We are delighted to have Pursway join Tmura as a Donor company” said Baruch Lipner Executive Director of Tmura.   “Pursway’s generous grant to Tmura is greatly appreciated and we hope will encourage other companies to consider their commitment to social responsibility as well.”

Rather than cash donations, Tmura receives grants of stock from companies and uses the proceeds from successful “exits” to fund education and youth-related charities.

About Tmura

Tmura, a foundation with a unique business model, was established in 2002, and is supported by leading venture capital firms and philanthropic foundations which fund the organization’s operating expenses. Promoting a unique model for philanthropy and a new standard for investments, Tmura’s goal is to create a culture of giving within the high-tech sector by enabling companies to donate equity to support education and youth-related initiatives. For more information, please visit www.tmura.org

About Pursway

Pursway empowers consumer-facing organizations to close the gap between how they market and how people buy. The Pursway patent-pending technology enables companies to identify, measure, and impact how opinion leaders shape their followers’ purchasing decisions. Using the Pursway solutions, leading global organizations in telecommunications, retail, and financial services are realizing 5- 10x improvement in the ROI of customer acquisition, cross-sell, and churn prevention efforts. Pursway is led by a team with an innovative track record in consumer marketing,social network analytics, advanced algorithmic development, and large scale data mining. For more information, please visit www.pursway.com

“We are very excited about this alliance,” said Ran Shaul, Executive Vice President and co-Founder of Pursway “to be able to offer the marketing expertise and consulting resources of the Keller Fay Group to customers in the U.S. and Europe will significantly enhance our value proposition in the marketplace. The alliance represents an important strategic move for Pursway as it continues to grow its influencer marketing ecosystem.”

Social influence can no longer be ignored by companies, whether they be financial service providers, telco operators or retail marketers. The majority of consumers buy based on the conversation and recommendations of trusted friends, family members, and colleagues. Companies that are able to harness the power of the influencers and turn them into advocates for their brands can see a significant boost in the success of their marketing efforts, in the order of 5-10x compared to their return on marketing today.

“We’re excited by the opportunity to work with one of the true pioneers and technology leaders of influencer marketing” said Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group. “This agreement opens the door to greater market penetration in our existing space, as well as attractive to new business opportunities in related areas.”

The alliance is the latest in the company’s growing ecosystem that enables the marketplace to quickly adopt Influencer Marketing Management as a core component to an organizations marketing strategy by providing rich and valuable insight into consumer behavior.

About The Keller Fay Group

The Keller Fay Group is the first full-service market research company focused exclusively on Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing and offers a complete array of research and advisory services related to WOM and influencer marketing. The firm’s CEO, Ed Keller, is co-author of  The Influentials and has a forthcoming book with Brad Fay.  Launched in the US in 2006 and the UK in 2011, Keller Fay’s TalkTrack® program is the only continuous study of WOM in all channels (online and offline) designed to closely monitor and measure the marketing relevant attributes of actual consumer conversations. For more information visit www.kellerfay.com

About Pursway

Pursway empowers consumer-facing organizations to close the gap between how they market and how people buy. The Pursway patent-pending technology enables companies to identify, measure, and impact how opinion leaders shape their followers’ purchasing decisions. Using the Pursway solutions, leading global organizations in telecommunications, retail, and financial services are realizing 5- 10x improvement in the ROI of customer acquisition, cross-sell, and churn prevention efforts. Pursway is led by a team with an innovative track record in consumer marketing,social network analytics, advanced algorithmic development, and large scale data mining. For more information, please visit www.pursway.com

In their session they will present a unique approach to give expression to the inherent real-world social networks that are locked-up within existing customer databases. Their approach is based on an in-depth statistical analysis that uses proprietary algorithms which look at a variety or parameters such as incidences of shopping together, geographical location and other factors. This analysis can infer with a very high accuracy the existance of social relationships between customers. The study to be presented is based on 300+ million consumer behaviors analyzed for a diverse set of major global companies and demonstrates the distinctive ability to identify and leverage market influencers. The annual summit is being held this year at the Cosmopolitan Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Pursway’s session is on Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 2:30 PM.

WOMMA Summit 2011, word of mouth and social media conference, will teach the Best Practices and Next Practices for creating Talkable Brands.

Summit 2011 Will Teach:

• How to get customers talking about your brand
• Best practice advice from brands using social media
• New trends in word of mouth marketing
• Recent research findings and measurement methods

For More Information Contact Pursway, Ltd.

