Influencer Marketing

While at Microsoft , as an intern I was working on a project " Influencer Marketing". This deals with identifying high profile people on the web( preferably) who can influence the entire community about Microsoft, tools and technologies. typically these are avid bloggers, people with huge no of followers on twitter, high recommendations on LinkedIn etc ... While companies are increasingly interested in engaging with such high profile influencers and keep them happy, they are forgetting the layman out there who is equally capable of starting " Ihatedell.com" and make it popular.
There have been instances of these high profile inlfuencers using twitter as a tool for their cribs and complaints. Say you are one of these and you have a problem with your Vodafone GPRS. You have just tweeted it and before you know it, the social media division makes a note of it and it is escalated and in no time your connectivity is smooth and noiseless. Talk about Customer Satisfaction. you tweet and blog about how responsive Vodafone was. Now imagine you were a tweeter with 50 odd followers, your cribs and complaints are doing rounds inside the call center itself.

The age old philosophy of the customer pyramid as shown. Here Gold tier customers were a meager 20% of all your customer and brought in 80% of the revenues. However there is a paradigm shift with the introduction of the Long tail concept.
For Eg :-
Even if X is a great influencer, he might not even be on Vodafone. He could be on Airtel, but blog about the positives of Vodafone and he would be on the radar of the company more than you 10k plus billers. This is because X is helping Vodafone cater to a huge community and spread positivism than a 10k plus customer who has no circle of influence beyond family and friends.

Well, I do not know if this is the right thing to do. I personally do not agree with this. A company should try to achieve operational excellence and ensure that their most loyal customers are kept happy and in fact all their customers must be kept happy. A company must measure its responsiveness of customer service and delivery through servicing time for any customer, not the top notch revenue contributors or influencers. Because if your existing loyal customer base itself is not happy , the blogs and tweets would look engineered. And how logn does it take to start a viral on the web? When a company is due to come on campus, we look up their consumer complaints. Information spreads fast ,especially when it is negative, albeit it is definitely more trusted and valued if it comes from your favourite blogger or critic or tweeter.