Cold Kiwi…

Red Bull is an energy drink sold by the Austrian Red Bull GmbH. It was created in 1987 by the Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz[1] and on market share, Red Bull is the most popular energy drink in the world, with 3 billion cans sold each year. Dietrich Mateschitz was inspired by an already existing drink called Krating Daeng which he discovered in Thailand. He took this idea, and to suit the tastes of Westerners, modified the ingredients, and founded Austrian Red Bull GmbH in partnership with Chaleo Yoovidhya.

Chaleo Yoovidhya invented the Thai energy drink Krating Daeng; in Thai daeng is red, and krating is the reddish brown bovine, gaur, an animal slightly larger than the bison. Red Bull is sold in a tall and slim blue-silver can. Krating Daeng is sold in Thailand and in some parts of Asia in a wider gold can with the name of Krating Daeng or Red Bull Classic. Both are different products produced separately.

Their slogan is “Red Bull gives you wiiings” and the product is aggressively marketed through advertising, tournament sponsorship (Red Bull Air Race, Red Bull Crashed Ice), sports team ownerships (Red Bull Racing, Scuderia Toro Rosso, EC Red Bull Salzburg, FC Red Bull Salzburg, Red Bull New York, RB Leipzig), celebrity endorsements, and with its record label, Red Bull Records, music.

The internet today has been defined by the explosion of social media, and especially through self-publishing platforms such as Blogger and Twitter.  Though the term blogging means different things to different people, at the end of the day what Social Media has become is around self-publishing, which blogging is a significant part of.  Social Media and all the different forms of self-publishing, from status sharing to link sharing to writing about your favorite recipes on your blog, has become the defining path for the web.

Even more importantly for brand marketers today it is critical for them to continue to invest in building relationships with their most fanatic supporters and also category leaders in their markets.   For marketers, in the realm of social media, they need to have relationships, but these relationships have to be defined based on two primary dimensions, popularity and influence.

Popularity and influence have long been used to determine whether a certain blog or social media site is successful. Although they mean differently, these two factors aren’t always regarded as such. Most people still commit the mistake that popularity is similar to influence. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between them and Popularity vs. Influence in Blogging and Social Media: What’s The Difference will tell you why.

What is Popularity and Influence?

Popularity in blogging means that a lot of people like you and your blog; many different people visit your blog and a huge amount of traffic is directed to your website. Then, you are a popular social media user if your page receives various comments and visits. Popularity and influence are different since the latter is the ability to affect the way people think and act. You are considered as an influential blogger if you can influence most people’s views on certain issues. Popularity and influence are both essential factors in the success of various online activities such as blogging and social media.

Popularity vs. Influence in Blogging and Social Media: What’s The Difference?

The difference between these two concepts should be well established since they are fundamental factors of a successful social media or blog. Popularity and influence may seem alike in a number of ways. However, they offer different ideas when used in blogging and social media.

Being popular doesn’t necessarily mean influential.

This is one big difference between popularity and influence. You can say that a blog is popular; however, you can’t be entirely sure that the same blog is influential. For example, there are two hypothetical blogs; the first one received 2 million views in a month while the second one got 100,000 visits. You can easily say that the former blog is more popular because of the large difference in the number of views. Nut can you say that the first blog is still more influential? No, you can’t because popularity doesn’t equate to influence. And who knows? The first blog might just be written by a popular person who doesn’t know anything about what he’s talking about. Or, search engines could also cause the high number of traffic for the first blog. This means that the visitors are just passersby who don’t read blogs at all. On the other hand, the second blog can still be the more influential one. Therefore, popularity and influence represent two different concepts.

One difference between popularity and influence is that influence can’t be measured with numbers. 

Sure, popularity can be easily described by the number of visits that a certain blog gets. However, the same doesn’t hold true for influence. Influence could only be measured using the qualitative method. Consider the above example again; the first blog may have more traffic and visitors for its website. Thus, it’s a relatively popular blog. However, its influence can only be measured if the writer affected the reader in some way. For example, the writer tried to persuade the reader to use a certain product. If that reader and other people follow, then the blog may be considered influential.