About Mr. Ran Shaul

Ran Shaul is co-founder and Executive Vice President of Pursway, Ltd. Mr. Shaul is a marketing and customer relationship management practitioner with vast experience around the world. Over the past decade, Mr. Shaul has led hundreds of projects for Fortune 500 companies in areas including market segmentation, social network analysis, customer profitability and lifetime value analysis, behavioral modeling, data mining, retention and communication strategies, customer advocacy, and campaign management. Mr. Shaul is one of the leading practitioners, thought leaders, and experts in Influence Marketing Management. As a co-founder of Pursway, Mr. Shaul has overall leadership of customer projects, laying out the strategy and overseeing the tactics for implementing influencer marketing initiatives at many of the largest global organizations. Mr. Shaul has a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Management from Tel Aviv University.

About Prof. Barak Libai

Barak Libai is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Recanati Graduate School of Business, Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University. In 2006-2008 he was a Visiting Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has a Ph.D. in Marketing from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prof. Libai’s research deals much the economic value of customers’ word of mouth. Relevant
questions he examines include how customer lifetime value changes when word of mouth is taken into account, what the ROI of word of mouth programs is and how advertising effectiveness measurement should take social effects into account. His current work centers on integrating social network data with agent based models to explore the social value of customers. His research on the economic consequences of customers’ word of mouth have won prizes from the Journal of Service Research, The Marketing Science Institute, The American Marketing Association, the International Journal of Research in Marketing and ESOMAR. He teaches executive and MBA courses and consults on areas related to word of mouth marketing, customer relationship management and branding.

About WOMMA

WOMMA Summit 2011, the most premier word of mouth and social media conference, will show the Best Practices and Next Practices for the coming year. Case studies from leading brands and the most innovative marketers will be presented alongside top-level keynotes. Outside of the sessions, ample time is scheduled for attendees, most of whom are Director level or above, to network with each other.

About Pursway

Pursway empowers consumer-facing organizations to close the gap between how they market and how people buy. The Pursway patent-pending technology enables companies to identify, measure, and impact how opinion leaders shape their followers’ purchasing decisions. Using the Pursway solutions, leading global organizations in telecommunications, retail, and financial services are realizing 5- 10x improvement in the ROI of customer acquisition, cross-sell, and churn prevention efforts.

Pursway is led by a team with an innovative track record in consumer marketing,social network analytics, advanced algorithmic development, and large scale data mining.

‘No (wo)man is an island’ – the old saying goes. This is particularly true in a digital society. The Internet has not only transformed the way we interact but also the way we make purchasing decisions. Increasingly, consumers are collaborating to gain better collective bargaining power in retail. This phenomenon is known as collective buying decisions.

“Collective buying power is when a group of consumers come together and use the old rule of thumb, there’s power in numbers, to leverage the group size in exchange for discounts”
(Wikipedia).

Increasingly, consumers are collaborating to gain better collective bargaining power in retail. This phenomenon is known as collective buying decisions. The objective of this article is to discuss the rise of collective buying decisions an d its implications on retailers. A case study is presented at the end to illustrate how Influencer marketing enables B2C organisations to harness the power of social influence and leverage on this rising phenomenon of collective buying decisions.

The evolution of collective buying decisions

Historically, collective decision making was made primarily involving household members. Today, the Internet has enabled consumers to rely on each other as a trusted and credible source for decision making.

“The phenomenon where a group of web users collaborate via the internet to approach retailers together to negotiate a discount is known as Tuangou, ‘Swapping’ is where consumers barter goods and services, thereby eliminating the retailer altogether.”

The idea that anyone would reach out (effectively) to strangers and seek advice was difficult to imagine a decade ago vet online reviews are one of the key influences in today’s purchasing decision. The rise of the web 2.0 digital consumer society had caused a panic attack amongst retailers. Over the past couple of years, we have seen retailers across the spectrum (from global brands to ‘mom and pop’ shops) furiously drawing out social media strategies. Tactics include web trawling to monitor online feedback (including real time tweets), employing professional bloggers/online ambassadors to promote products and services as well as creating corporate or sponsored online communities. There have been many case studies to highlight the success of some of these aggressive social media strategies yet the ROI is debatable.

The Internet has not only enabled consumers to be heard individually, but also to collaborate and gain better bargaining power, The phenomenon where a group of web users collaborate via the internet to approach retailers together to negotiate a discount is known as Tuangou. A further extension of this approach is another growing phenomenon called ’swapping’ where consumers barter goods and services, thereby eliminating the retailer altogether, Rachel Botsman discusses this phenomenon in a book she recently co-published, ‘What is Mine is Yours – The Rise of Collaborative Consumption’ (www.collaborativeconsumption.com).

