Discounts according to your social influence: tools and takes on this new marketing campaign model

Pay with a Tweet, Social Whis­pers, Volga Verdi and Miista have all been involved with a cam­paign that utilises social influ­ence. They all applied the con­cept in a dif­fer­ent inno­v­a­tive way and many brands have picked up on their suc­cesses since.

Pay with a Tweet, a tool sim­i­lar to Social Whis­pers that also enables users to sell con­tent or even prod­ucts for a tweet. Pay with a Tweet bills itself as “the first social pay­ment sys­tem where peo­ple pay with the value of their social net­work.” In other words, rather than pay­ing with cur­rency, pur­chasers of any kind of con­tent tell their friends on Twit­ter about it instead. Inter­ested con­tent own­ers sim­ply sign up with Pay with a Tweet, includ­ing the down­load URL, the tweet to be posted and a link to their company’s web­site. Pur­chasers, then, fol­low a “forced viral” model to pro­mote the prod­uct in ques­tion far and wide.

Social Whis­pers, a tool that enables users to cre­ate viral mar­ket­ing cam­paigns by exchang­ing con­tent for sta­tus updates. Cre­ated by Glasgow-based web design firm Pretty Klicks, Social­Whis­pers is named for the poten­tially sig­nif­i­cant value that even a sin­gle men­tion on social media such as Face­book and Twit­ter can have for a brand. The site offers a free web but­ton that con­tent own­ers can place on their own web pages to “sell” mate­r­ial in exchange for such a “social whis­per.” Even brands or ser­vice providers can then use the func­tion to help increase the odds that their socially dis­trib­uted con­tent will go viral. A pro­fes­sional ver­sion, mean­while, offers unlim­ited but­tons, live sta­tis­tics, auto­matic URL short­en­ing and more.

Volga Verdi a California-based fash­ion brand, that offers its cus­tomers dis­counts depend­ing on the num­ber of friends, fol­low­ers or fans they have on pop­u­lar social net­works. To take part in Volga Verdi’s Exchange pro­gram, shop­pers begin by refer­ring to a chart on the site list­ing the size of the dis­count it offers for the num­ber of friends or fol­low­ers they have on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google+, tum­blr, Kohtakte or Lookbook.nu. Twit­ter users, such as, get a dis­count of USD 7 if they have between 20 and 200 fol­low­ers, or USD 15 if they have more. To get the dis­count, they must fol­low Volga Verdi on Twit­ter, tweet a spec­i­fied mes­sage about the brand, and then email Volga Verdi to con­firm they have taken part. Those on other social net­works would need to do sim­i­lar actions tai­lored to the social net­work they are using. Volga Verdi then pro­ceeds to issue a unique voucher code for the cor­re­spond­ing discount.

Miista, a footwear band from Lon­don UK, which is not only fash­ion for­ward but also dig­i­tally an early adopter out­shined the com­pe­ti­tion with its “cheaper with a tweet” cam­paign in Jan­u­ary 2012. To kick-off Jan­u­ary sale, Miista.com launched a great twit­ter cam­paign that worked almost like a back­wards eBay. The “cheaper with a tweet” cam­paign would decrease the price for every­body every time some­one tweeted through the shop page about a spe­cific style. The larger your fol­low­ing, the fur­ther the price drops. This was mea­sured using Klout scores, which essen­tially give every Twit­ter user an influ­ence rat­ing. An active and aver­age Twit­ter user has a score of about 20 — so their tweet could cause the price of the shoe to auto­mat­i­cally drop by 1.5%. But some­one with an excep­tion­ally large fol­low­ing could cause the price to drop by up to 7%.

Check out the indi­vid­ual cam­paigns by click­ing on the brand’s name.