In my last blog post we discussed How Social Commerce will lead to Advocacy Based Marketing (ABM) because of things like Facebook Connect. And if we start to move to Advocacy Based Marketing ( ABM) then perhaps a new measurement–the Cost per Advocate model will need to be born.


Cost per Acquisition (the old CPA) has been around since the dawn of the internet. Those unwilling marketers like me who were not willing to pay the Internet bubble prices for CPM (cost per thousand) impression based model demanded a more accountable model from our media partners and CPA (cost per acquisition) was born.
Now with the new era of Social Commerce about to dawn then perhaps advertisers will want to BUY targeted ads based on social profile of an individual. The stronger the profile of an individual the higher the price it will be to reach them. Like keywords–perhaps there is a bidding process for these individuals that rank highly on influence for a particular topic.
With something like Facebook Ads you can already target your message based on real data, real tastes, stated likes and desires so perhaps the next iteration of Facebook ads will have a way to segment based on influence–if you have 5, 50, 500 or the max 5000 friends–why should all of those profiles cost the same? All Facebook needs to do is add a feature that targets 500 friends or more and charges you a premium price!
One thing is for sure–we have a long way to go when it comes to social media marketing and this is just another frontier that we have yet to discover.