Money can’t buy love, but it can buy you millions of guaranteed friends to support your politics, purchases, or personal pursuits.
I just generated over 100,000 friends, followers, and fans for 4 separate clients over the past 96 hours! The catch phrase immortalized by the Beatles “Money can’t buy me love”, has been repeated as the golden rule of relationships for decades by hopeful hearts and probably poor romantic novelists has now been proven a farce. What seemly separates social friend fishing as opposed to true personal interaction is the message relevance and method of continual, hierarchical engagement. The expected end result is not to collect friends, followers, and fans, but to create an army of like minded individuals that can be lead to a specific action. Whether that action is one of capitalism or cause, integrated socialization into any media campaign can create exponential results.
The idea of pay-per-friend came from my initial pay-per-call platform I built years ago, in which you only paid for qualified client calls generated from our advertising. Unlike pay-per-friend, pay per call is a one shot, one kill deal, when a call comes in the advertiser answers, the interaction is now over. Referral potential from a call in client is low. In a pay-per-friend model, targeted friend is engaged, we continue to feed the target client relevant interaction, which create additional interaction with the target friends circle of influence, thus semi-viral fellowship begins to grow exponentially.
Pay-Per-Friend campaign basic steps – minus social technology details
Step 0: Start with the end in mind – simply put, in a perfect world what is the end result? Do you want 10,000 calls into the governor’s office? Change the perception of consumer confidence in a specific product or brand? Or promote your stock to those most likely to buy? All is possible, but the goals need to be set ahead of time.
Step 1: Set the stage / Client targeting via digital listening – this means selectively harvesting followership by listening to the interactions within the social sphere and create immediate engagement based upon the relevance of the conversation which compliments a per determined position.
Step 2: Socially class engaged as a leader or lemming – simply stated, does the engaged follower have their own following. Dependent upon the influence of the engaged participant, semi-automated to personal social interaction may be the best course of action, as opposed to the lemmings that will follow and syndicate a social conversation just to be a part of the group, cause, or conversation.
Step 3: Cross connect social, mobile, and traditional media platforms – Create tasks that help identify your social army, and allow you as the brand, advertiser, or agency to connect those identified as influencers to cross pollinate to other social mediums. The easiest way this can be achieved is to give influencers access to social, mobile, and ad mob tools to elevate their influence status.
Step 4: Seed social action and let leadership take form – plant a single seed in the mind of an individual, and potentially change the world. Carefully crafted and timely interactions will yield a predictive result. Those of social influence will lead an army of followers to an end action. Dependent upon the levels of influence of your social sphere, interactions can range from syndicated to highly personal.
Step 5: Create a rewards system – rewards can be a powerful motional tool, but like any compensation, the expectation must meet reality. Doesn’t promise and not deliver, or you will create a viral A coup d'état.
Step 6: Measure the social success, optimize and repeat – from step 0 to now, friends were engaged, mobilization occurred, and most likely new opportunities emerged.
Step 7: RECYCLE – Just because you won the war, does not mean you throw your army away!
John Cataldi
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