proves Useful

Razorfish has published a pleasantly useful report on social media called, “The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report.” You can download the report on Razorfish’s website here. It’s well worth the read.

The company’s VP and Global Social Media Lead, Shiv Singh sent a number of marketing and social media bloggers advanced copies of it last weekend in hopes we would write about it. I normally have little time to read reports or books, but most things coming out of Razorfish are pretty good and Singh has a stellar reputation, so I gave it a look see.

The report does something a lot of social media bloggers, thinkers and talkers don’t do. It whittles the focus down to a specific: Influence marketing or leveraging social connections with online influencers to market your product or services. Their analysis includes a survey of social influence which touches on the role of social media in buying decisions, how social media is becoming a place for paid and unpaid marketing efforts and talk of Facebook Connect an the resulting movement of the social graph.

More interestingly to me, though, is that Razorfish reveals in this report a new influence metric call the SIM Score, or social influence marketing measure. The score has two attributes the report calls, “critical.” First is the total share of consumer conversations the brand in question has online. The other is the degree to which customers like or dislike your brand when they talk about it online, or a sentiment score.

According to the report, “The first attribute … is a measure of reach. The second a measure of likability. The SIM Score combines the two attributes to essentially measure favorable impact of your brand.”

Essentially, the SIM score takes the net sentiment score for the brand and divides it by the net sentiment score for the industry, giving us a number. Comparing it to competitors would be relevant. I’d be interested to see other ways they might recommending using it.

There are lots of great insights to be pulled from this report. The best way for you to grasp them is to go and download it for yourself. It can be found online at http://fluent.razorfish.com/publication/?m=6540&l=1.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, good or bad, in the comments. And a nice tip of the hat to Singh and the Razorfish crew for producing some relevant content to support their brand.

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