While sitting on the dentist chair last week, I received a 101 lesson on influence marketing.

My dentist looked at her file on me and congratulated me for having referred 5 patients to her over the years. I know I like my dentist and I dropped her name a few times to friends and colleagues in search of good dental care. I really had no idea some of these people ended up patients of hers.

So I asked her how she knew and she explained to me she simply asks every new patient how they heard about her practice and if this was from a patient, who that patient was. I then recalled that I first heard about her from a colleague of mine at the time so I asked how many referrals he had made. She didn’t need to look up her records to answer: over 25.

I had in front of me a very talented marketer:

1- very aware of who matters most to her business

2- skillful and subtle in her way of recognizing contributions

3- driven to set up a process to collect data and measure performance

As for my former colleague who referred over 25 new patients there, probably resulting in another over 100 new patients through people like me, my guess is that he’s as clueless as I was about how important he’s been to this small business owner.

This is a great reminder to me and the Traackr team that influencers we find online are not the product of social media, they have been around us all along. The social web has simply made it possible for them to express themselves in new and more powerful ways, and for us to find them as a result.

Tags: influence marketing, offline influencers, ONline influencers, small business

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 11:30 am and is filed under MarCom 2.0, We Search, We Score, We Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.