Work Stuff

The reasons for brands to engage with affluent consumers are simple enough. Affluents have larger disposable incomes and can purchase more goods and services. If their peers are other affluents, positive referrals from happy consumers can produce a powerful and profitable ripple effect.

Asking consumers to like an ad or post on Facebook-common practice among marketers for years-has, let's face it, become about as popular as Friendster. While Facebook has for some time now preached the gospel of shares to its advertisers, brands finally seem to be heeding the social giant's advice and ditching likes for shares in measuring their social media efforts.

Online influence is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma for most marketers. What exactly is influence? Who has it? How can marketers tapped in to it effectively? With 3.2 billion likes and comments per day and over 400 million tweets per day, the social media world is based on how well we can sway the opinions of others both on and offline.

As influencer marketing has risen with the likes of Klout Perks, exclusive Kred events, and the rise of Social Media Brand Ambassadors, there is one thing that strikes me as contradictory to the whole concept of social media marketing: If social media is about creating long-term relationships of value, why do so many companies target influencers for one campaign and move on?

In today's world of collaborative marketing, brands seek to engage their consumers more and more. The communication gap between brands and consumers has essentially disappeared. Brands no longer have to guess what their consumers want. Smart brands solicit consumer input from product inception all the way through product delivery.

Last week I saw a post on Facebook from C.C. Chapman about a small microphone that he uses for interviewing and dictating while on the road. The photo he posted drew my attention because it looked like a miniature microphone that Elvis would have sang into back in the 50's, but it was a modern USB device.

Every business-to-business CEO and CMO I've met - most of whom came of age prior to the social media era - is trying to understand how to leverage social media to grow their business. They want to understand Twitter. They want reports on their Klout scores.

Facebook plans to eliminate the "friends of fans" metric from its page insights product, first reported by Wisemetrics and confirmed to us by Facebook. The metric shows page owners their estimated total potential audience when counting the friends of users who Like their page, however, it is not very useful.

THE NOW REVOLUTION Read The NOW Revolution, the best-selling book on social business from Jay Baer and Amber Naslund. Every customer is a reporter. Every employee is in marketing. And speed matter like never before.

Analysts and marketers stressed the core importance of content marketing at BtoB's Digital Edge Live conference last month in San Francisco. Tony Jaros, senior VP-research at SiriusDecisions, highlighted the role of content throughout the customer life cycle during a keynote presentation in which he explained a "rearchitected demand waterfall."

YOUTILITY Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to your company's success. You're not competing for attention only against other, similar products. You're competing for attention against everything.

In this edition of The Baer Facts, I talk with Kyle Lacy of ExactTarget about the newly launched "Facebook Phone," released to little acclaim last week.