Implications of collective bargaining power

“Influencers represent 5 to 10%  of a typical consumer base. In the case of group buying decisions, targeting Influencers enables retailers to amplify the virality of the offer/promotion and attract a greater number of consumers.”

So what does the evolution mean and how does it change the value chain? One of the most notable cases is a website called Groupon which actually sees retailers benefiting from collective buying decisions. Consumers are required to collectively bid for discounted products and services. The business model is very lucrative as the consumer needs to earn (pay for) the right to bid and the retailer too has to pay a fee to promote its products and services. Groupon is reputed to be worth over $1billion dollars today.

Underlying Groupon’s success is a strong element of virality. This brings us back to the main premise of this article in that consumers are ultimately influenced by others. There are two types of influence that take place in a social network: outbound and inbound influence. The former is the influence created by an ‘Influencer’ while the latter relates to peer/group pressure.

“The collective/group offer had a social component in it meaning the more friends you bring, the more your “tribe” enjoys.”

Pursway’s analysis of over 500 million subscriber records globally across retail, telco and finance has revealed that Influencers represent 5 to 10% of a typical consumer base. Our analysis also shows that there are different types of Influencers and varying viral speeds. In the case of group buying decisions, targeting Influencers enables retailers to amplify the virality of the offer/promotion and attract a greater number of consumers.

In a recent referral member-get-member (MGM) campaign which targeted Influencers, a retailer was able to attract two additional customers per one converted Influencer (through word of mouth). In a second attempt, the retailer combined Influencer targeting with a collective/group offer which proved to be more successful; each Influencer convincing four other customers to subscribe to the offer. The collective/group offer had a social component in it meaning the more friends you bring, the more your “tribe” enjoys.

In the case study below, the top half shows the collective/group offer resulting in a factor of 2 (from 2 to 4 new customers) in terms of referral impact.

The lower half of the diagram shows the same campaign approach based on a BAU (Business as Usual) selection and although BAU referrals were not as strong as targeting Influencers, the collective/group offer still managed to amplify the referral effect by a factor of 1.6.

The success of such campaigns can be further improved through inbound influence i.e. peer pressure. By leveraging on the dynamic power of social networks and understanding the nature of collective buying decisions, we have helped companies improve marketing effectiveness by 3 to 5 times. To learn more about our solution, please visit our website www.pursway.com or contact Info@pursway.com.

The numbers may not seem huge at first. The everyday Influencers typically affect the actual purchase behavior of anywhere from 3 to 10 of their followers. But do the math: If you can persuade a group of Influencers to purchase a new product, join your loyalty club, or remain in place instead of abandoning you for a competitor, and they bring along another group that you probably couldn’t reach directly with your own programs, you’ve just earned an exponential increase in marketing impact.  Marketing should perform at factors of 3x, 5x, and 10x.  1 or 2 no longer works.

Background: Current Customer Value Models

Proactively managing the relationship with these VIP-to-be would result in their increased spend, pushing them across the threshold to VIP and increasing their value /profitability to the company

General practice holds that a company’s most profitable customers should be the most valued, or VIP customers. That thinking eventually gave way to customer value models that consider not only the company’s revenue from the customer, but also other relevant parameters, giving each its own weight, according to the business’ needs and characteristics.

The basic objective of segmenting customers according to customer value is to establish a company policy and levels of service, as well as customer retention and sales policy per segment, in order to focus on that small group of customers found to be most valuable for the company.

Model evolvement – Future Lifetime Customer Value:

When an Influencer of a certain product purchases that product, other customers from his social network follow suit. Alternatively, when an Influencer terminates his relations with the company, members of his social network churn soon after.

However, segmenting customers solely on the current customer value model leaves out customers who are not currently ’VIPs’ but have the highest potential of becoming VIP customers in the future.
Proactively managing the relationship with these VIP’s-to-be would result in their increased spending, pushing them across the threshold to reach VIP level and increasing their value/profitability to the company. Sophisticated data-mining models may be used to define the “VIP-to-be” segments, while simpler business analyses, based on the organization’s business experience and on best practice tactics, may also do the job.

A better approach: Customer Influence Value (CIV)

Our recent research has determined that recommendations of a customer’s close social environment are a key factor in most purchasing decisions and are much more effective than brand advertising or marketing campaigns.

