WOMMA/Summit - Day 1: The Influencer or Network: What Matters More?
The session discusses whether influentials (i.e., the person who tells others what to think and buy) are real, whether they span product categories, and whether they really matter in the age of social networks.
Panelists:
* Ed Keller, CEO, Keller Fay Group
* Dr. Barak Libai, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
* Sean O'Driscoll, General Manager, Support Communities & MVP, Microsoft
Keller:
* 15% of all population accounts for 1/3 of all word-of-mouth
* They have 60% more conversations that the rest of the public
* They have 90% brand conversations that the rest of the public
* Ways to reach catalysts is via media (particularly print media, as well as radio) and technology
* The catalysts tend to be early riders and therefore consume all sorts of media early in the morning - important to know for media placement
* The catalysts are eager to sign up for WOM programs
* An influencer program can make WOM marketing more effective
Libai:
* How do we measure the value of influentials/opinion leaders? Possible measures include how many people they talk with, how many people they personally affect, how many people are affected by the WOM process they start.
* A more robust value to measure the value of opinion leaders is via social value, i.e., how many people the influential personally affect, the profitability of each additional customer, and whether people would adopt something even without the existence of the influential.
* Influentials affect the net present value because they accelerate WOM
O'Driscoll:
* Who the conversation stoppers are is very important to know
* Due to Web 2.0, there is much more engagement by people outside the traditional product cycle
An audience member asked whether influentials are becoming synonymous with bloggers. Keller stated that the universe of influentials far exceeds simply bloggers.