Web services can be used to trawl social media sites for users that exert influence in their respective communities. The social influencer marketing firm then asks those influencers to try client products or services and discuss them on their respective social networks. Clients can then observe, through an enhanced digital dashboard, with metrics that measure the dissemination of brand mentions across numerous web platforms.
There are at least 70 companies offering online influence measurement. Advocates of this online-only approach claim that online activity reflects (or pre-empts) the trends in offline transactions. For example, Razorfish released one of the first social influencer marketing reports, entitled Fluent. The report discusses many theories surrounding social marketing, including the importance of the push/pull dynamic and online consumer empowerment, authenticity and importance of buzz marketing.
In addition, online activity can be a core part of offline decision making, as consumers research products and review sites
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Critics of this online-only approach argue that only researching online sources misses critical influential individuals and inputs. They note that much influential exchange of information occurs in the offline world, and is not captured in online media. Indeed, the majority of consumer exchanges occurs face-to-face, not in an online environment, as evidenced by Carl. He notes that “an overwhelming majority of word-of-mouth (WOM) episodes (nearly 80%) … occur in face-to-face interpersonal settings, while online WOM accounted for only seven to ten percent of the reported (WOM) episodes.”
Carl concludes that “The majority of the WOM action still seems to be happening in the offline world. These findings are especially provocative since they emerge at a time when more and more organizations are paying attention to how their brands are discussed online and recent academic research has focused on online WOM. Thus it is important for organizations to keep both online and offline conversations on their radar screen.”
Keller Fay announced in 2007 that “While experts have previously estimated that 80% of marketing-relevant word of mouth takes place “offline” (i.e., face-to-face or via telephone), the new results indicate that this figure is even higher – 92%.”
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More recently, Nate Elliott at Forrester observed that “the huge majority of users influence each other face to face rather than through social online channels like blogs and social networks.”
And the Fluent report, though generally orientated towards online measures admits that “it is necessary to remember the effect that offline social activity has on purchasing decisions.” It also notes that survey “respondents trust offline friends most, with 73 percent indicating near or complete trust versus just 33 percent for online friends.”