Innovative analyses and advanced algorithms enable detection of social connections between customers, identification of the type of connections (family, close friends, acquaintances, colleagues, etc.), and location of the Influencers at the heart of these social networks to generate certain purchase decisions.
Influencers of social networks are not necessarily those customers with the most direct connections to other customers, but are the people who have the strongest cumulative influence within their social network. Influence can refer to the purchase of a certain product line or a specific product, or to loyalty level and churn.
When an Influencer of a certain product purchases that product, other customers from his social network follow suit. Alternatively, when an Influencer terminates his relations with the company, members of his social network churn soon after. The importance of understanding the customer’s influence on his social network was recently highlighted in the Harvard Business Review article “How Valuable Is Word Of Mouth?” (www.hbr.org).

An Influencer may not be individually profitable to the organization, but has a great influence on his social network, thus his overall social-network cumulative value is high. Consequently, this high cumulative value should be reflected in the Influencers’ score and he should be treated as a VIP customer.

Pursway has seen this phenomenon in a number of recent client engagements. The diagram below is based on an EU mobile operator and shows that traditional customer value approaches don’t capture the full value or the real potential of the influential customers. While some Solitary-spenders

traditional customer value approaches don’t capture the full value or the real potential of the influential customers

spend significant amounts of money, more often, they don’t generate a great deal of purchasing influence among their social network. As a result, their cumulative value to the company is relatively low, while other “Everyday Purswayers” may not spend as much, but at the same time influence their social sphere to make purchase decisions, hence increasing the total spending of their network and their value to the company.

Pursway’s analysis of over 250 million subscriber records in the telco, retail, and banking sectors worldwide has revealed that Influencers represent 5-10% of a typical consumer base. Our analysis also shows that there are different types of Influencers. Calculating each customer’s CIV needs to proportionally reflect the customer’s influence on each of his followers and the types of products and actions that he is actually influencing on, as illustrated in the formula below:

CIV applications:

Calculating each customer’s CIV needs to proportionally reflect the customer’s influence on each of his followers and the types of products and actions that he is actually influencing on.

Once the influence value of a customer base is mapped, what should you do with this data and knowledge about these new high value influencers? The table below shows some examples of the recommended actions for building a long term relationship with the influencers:

A recent financial services engagement led to the launch of an annual loyalty program for Influencers aimed at providing the segment with personalized offers to increase the penetration rate of certain products proven to act as “loyalty products”, which we call “Anchors”.

A recent financial services engagement led to the launch of an annual loyalty program for Influencers aimed at providing influencers with personalized offers to increase the penetration rate of certain products proven to act as “loyalty products”, which we call “Anchors”

Within one year of operating the program, the company experienced an increase of 240% in the anchor products penetration for the Influencers, which also drove their followers to increase anchors penetration by 82%, compared to a natural increase of the rest of the customer base by only 23%. At the same time, the program also decreased the churn rate of the influencers and their followers by 13%.

More on the anchors strategy will be shared in an upcoming article.

Conclusion:

Customer value calculation should be based not only on the customer’s spending history and his current status, but also on his potential to become a customer of higher value to the company. It should also reflect the customer’s position within his social network, his level of influence on the purchasing decisions that are made by members of that network, and the cumulative value of his social sphere.
Once we identify the customer’s influence value we should then treat these customers appropriately to increase their loyalty and maximize their social affect.
To learn more about Influencer Marketing and how it can help your organization increase marketing effectiveness and profitability, please visit our website www.pursway.com

These everyday Influencers typically have no special demographic, social network behavior, product adoption, or other general characteristics that distinguish them from the broader customer population. They just know a bit more and have more interest in your products and services. On the passion-meter, they are on the right side while the average customers sit on the left.

To make matters even more complicated, you probably have different groups of Influencers for different products and services. In telecom, for example, some customers are particularly influential when it comes to data services but less so for churn, where others have a stronger influence.

If you still think all of your customers are equal, how can your best marketing effort do any better?

Former CEO of TIME Telekom, regional head of BT to lead Pursway’s expansion in Asia Pacific

Tel Aviv, ISRAEL – November 28, 2010 - Pursway, the leading provider of Influencer Marketing Management solutions, announced the appointment of Mr. Bob Fox as Regional Director, Asia Pacific. Mr. Fox will oversee Pursway’s expansion into the telecommunication, retail, and financial services verticals in the region. Mr. Fox brings to the position more than 25 years of experience, leadership qualities and breadth of knowledge in telecommunication, innovation, customer care, and market development.

Before joining Pursway, Mr. Fox had served as CEO for TIME Telekom. Before that he was one of the founders of Starhub, and the Regional General Manager Asia Pacific for business development with BT. Mr. Fox held additional senior positions in telecommunications and other sectors including covering a suite of enterprise solutions.