1. Pay utmost attention to the needs and wants of your customers. A lot of companies and businesses make the mistake of focusing their attention on how they can get more people to join their communities instead of focusing on providing for the needs and wants of those who already joined. Give to your existing customers what they need and they’ll do the recruiting for your brand community.
2. Allow peer to peer communication. A brand community isn’t just about you conversing with your customers. Most importantly, it should be about the customers conversing with the other customers. Relationships should exist between customers and between you and the customers. The keyword here is open interaction. A customer should be able to interact with another customer as much as he can interact with the brand.
3. A brand community can be built on any type of business, no matter how small the business. Don’t think that brand communities are only for huge and major companies. Do you own a small town diner? No problem. An effective brand community can still be built around it. Who knows, because of your brand community, your small diner could grow into a network of diners. Never underestimate the power of these communities.
4. Make it easy for people to create content about your brand and make it even easier for them to share such content. Take advantage of the popularity of social media sites like blogs, social bookmarking sites and online forums. And don’t forget to create platforms in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter where your community can connect and converse with each other.
5. Nurture open exchanges and conversations. Don’t try to over-moderate your community. The main purpose of people in joining communities is to communicate and interact. So the act of overly moderating a community is contrary to what brand communities are about. Moderate only when it’s necessary.
6. Participate in the community. Don’t just be a bystander looking into the conversations. Be active and show your customers that you care about what they think and what they’re saying about your brand.

If you have been using the more traditional forms of marketing to promote your products and services to no avail, then you should look into how you may use the many categories of word of mouth marketing to better achieve your business goals. There are various resources that you may use to learn about this practice, all of which will give you certain tips and techniques that you may use to win in your field. Here are certain pieces of information that you may use to develop a word of mouth marketing plan that will benefit your business.

First and foremost, make sure that you understand that the many categories of word of mouth marketing are mainly carried out to increase understanding about your products and services. When you use this marketing technique, you are not simple increasing awareness about your products but you are boosting their reputation among the members of the market as well. For this reason, it will do you well to ensure that all your clients get a clear understanding about your services as well. This way, they will be able to tell others everything that they should understand about your business using pieces of information that they may then use when they talk about your company.

The many categories of word of mouth marketing also do not take any part of the speaking party as the audience. Both personalities that are involved in the conversation are equally receptive to the message that is being transferred. One part may be hearing about the products for the first time, but this does not mean that the one sending it is not susceptible to the message as well. As a matter of fact, the one speaking will most likely be most likely have his image of the products reinforced when he talks about them.

Since conversations are usually done live and in real time, there is no way to predict where it will go next. As a matter of fact, there are instances when people fleet from one topic to another, only to go back to the main topic at hand. You need to be able to understand the fleeting nature of conversations if you were to use the many categories of word of mouth marketing to your benefit. Doing so will allow you to use this characteristic to make your products and services more alive and, therefore, more interesting.

Marketing can be conversational (pdf whitepaper) as long as the two parties involved are genuinely interested in what is being said. This is the main reason why the many categories of word of mouth marketing are found to be most effective when they are used among people who are already using the products and services that are beings discussed. For this reason, you need to focus majority of your attention to ensuring that the different products and services that you offer the market has various qualities that people would want to talk about. With this aspect taken care of, you can basically ensure that people will be talking about your offers in a positiveand a profitable light.

I have been really lucky to be involved recently in a new business environment, aka a new career at a company out West in Cali. More to come on that front soon, but in the meantime I experienced an amazing feeling recently and it has changed who I am.

I forgot how important leadership is to an organization and how much it shapes the company. I forgot the impact the leaders of a company have on the overall company growth and success. I forgot that leadership is what makes companies successful.  Leaders are influential in the organization and to me influencer equals leader.

I have been struggling with trying to understand why certain companies were successful and why others were not, it is because of leadership. I have been trying to better understand the impact the CEO or other C-level people have on the success of a company, and I now realize it is leadership. Great leaders are worth their weight in gold. Great leaders will payoff 1000x what you pay them. Great leaders will make the difference regardless of the environment or business situation.

I have had an awaking to something I knew already in my heart and in my head. It is like I have come out of a cloud of confusion and have seen the light. I have gotten religion, it is called the awaking of leadership.

The people I am involved with today are the types of leaders who define the ability to lead. They are the types of people that look out for each individual contributor and respect them for who they are and what they can bring. These people I have joined recently have been tremendously successful in business, and it is not because of luck or timing, it is because of pure leadership. If you think I am speaking to you, I am.

