Marketers place a lifetime value on a customer on an email list based on their purchasing activity. For Netflix, it could be $9. At US Airways, maybe $2.
But now with social networking
booming, a question emerges: How to place a similar value on a person who is an active participant on a company's Facebook or MySpace page (or a similar venue, maybe Twitter). And marketers are now in
hot pursuit.
They agree that a person who simply visits the page and is a static follower is of minimal value. But people who can be tagged as influencers, who forward information to friends
or other contacts that result in transactions obviously have tremendous value.
Identifying those social-media pacesetters and understanding what drives them can help marketers send them more
targeted messages, aiming to drive even more referrals and launch successful viral marketing.
Email marketers are working hard on algorithms to quantify the worth of those influencers. Tim
Schigel of ShareThis.com, who spoke on a panel at the Summit, said: “We’ll see a better understanding of that … the industry is trying to figure it out."
Craig
Swerdloff, CEO of LeadSpend -- also on the panel -- said a value of a social-media influencer should be “another variable that you put into your algorithm to determine the lifetime value of a
customer.â€
What is that value? Back-of-the-envelope calculation: If it's $9 per Netflix consumer and that person has 500 Facebook friends and persuades 1% (5) to make a purchase, the
figure could be as high as $54.
Peter Horan, also on the panel and CEO of Goodmail Systems, suggested marketers consult the work of MIT professor Eric von Hippel, who has a method to identify
so-called “lead usersâ€â€" those trendsetters who can drive influence across a range of industries.