In my last post covering the application Pay with Tweet , I had alluded to the fact how social payments can evolve and how brands can use social networks to further their message, last week Brian Solis (@brian solis) along with Vocus have come out with a research paper , which fills an important cog in this wheel ” Influence”, The detailed report can be downloaded here . I am summarizing the important points covered in the report.
- Influence is different from Popularity
- Quality of network and quality of content have a defining impact on influence
- Content is king, but context is also very important
- Effective measurement is still an area where executives are divided,but still majority feel the action is the most important tool to measure effectiveness of social media.
- Executives are willing to pay for the influence .
Well in context of social payment, two important things come out , one is that now we have a clear notion of usability of influence and proxies to measure it, secondly and importantly the marketers are ready to pay for the influence .
In my view this has huge ramifications for the social payment system and will enable the development of tools which will help brands engage with influencer’s, and also pay them ( in cash/kind) for the value they might add. These alternate payment systems can sit parallel to or integrate with the current loyalty systems the users might be exposed to and also work as stand alone offer based systems ( like pay with tweet).
There are obviously apparent challenges for these kind of system to work, would love to hear from you guys and may be we can have a next post on that 
We have been listening a lot about social payments in the last 2-3 years, with the ballistic growth of social networks and social properties , some kind of commercial activity had to set in and whenever any commercial activity sets in payments or transfer of money ( real or virtual) has to be in place,Social Gaming networks , have long experimented virtual currencies and other things, Facebook credits, Virtual credits for games are some of the interesting things happening in the space .
I recently came across a service called ‘PAY WITH TWEET’, this is an interesting use case, how social payments may evolve in future, what Pay with tweet does is it allows you access to good and services in exchange for you tweeting about that service. So in nut shell, you pay by marketing for the brand or product, the basic premise of the service is brands/services can make more money by promoting their product rather than just selling it to the user, because of inherent virality involved on various social networks.
These kind of payment method comes with all the usual baggage which all payments come with including fraud,settlement(between seller and marketer), reconciliation etc.
Pay with tweet though does not involve any money exchange currently, but i thinks this is one area they need to work on because in any payment transactions some money exchange (at certain level) should happen to make it viable and scalable .
Inspite of this it is an interesting use case , where your network on twiiter or facebook can decide how much money you can make,sounds similar to multilevel marketing in automode . where your network decides how much you can earn, though users and brands need to be careful in designing such campaigns as social networks are integrated chain based systems , where good words and bad words spread with equal speed .
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