Trust me, when you experience this environment you will know what I am talking about. I understand your confusion. I understand where you are. I understand why this might not make sense to you. But it will, one day.

I was in New York City the other day and had just finished up a handful of great meetings with prospects and social influencer’s around social marketing.   It was interesting because most of the day was spent talking about the dramatic shift that has occurred in our short lifetime related to the Internet and specifically social media.  We talked about everything from social media to conversational marketing to earned media.

One of the topics we spent a lot of time talking about was the fact that consumer reviews and word of mouth marketing has changed how marketers, and especially retailers, operate in the market today.  A good example of this paradigm shift can be seen by looking at Amazon, even years ago when they were mostly focused on books.

One of the things that made Amazon such a successful business model was they could offer the true long-tail of books. I remember, even as much as 15-years ago, I told my dad that I was interested in books about toasts and toasting people at parties and dinners.   I had a difficult time finding any of these titles at the local book store and the library, but my dad went on Amazon.com and because they were able to offer such a rich catalog of books that covered every possible topic, he was able to find me a handful of books that were really useful and interesting. Because Amazon didn’t have the overhead of retail locations and the limitations of having only a limited set of local customers, they could really offer almost any and every book you would ever be interested in.

It was interesting as I was walking back from my meeting I looked across the street and saw one of the Border’s book stores going out of business. It struck me as really interesting and woke me up to the reality of the discussion we were just having hours before.  

It is clear the downfall of Borders can be directly tied to the growth of the internet and the increase in consumer adoption of e-commerce.  

Though there are many reasons Borders failed as a company, a few of the primary reasons were due to the fact that their business model was similar to Amazon, though they had to have local stores.  Borders model was to carry any and every book you would ever need.   Yes, they would carry the best sellers and the classics, but they also tried to carry as many other titles as possible.   This is the same story as Amazon, but if you think about the overhead that Borders had to carry with having to stock each of these books in all their local book stores.  Since demand for the long-tail of products is almost random, there is no way to scale a business like this unless you can charge a very large premium or you can reduce your carry and logistics costs.

It is clear Borders wasn’t able to pull off their business plan, and though they had other failures, such as being very music focused (another internet nail in the coffin), the internet could account for the majority of this companies failures.

I visited this store that was closing down in the next few days because they were offering really great discounts.   What became apparent to me was even with a discount as high as 90%, I didn’t see value in these books because I now read everything on my kindle or iPad.  It made me a little sad to see all these great books that would be fun to read, but realize I had no use for the paper versions.

I took some photos of the store that was about to go under.  They were selling everything, from the books to DVD’s to furniture to the cash registers.   Check out some of these photos, you can see a story that is playing out across the US at many Borders, and other book stores.

The one amusing thing I found was that, though most of the books were gone, the Palin and Beck books were overstocked and there were plenty of these books to go around.  Even at a 90% discount for the Palin or Beck books, people were much more likely to buy a book on dirt or economics versus buy one of these things.

This is an interesting relationship between the premier camera company Nikon and Hollywood’s A-list actor and producer, Ashton Kutcher.  Kutcher has signed on to promote the Nikon COOLPIX brand cameras and is lending his photogenic qualities to Nikon to help them reach a new younger and hipper audience.

Nikon shares the pro-am segment and of course the professional segment of the market, which lends itself to the higher income male 45+ demo.   The fastest growing market, especially in digital photography is the active mobile woman and the younger out of college segment.

Ashton Kutcher is going to help promote the manufacturer’s new COOLPIX Style series cameras. The campaign will debut nationally on March 25th with a television commercial, which precedes the print advertisements and an interactive online component.  The interactive component is really trying to tap into the rich influencer position that Ashton has and his ability to create a scalable conversation with his fans and followers.

Though Kutcher is being paid as a celebrity spokesperson, there are plenty of signs in these vertical categories of brands building influencer relationships with small and mid-sized blogs and websites.   You don’t need to be a Hollywood celebrity to make an impact, and the brand marketers of today realize that they can tap into their rich fan bases and category influencer’s to promote and build their brand message.   Though Kutcher can reach millions, there are plenty of others that though effective conversational marketing strategies by brands that can move the needle and drive true ROI.