#SuryaRay #Surya Companies are getting more tools to find their influencers, those standouts whose voice carries the most weight. But while services like Klout and Kred are identifying people with a strong social presence, the challenge for many companies is to highlight the individuals who actually drive sales and make an impact on business results. That’s what Pursway, a Waltham, Mass., startup is trying to do for enterprise clients. The company, which counts Orange, Sony and MetroPCS among its customers, has created a big data analytics tool that can sift through a client’s customer data and identify “purswayers,” the often-hidden people who are able to prompt others to buy products or use services. The company said that these influencers, about 7-15 percent of a company’s users, are not necessarily the highest-revenue customers or the loudest users and they may only influence a handful of people. But they can be very valuable to a particular company because they help influence purchase decisions, for good and bad, in their vertical. Pursway’s information can be used to provide better customer service, tweak marketing campaigns or to extend special offers to the influencer. That can ultimately mean less customer churn, better adoption of products, faster acquisition of new customers and, ultimately, more revenue. Pursway said the top 10 percent of customers with a lot of influence can impact more than 50 percent of a company’s revenues. Here’s how it works: a company turns over its customer lists and sales data, usually 12 months worth, to Pursway. Pursway taps online and social information along with its own data to establish existing “shopping relationships” and tries to understand the strength of those relationships. Then it looks for actual purchase behavior that appears to have a causal relationship, like if one person buys a product and then a friend buys a similar product the next month. It gives users a score to represent that person’s purchasing influence. Pursway co-founder Ran Shaul told me that while services like Klout can measure a person’s social footprint, influencers are not necessarily the people with the loudest voice online. And there’s only about 25 percent overlap in a company’s heaviest spenders and their most influential customers. Some influencers are only trusted in specific categories. But find them and you tap into the power of word of mouth and potentially make your marketing efforts more efficient. “Instead of focusing on displaying and pushing ads, this is about whom do you push the ads to,” Shaul told me. “Social media is important but word of mouth is everything.” Companies who use Pursway don’t tell their influencers they know who they are. Pursway said it can increase marketing ROI for companies by 5-10x by just directing their work toward these influencers. Orange Switzerland used Pursway to combat its prepaid customer churn by pursuing the most influential customers, not the highest-revenue customers, who are normally targeted. It also created a marketing segment for those users, offering them special offers. Orange was able to improve churn by more than 5 percent and among the customers who stayed with Orange, 40 percent were retained without extra costs. Pursway’s work highlights the power of transactional data. Former PayPal CTO Mok Oh told me that transaction data, combined with consumer behavior information, can be used by merchants to identify and interact with their best customers. Pursway was founded three years ago as Datanetis and has taken on $6 million from Battery Ventures. I would like to see more case studies that prove out Pursway’s proposition, showing how they can home in on real-world influencers. This is not easy work, blending offline actions and online data, and it involves analyzing terabytes of data. It also potentially skirts into some privacy issues, though Shaul said all the data is legally obtained. But if Pursway is right, companies need to rethink how they calculate customer lifetime value. It’s not just how much a person buys over time, but also how much they can influence others to purchase. We’re just getting started thinking about how to measure influence and how that impacts the bottom line. But if companies can easily understand who actually moves the needle based on real transactions, they can get a lot smarter and more efficient with their marketing dollars. http://dlvr.it/2SMDKV @suryaray
