Do you know how many friends you have on Facebook, 100, 500, or 1,500? Dare I ask the next question, do you have any idea of those friends who listen to you or respond to your post or recommendations? The truth is most of us are not aware of the true influence we carry on those around us. Whether in a face to face interaction or as a part of our virtual encounters (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc), we don’t have access to tangible numbers or facts to prove or justify our influence in these realms, nor is it a need in relation to our personal life and engagement with our peers and friends.

However, as a marketer and VP of Business Development at Dukky, the true influence rating of my consumers is not just an interesting piece of data, it’s my golden ticket to increase a campaign’s reach, response and ROI. The ability to categorize my customer’s based on their association, activity, commitment and influence with my brand changes the way I interact with them.  Better yet, it encourages my interaction with them.

I read an article yesterday, Influence Versus Popularity on Twitter: Kim Kardashian Case Study, that exemplifies this comparison perfectly.  The celebrity race to gather the most followers is no secret to any of us. This case study takes a more granular look at the responsiveness of those celebrity followers and evaluates their influence based on the number of followers.  According to the article,

“Lady Gaga weighs in at 6.5 million Twitter followers, for example; Britney Spears has just over 6 million; Ashton Kutcher’s got 5.8 million; and even the pint-sized Justin Bieber has 5.5 million Twitter followers. Ms. Kardashian has yet to break the 5-million-followers mark as of press time. Nevertheless, Kardashian’s official website gets a ton of traffic from Twitter — more than any of these other celebs do. In fact, her site ranks 54 of all websites that get clickthroughs from Twitter users, and she’s number 20 in the entertainment category. The types of sites that outrank her are media hosting sites (Flickr, TwitPic and Vimeo, for example) and a plethora of sports and news sites.”

If I had to pick which of these celebs I wanted in my database, I’d pick Kim over Gaga any day. The power of a consumer’s influence trumps the difference in followers, because the number of followers doesn’t impact my ROI, the true influence of a consumers does. Equipping your marketing with the kind of intelligence to identify and reward your influencers will soon become the new normal, as technologies like Dukky continue to be added to campaigns to measure and identify a consumer’s influence. What are your consumers worth to you individually? It’s time to find out.

To read the full article mentioned above, click here.