Social media and WOM have been around forever. Listening and engaging along the consumer journey is how we as marketers/PR pros influence that conversation, and thus impact purchases and WOM.

Being top of mind to a consumer and helping them with their need versus pushing your product is a huge competitive advantage for the brands that choose to embrace it. Think about when someone asks you if you know any good candidates for a job, for instance. I always think back to the people who have talked to me about their job search, what they want in a job or who have made the effort to meet and have conversation.

Companies can do the same thing. It’s just a different, more effective way of engaging the consumer and actually building relationships. Problem is that it’s hard and involves a culture change. That’s what’s allowing the old school sales funnel to stick around :).

So ideally, this means that the external conversation the customer is having about the brand, and the internal conversation the brand is having about the customer, are more in line, or even…..the same.

As more customers are spending more time online and offline Word of Mouth is increasingly becoming online Word of Mouse, the importance of engaging via social media channels becomes even more important. This isn’t about improving social media, this is about improving marketing and how we communicate and connect with customers.

In terms of influence I am not in the Oprah book club (nor ever will be lol), and if Klout scores start allowing us to cut in line, I’m going to have to up my score asap.

Disclaimer - I work for Alterian, which has a social media monitoring tool, but these thoughts are my own.

Kyle Henderick
Alterian(http://socialmedia.alterian.com/)

That is absolutely influence and I agree with your assessment. Except, I think the people who would do all those things you bulleted above are probably the same demo who watches her show — women ages 25-plus (guessing there) and a small scattered demo of men.

Explained in that context, she is absolutely influential. But Oprah is not universally influential. No one is. The 18-29 year old guys still aren’t interested no matter how much she uses Twitter. May seem like semantics, but we’re talking about two industries — PR and Marketing — that based results measurement on a metric as misleading as impressions for 20-plus years (and many still do without telling the rest of the story).

Thanks for stopping by, Nate. Cheers!

- thousands might respond if she asked a question
- thousands would RT her stuff
- If she put out a challenge to her followers (in her main demo) to start blogging, how many would do it?
- It would probably be on Mashable the next day
- her tweets and activity might even make the TV news

Is that influence?