Do brands care whether they have influence in social media? They certainly should, said members of the three-person panel on social influence at NMX Monday.
Jonathan Dick, Director of Business Development at Klout, kicked off the conversation with his thoughts that brands do care, though they may struggle to understand or measure their influence.
Andy Levey, Senior Manager of New Media & Analytics at Cirque du Soleil, believes social influence is incredibly important for brands to connect with and engage fans. “It’s all about them; if we don’t have fans talking about us, we’re not in business,” he said. Cirque du Soleil are lucky, Levey admits. Their brand is creative and entertaining; many businesses lack this stroke of good fortune. What can you do if your brand isn’t inherently entertaining or you’re not in the media space and therefore informative by nature?
If you had to put a value on the UFC, what would it be? You wouldn’t be remiss to put it in the hundreds of millions, or even billions. Dana White got into the UFC for $2 million and people thought he and his partners were out of their minds for paying even that much. Yet today, UFC is a multi-million dollar business, with over 
Repeat after me: This holiday season, I resolve to take into consideration the increasingly mobile and visual preferences of my customers or readers, and to create and repurpose content to meet their needs, on whichever platform they use to connect with my business.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to have your own army of word-of-mouth marketers, standing by for deployment at your beck and call?
As a business journalist, I looked forward to information from a handful of specific sources each quarter. In fact, my quarterly e-commerce reports would wait until each of these select few companies, from whom I had come to expect great information, released their data. I relied on these sources for fantastic written and visual content our readers appreciated.
Picture this: your company has exciting news to share with customers, shareholders, suppliers and your target market. You’re launching a new product this week and it will be debuted at a popular industry event, sure to be attended by media, influencers and people who will want to buy YOUR product, just as soon as they learn about it.
