It has become imperative for any youngster to have an account on any of the social networking site and most importantly on Facebook and Twitter.

The more the friends you have, the more you are connected to a vast number of friends chances are you are already crowned queen/ king of the social networks.

There is a joke doing the round, a Girls posts on her FaceBook wall, “ohh! hurt my ankle!!”, and there are 834 comments on 560 likes, and comments ranging from enquiry to all range of medicinal advice. And a Guy posts that his leg got broke, he receives 2 likes and 3 comments all asking for if they can borrow the bike till he gets healed.

Social Influence, is very well defined at Wikipedia, as which happens when an individual’s thoughts, feelings or actions are affected by other people. But still is it a persuasive effect we have on one another or our Emotional Need to be in touch with other and create a socially defined open or closed circle for us to reach out to other. The Anna Hazarre case made a case for where Social Influence is responsible for change in Attitude.

Recently, Klout, the infamous Social Influence watch dog ooops ranking service, ranked the social influence of over 100 million people, and there CEO rightly said, “One hundred million people with Klout Scores means that there are 100 million voices effectively leveraging the social Web to share their opinions, hopes and dreams and shaping the decisions of the billions of people now listening to them”.

Of course! It doesn’t guarantee Klout’s as a legitimate yardstick of social media influence although Yes, it can be a great method of finding like-minded, thoughtful people with a certain interest or expertise. but do open gates or atleast Business Intelligence (BI) fraternity need to measure anything and everything.

As Klout, the system that rates how influential people are on social media is set up in an old Carrot and Stick thory of Motivation, herein the carrot, which is the reward, is the influence you have, and that is backwards. But Influence is not a reward or an end result. It is a byproduct of actually being good or bad.

Can this Social Influence be deployed by a Firm for Marketing purpose?

Late C K Prahalad in his book, ‘The New Age of Innovation (Next Practices)’, give a principle for Social Influence for a firm which rightly can be said as guiding parameter for New Marketing Dimensions, which is: N=1, R=G formula. C K Prahalad formulates serving one customer at a time as N=1. In order to service this one customer like this, a whole lot of reliably working partnerships are to be forged.

It invariably will have to scale globally, formulated as R=G (Resource = Global).

The key characteristic of a The Firm serving N=1 with R=G are:

• Node within a global web.
• Personalized Experiences
• Co-creation
• Celebration of Individual
• Thematic experience.
• Delivery Network.

For example, YouTube had this democratization (N=1 + Affordable = Democratization, unlike any paid online video channel like OnStar) play out in physical space more intensely and much faster than anticipated.

Time will soon be there when these “Influence-rs” of market will advocate Market Buying and Purchase Behavior of Consumer. No Wonder, Google who never was known to provide a way for marketers to distinguish between the performance of their paid efforts such as Product Listing Ads, and organic search ads recently came out with Metrics for Shopping.

Google now seems to be more interested in trying to understand the product data in the context of how people search.

So now for Ecommerce Players and Retailers, it is imperative to ensure their feeds or Product Search Queries are optimized for search queries, similar to Web site pages for search engine optimization. Otherwise, consumers will take no time in passing to a result where  the product photos and descriptions are tuned to the people way of searching. Marketers must do a better job of normalizing their feeds to align with the way people search.

So again the Social Influence blends contextual and behavioral targeting for Social Media Marketing.

- Akshat