Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The standards for company influence

Who are the people that have the most influence on your company's brand, reputation and sales? How can you identify those that play the biggest role in the success of your business?
These are simple enough questions to ask, but need a lot of thought and information to answer correctly.

I've been looking at the role of customer influence now for a few years and have seen various ways of finding, showing and measuring influence, but have yet to see the definitive and 'industry standard' way of doing this..... I guess its for the reason that it is complex.

You see its difficult to agree on a standard for influence, not just because every product or brand out there has a different profile in the minds of the end-user, but also because different business people (your managers and stakeholders) will want different figures or metrics:

1. eCommerce department
They want to find out which influencers create the most revenue on your site, either directly: (actual customers) or indirectly (people they encourage to buy, via whatever means)

2. PR department (Brand / reputation)
They want to identify those that have a positive or negative sentiment (at a particular time, for a particualr product or service) or are more likely to pick up on what yoir company does and report / blog / tweet / etc. about it.

3. Marketing department (Search Engine Optimisation)
They just want to reverse engineer the whole Internet to track back links from other sites to yours and to then see the traffic and search engine "juice" this provides.

With each of these different bodies wanting different measures of influence, is it any wonder there's been no standard way of measuring it yet?

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