Power to the people!

It is called “influencer marketing” and it is nothing really new in the marketing world. The concept is straight forward; you find an individual, or several individuals, with influence and credibility and you associate them with your brand. Usually influencers could be celebrities, athletes, professors, mentors, doctors, etc. The final objective is to have their credibility rub off on your brand so that you gain credibility and, hopefully, a larger following of consumers. Brand ambassadors and celebrity endorsements are the typical examples.

With the advent of social media businesses are also looking at ‘ordinary’ people to help them disseminate information in a more genuine and credible way. Companies in Oman are now looking to engage people on Twitter, Instagram and blogs in a more personal and interactive way as well as getting online exposure. A few examples from the past few weeks:

Nawras hosted their first ever Tweet-up.  A few key Twitter enthusiasts were invited for a tour of the Head Office and flagship store where they were able to experience first-hand how the big telecom works, meeting personally Omani football superstar Ali Al Habsi, and immediately tweet about it.

The InterContinental Muscat invited several bloggers (including myself) to spend an evening at Trader Vic’s for the launch of the new menu and Japanese promotion. It was the first bloggers gathering, at least that I recall, and some bloggers wrote about the evening as you can read here, here and here.

Lastly, Elevation Burger, as part of their aggressive launch campaign which also includes print and broadcast media, organised too a Tweet-up to create some anticipation just a few days before the launch. Again, a few Tweeps were invited so that they could find out everything about the brand, its philosophy, products as well as having fun cooking burgers themselves and tasting them. Elevation Burger couple of days later also organised an Instagram competition. A couple of bloggers wrote about it here and here.

So this is the current trend; identify one or more credible individuals with passion for social media; let them experience your brand and they’ll help you spreading your messages. Usually these people use several platforms whether Twitter, Facebook, blog, Instagram, etc. so you’ll end up generating great exposure on several channels! Careful though, keep always an eye open as not always you might get 100% positive feedback.