Mr. Fox holds a master’s degree from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and BA LLB from UNSW in Australia. 

“We are excited to have Bob join Pursway to spearhead our presence in Asia Pacific. Bob’s knowledge of Asia Pacific and focus on customer needs are strong assets for Pursway,” said Elery Pfeffer, Founder and CEO of Pursway. “Bob has previously been responsible for establishing regional presence and generating significant sales and profit growth for telecommunications, marketing companies and companies in other verticals. He has built and managed teams in start-up environments and established companies alike. We expect Bob to play a pivotal role in Pursway’s continual growth.”

Pursway’s Influencer Marketing Management solution has already helped some of the world’s largest consumer organizations to consistently improve marketing effectiveness and increase top-line revenues.

“I am delighted to join the growing Pursway team. Given the remarkable results Pursway’s customers are achieving, the company’s solution will rapidly become a strategic component in many organizations’ growth in APAC. I look forward to working closely with our customers to continue building upon Pursway’s proven track record.” said Mr. Fox.

Breakfast briefing to open the 3rd Annual Cards & Payment Loyalty Conference, November 4rd 2010 at the Buena Vista Palace Hotel, Orlando, Florida

Tel Aviv, ISRAEL – October 12, 2010 - Pursway, the pioneer in Influencer Marketing Management, will be hosting a breakfast briefing on “Pinpointing Influencers and social relationships using credit card transactions to increase customer share of wallet.” The breakfast briefing will open the 3rd Annual Cards & Payment Loyalty Conference which will take place between the 3rd and 5th of November 2010 at the Buena Vista Palace Hotel, Orlando, Florida.
 
In this breakfast briefing Pursway co-founder and CEO Elery Pfeffer will demonstrate how card issuers can leverage transactional data from cards to reveal relationships within their customer base.  Through the use of Pursway’s technology, card issuers can pinpoint the influential customers who are defined as those who can sway the purchase decisions made by their friends, family members and colleagues.

Attendees will have the opportunity to:

• Understand how card issuers can map social connections within their consumer base and identify influencers using solely their exiting transactions data without relying on social media
• Understand how influence can be measured and linked back to bottom line
• Discover the top five influential customer behaviors observed in the credit card industry
• Discover how card issuers can segment their consumer base into “tribes” by merchant type and reveal segments with high spending potential like “Soccer Moms”
• Learn how to amplify “tribe” responsiveness by using collective decision-oriented consumer offers
• Learn how to separate everyday influencers from Social Media buzz

 Pursway will also present examples on how some of the top banks in North America are getting extraordinary results from Influencer Marketing Management.

According to Elery Pfeffer, financial organizations and cards issuers already understand that most people decide where to shop, what to buy and what card to use based on recommendations of their trusted friends, family members and colleagues. At the same time, marketing efforts through Social Media can sometimes fall short in translating this insight into real purchases that influence bottom line results. Social Media can also fail to truly address their need to understand influence factors and dynamics in their consumer base.

“The holy grail of social networks and influencer identifications lies within the existing card transactions. Card issuers that are able to adopt Influencer Marketing Management advanced technology harness the power of the influencers and turn them into their brand advocates and therefore can see an increase of 3-5% in their net revenues. They are also able to greatly extend their touch points with their existing and new customer base and increase its loyalty” says Pfeffer.

The 3rd Annual Cards & Payment Loyalty Conference is organized by American Banker, the leading information resource platform that serves the banking and financial services community. The conference is chaired by COLLOQUY and First Annapolis Consulting and will be featuring speakers from Bank of America, U.S. Bank, Discover Financial Services, Barclaycard U.S., RBC Bank, PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP, Sears Holdings, Delta Skymiles, Pillsbury and Motorola.

Financial executives interested in attending the conference could qualify to a 20% discount by contacting Pursway at http://www.pursway.com/news-events/events/ or Adi.Barlev@Pursway.com

You know there’s gold in your customer data, but your mining efforts never seem to work out the way your vendors and consultants promise.

Do your CRM programs deliver results that can be measured in revenues, retention, and customer lifetime value?

Here is some food for thought:

• Your most valuable customers are not necessarily the ones that spend the most
• The most important relationships are not necessarily those between you and your customers
• Customers (and people in general) don’t want to be managed, but they can be coached, motivated, and influenced

Companies that understand these realities are focusing on the right customers, the right relationships, and the right metrics.  They are also generating results far beyond the incremental improvements typical of even the best CRM programs.

Read this eBook and see how you can join them.