In the world of social media, opinion makers and influencers rule what gets shared, tweeted or is trending.
We decoded this phenomenon, and discovered the snacking behaviour of people following others on social platforms such as Twitter. So, for car enthusiasts, a few ‘micro celebrities’ rule the opinion stakes, because people love to read reviews of new cars. Similarly, for food, travel, fashion, and technology.
So when a leading financial services company came across with an alternate payment method, that would revolutionise online transactions, we decided to engage with bloggers to be the first with the experience, and then engaged with them to get an understanding of how their following would be using the solution.
The key challenge here, however, is engaging the influencers, and that’s a chicken and egg problem. The folks who are already influential, don’t want to be influenced, and the folks that want to be influenced, aren’t there yet.
We look at it differently. It’s not the follower count, or Klout score, or any of the much-touted indices of influence that we decide on. On the other hand, we have a method of looking at the crowd to find the influencers i.e. the retweets of retweets, and so on.