Page 96 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

through five weeks of blogging efforts.
In this case, Groove methodically built relationships with influencers that led

to measurable success. But there was another force at work here, too—the
powerful, magnetic attraction of involving key audience members in your
content creation and transmission.

As influence marketing has rapidly gained acceptance as a mainstream
marketing competency, the number of options for how to succeed in this space
have proliferated.

Building an internal competency

Dozens of new platforms have emerged to help you build your own influencer
list, connect with them, and nurture an Alpha Audience relationship. Like our
friends at Groove, with the right resources and a little elbow grease, there’s no
reason that even a small business can’t figure this out and manage the process
themselves. In fact, a DIY approach might provide an advantage over agency
outsourcing because influencers appreciate the direct connection with key
members of a company. Remember, you’re building long-term relationships, not
running a campaign that fluctuates with a quarterly budget.

The most challenging part of the process is finding and nurturing the right
advocates, especially in a very large company with thousands or millions of
customers. A thought leader in this enterprise-influencer space is Shree
Dandekar, Senior Director of Product Management, BI Analytics for Dell.
Dandekar’s philosophy is that creating advocacy means leading customers on a
journey, and that customer journey involves multiple touch points with content
serving as the ignition at each intersection.

While it’s important to understand, measure, and shape social influence, it
can also be extremely complicated for a large company. To achieve success on a
massive scale, you need an assist from software that automates the collection,
filtering, and analysis of all that data.

“We use social analytics software based on Dell patented technology and
integrate it into all aspects of our business,” Dandekar said. “Even though we
assess more than 1.5 million online conversations annually, we can drill down to
very granular feedback in real time.”

This patented content assessment engine scores 150 different conversation
categories on an 11-point sentiment scale, enabling Dell and its customers to
make sense of the vast amount of customer feedback and react immediately. The
company has also developed metrics to help them find the most important