How To Use Social Score: Referral Marketing

I have talked this week about social score, which is one of the most important CRM concept that emerged for the web 2.0. Social score aims to identify the potential of one customer in regards of both his online community (in size and value) and activities (blog posts, number of tweets...)

But once you have identified its potential value, its ability to spread the word of mouth, you need to leverage your new abilities. Of course, you need to have set up a proper community management strategy, where you'll be able to interact with your customers, provide the appropriate response to their needs, but also survey what is said about your brand and products online.

Referral Marketing As A Community Management Tool
I believe referral marketing could be the best strategy to apply online. Indeed, you need to get a specific trigger, and to reward people that will bring you customers among their friends and community activities.

Referral marketing is commonly known in the real estate business, and helps agents to find new clients thanks to their existent network. Hence, referral marketing has developped a wide range of tips and techniques to trigger referrals at no cost. I think there is a lot to be learnt from it and to be adapted to community management.

The goal is to mix social score results (in order to identify the potential return on investment you could get on a specific customer) with referral marketing (that will enable you to reach new customers thanks to the one you already have).

And you what do you think about it? It will be interesting to speak with some already great experts of both worlds to see how they envision the concept.

Social Score: A New Marketing Concept

The concept of social score is emerging. New social media have changed interraction between people and hence, it implies a change in the way we consider customers values.

If in marketing an important concept was to reach early adopters, which influents the rest of customers, wouldn't it be great to know how much of an early adopter each of your customers are?

The social score aims to measure how influent someone is based on its social media activities. It could take into account:

• The number of services he uses (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Gtalk among others)
• How often he uses (number of Tweets/day, time spent on Facebook, number of comments via Disqus)
• How implicated he is (does he post notes, or does he simply watch comments and status updates? Does he create events, groups, or tests?)
  
• Number of friends he owns
• How influent his friends are

On a customer relationship management point of view (CRM), we consider that a company own a customer equity, which is the sum of customer lifetime value. This customer equity is as important as the financial equity, as it is the base of future sales. Actually, this social score idea match perfectly with a CRM approach.

Now, thanks to social score, the customer equity concept must be revisited, to evaluate how your customers could spread your brand through social media.

To learn more about the topic (in French), it's here on the blog of Henri Kaufman.