Hey, Have You Heard About This?

This chapter discusses the value of online customer influences in creating value for the firms. This chapter introduces two metrics called customer influence effect (CIE) and customer influence value (CIV) to help measure and quantify customer influence on others. Using these metrics, this chapter advances a seven-step framework that firms can use to create successful social media campaigns and discusses the implementation of this framework for an ice-cream company, HokeyPokey. Additionally, this chapter also discusses the use of social coupons and their relevance in promoting online influence. This chapter also explores the relationships of CIV with CLV, CBV, and CRV. This chapter concludes with a discussion on social media marketing, how it can be implemented, and the dark side of social media marketing.