The Istobe eCommerce Analytics Blog

Today one of our twitter peers asked us how she could find people of influence for a given region. As I researched the question and solution I found that there is actually a name for what is probably the end-game for this exercise:

Influencer marketing- is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

As I will demonstrate it is possible, using some freely available analytics tools, to narrow the list of influencers. However, as our own Social Network sage Matt Thomson pointed out, the analytics tools fall short in becoming truly useful and further click-based research is really needed to establish credible, influencers who may become evangelists. Read Find your ideal customer evangelists »

As you can tell from our blogs, we’ve been very social media focused this week. We’ve actually been watching the space for quite a while now, but recent events have really shown how the power of social media has changed the thinking of the mainstream marketing crowd. I’m sure many of you are aware of Motrin fiasco where women (and men) on Twitter expressed outrage at the portrayal of moms by the ibuprofen company (“Motrin moms,” a-Twitter over ad, take on Big Pharma–And win).  Additionally, many political pundits have credited Obama’s success with winning over 18-35 yr olds to his use of new and more cutting edge marketing mediums. The power of social media has certainly been proven out, but does your company need to worry about it and, if yes, how do we take advantage of it?

Read Twitter Me This: How Do Businesses Take Advantage of Social Marketing »

Continuing our research into how to navigate the social and micro-blogging networks, specifically twitter, I want to dicuss the various sites and tools which can be used to draw a map of the twitterverse.  The tools fall into categories of search and survey.

Search. Like every other internet based network there are several solutions for searching the twitter world.  Each search tool is oriented towards a specific goal.  For searching against keywords there are 2 good options: Twitter Scan and Monittor.

Read Twitter Analytics »