In the business ideas category I post potential business ideas, which I cannot work on the moment, but which may be good input to other people.

You might have seen the nice pic on Facebook, which said
“Please fix my phone or I will tell my X-thousands of followers about your bad performance’”.

This sounds like a joke at the moment, but in terms of customer relationship management you might fear the bad sentiment about your company, which is conveyed to a (potentially) very large group of people by messages like this one. You also might have heard already about the very positive impact on your brand, when you react on customer feedback in social online media in a very constructive, friendly & timely manner.

So not only in case of customer service tasks, but also for customer acquisition tasks you are interested in making influential people to talk about your product or service.

But how would the company know who is important/influential on social networks and in which peer groups their voice is heard best? There is a solution for that!

So the idea is:

Value Proposition:
Enable companies to put  special attention on influential people on social networks (among their customer & prospects).

This enables them to e.g.

• distribute limited special goodies, (such as  beta invites, coupons etc.) to the people influential in their domain,
• prioritize them in customer service applications or
• approach them for feedback on your service.

Solution:
Match their customer information with data sources on influential people, e.g. based on the services of  Klout or PeerIndex.

(yes: there is sometimes bad sentiment about services like Klout, as they reduce a persons relevance to a single number – and they don’t tell you in detail, how they are doing it. This bad sentiment goes as far as motivating people to setup fake services such as flout.com. I think these services learned from this feedback, e.g. to tell you also on which topics someone is influential.)

Many of these service, including the two mentioned ones, make their information available as APIs, so one could link this information with customer information.

This could go as far as: “Distribute 100 books coupons to the most important people in the area of ‘Rosamunde Pilcher’ literature in my customer list.”

Secret sauce: (important to not get immediately a victim of other people copying your service)

Companies wouldn’t want to do this kind of data wrangling from APIs and the merging with other data sources on their own. They likely also don’t want to invest the infrastructure, which is needed the keep this data current and to hint the company to relevant changes over time.

However, there is a caveat: you need a good story (or a list of precautions to show the companies, that you work with their data in a secure way)