When you follow the marketing trends overseas, it is almost impossible to not to notice the rising trend of influential marketing, especially after the social media boom. Take Ad.ly for instance, this company pays Snoop Dogg, Kim Kardasian and many other celebrities alike thousands of dollars for each tweet they post (reportedly $10,000: if you do the math each word they write comes about to $70). There are also companies like Influenster who have a rich portfolio of influential people in urban cities and provide incentives to members who share their brand experiences on social media. Since the diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 2001) can only and truly take place from top to bottom or from early adopters to laggards, it becomes enormously important to spend marketing dollars on influential people rather than average Joes. However, once again, we do not see this type of marketing taking off in Japan, though trendy (トレンディ）is one of the fastest growing brand groups on fb Japan. I am wondering when we will see ジャニーズ charging 1 million yen for each SMAP member’s tweet about Suntory…Read more here http://bestofsocialmedia.blogspot.com
