There is not a more cost effective way to leverage your W.I.T.T.s  than by including an Onsite Community as part of your social and digital marketing mix and the advantages are real and the reasons all around us.

There is not a more cost effective way to impact your bottom line than by using your W.I.T.T.S

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people from the online community.

Crowdsourcing is achieved at scale by first using your W.I.T.T.S to pull it all together into a social networking ecosystem that is managed, monitored and revolves around one central location-Your company website.

By now you are probably wondering “what is W.I.T.T.S?” W.I.T.T.S is the first step in forming a truly effective social networking ecosystem.

1. First Identify the influencers Within your community and rank them in order of importance and

2. Turn those Influencers within your community into advocates of the firm by

3. Marketing To these influencers with special incentives to increase awareness of the firm within the community and finally

4. Marketing Through your community using the influencers within your community to increase market awareness of your company amongst target markets.

Exactly what is included in Influencer Marketing depends on the context (B2C or B2B) and the medium of influence transmission (online or offline, or both). But it is increasingly accepted that companies should be identifying and engaging with influencers.

As marketing experts Keller and Berry note, " Business is working harder and paying more to pursue people who are trying to watch and listen less to its messages." Targeting influencers is seen as a means of amplifying marketing messages, in order to counteract the growing tendency of prospective customers to ignore marketing.

Onsite social communities and newsletters are an effective and low cost method in which to engage with and learn from influencers both in B2C and B2C.

Social Communities allow businesses not only to connect and follow and market to existing customers but also to engage with their employee base. This is a centralized way in which to communicate with, retain and turn your existing customers and employees into marketing influencers.

But a large part of the problem is that many companies view social technologies as yet another tool to be implemented rather than as an enabler of organizational and marketing transformation.

It is said that one in every 10 Americans is what they call an "influential." These people have a tremendous impact on the rest of society because their ideas and opinions are sought out by the friends, family and community members around them. The conversations they hold and the examples they set have the power to shape your community's and hence your social networking ecosystems behaviors and attitudes as a whole.

Based on this, how many untapped influential customers might already be in your database. And by finding and utilizing those existing untapped influencers and making them an advocate for your business is a treasure waiting to be utilized.

By using your W.I.T.T.S as a base from which to launch your crowdsourcing, you will have created a permanent infrastructure to form most effective social networking ecosystem that will live on and survive all the trending fads that are inconsistent and constantly being replaced.

William Cosgrove
Bill Cosgrove Straight Talk

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