Social Media Marketing

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Historical data
Listening started January 1
After social media program launch
Baseline
Figure 7.1 Baseline for Conversation
Find Your Influencers
Moving deeper into listening, who is participating in the conversation is often as
important as what is actually being said. Being able to identify participants who are
more broadly connected, or who have a specific connection in your marketplace is
clearly important. In PR, for example, you connect with media influencers and similar
professionals by researching or subscribing to a database of known journalists, writ-
ers, analysts, media influencers, and so on. These people sit at the entry points of the
media channels that convey your message to large, defined audiences. In this setting,
getting your information to specific people is as easy (or as hard) as the readiness of
your own contacts database enabled. (Getting them to do something with it, and more
importantly what you wanted them to do with it is, of course, much more difficult.)
By comparison, one of the aspects of the Social Web that makes it more chal-
lenging than traditional channels of communication is that the influencers—in the
conversational leadership and direction or tone-setting sense—can be literally anyone.