Awareness Report on Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital

Awareness has released an interesting free report, 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital. It began with some useful statistics:

• 90 percent of all purchases are subject to social influence.
• 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
• 67 percent of shoppers spend more money online after seeing recommendations from friends.
• 75 percent of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand, and 53 percent of Twitter users have recommended companies or products.
• Fans of brands are 51 percent more likely to buy.
• Sharing features can increase the spread of awareness by 246 percent with “Likes” and 98 percent with “Send to a friend.”

We are in a social world. When LinkedIn added social features, their use and market value went up. Even the Weather channel is adding social features. It is happening inside and outside the enterprise.  The Awareness report provides three keys to gaining great influence in this new online social world. They define influence as “a brand’s ability to affect or prompt action among its key constituents.”

The first key is growing social capital by leveraging external and internal influence. I like this use of both internal and external. This is why I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0. The internal and external social media strategies and practices need to be aligned, and where appropriate, the technology needs to be integrated. I remember the old call center days in 90s when call center reps said they would learn about their company’s latest offers from people calling in. This cannot happen today and should not have happened then.

In the section on leveraging external influence they look at a number of tools, including one of my favorites, Traackr. I have written about them many times (see Appopedia). Here is their enterprise social media list of key influencers. They also mentioned, PeekYou, Kred by PeopleBrowsr, mBlast and PeerIndex. The Awareness report provides an eight step approach to maximizing this influence.  You can also find my posts on Awareness in the Appopedia. 

In the leveraging internal influence section they offer a four step approach that begins with benchmarking your firm’s social capital and concludes with fostering brand advocacy over time.   This is a very useful report for marketers and others who want to expand their organizations’ influence through social media. Here is the way to download it.