This is a guest post from Tuhin Roy, Co-founder of Fanzy. I met Tuhin at one of my events in London and, I see a lot of Facebook apps, but I think he’s onto something. See if you agree.

Have you ever been perplexed to see someone walking down the street wearing a t-shirt with a loud image of their favorite brand? I’ve often wondered at what point the consumer crosses the Rubicon and becomes a “fan” of the brand rather than a mere “buyer.”

And yet, nearly all of us make that leap at some point. Nearly all of us have those products or services that we feel reflect who we are. These are the brands that we are proud to wrap ourselves in. These are the products that we market to our friends and families simply through our enthusiasm for being associated with them.

A key task of online social marketing is to find this group of brand “fans” and to enlist them in the effort to spread the word. Facebook and Twitter inherently help in this endeavor. By liking a Facebook Page or following a brand on Twitter, consumers make the first steps towards becoming “fans” of the brand. They have signaled that they wish to stay in touch.

But, until recently, there have been a lack of tools to figure out which Facebook likers and Twitter followers are the true fans, and, among these, which are the most likely to spread the word.

A big part of the problem is that while Facebook users may like a brand’s Page, they reveal little about themselves in doing so. Understanding a consumer’s level of commitment, influence and potential to spread the word requires that they share more of their social sphere. On Facebook, this only happens when consumers install an application and grant access to their personal profiles.

While social gaming has been great at getting Facebook users to make that leap, brands have been much less successful. This is where we feel we’ve made some real progress here at Fanzy since launching our beta Facebook App in May. Fanzy rewards fans for spreading the word and for other social activity around brands. By gamifying the experience of being a social fan, we have won the trust of nearly 200,000 influential consumers on Facebook. These Fanzy members are sharing their social fan activity with us and our brand partners on a minute to minute basis.

The data that fans share with us enables us to learn a lot about their level of influence, engagement and ability to drive results. Using our proprietary influence measurement, the FanScore, and the Fanzy Rewards Builder our brand partners can now target individual rewards and offers to sub-segments of their social fan bases based on levels of influence and specific social achievements (like sharing a viral video and getting lots of comments on it).

A great example of this is a campaign recently launched by social media agency The Big Other to develop the social presence for a new UK television show, Movie Kingdom. The show has just launched a Facebook Page which, at the time of my writing this, had a total of only 396 likes. By adding Fanzy to the Page and offering rewards of exclusive movie previews to any Fanzy member who has achieved a badge for social sharing, Movie Kingdom has attracted 323 influential Fanzy members to the Movie Kingdom Fanzy. These 323 Movie Kingdom Fanzy members in turn have a total reach on Facebook of 156,524 Facebook users and have already generated a significant number of posts, comments, likes, tweets and retweets around links to the TV show’s YouTube page and website.

With larger pages, Fanzy has proven absolutely explosive. Tiesto, a super-star DJ with over 10 million fans on Facebook, used Fanzy to promote his recent album launch. In addition to other rewards, Tiesto offered to play a private party for his most influential Fanzy fan. The promotion generated more than 800,000 social mentions in 6 weeks.

With Fanzy and other new social loyalty apps, marketers can, for the first time, find and energize their most committed social fans. I like to say its like figuring out which buyers will wear your brand’s t-shirt and giving them one that is just the right fit.

For more information on Fanzy visit www.fanzy.me or to try out our Facebook App.

About Tuhin Roy

Prior to co-founding Fanzy, Tuhin founded the Digital Rights Agency, a digital distribution company whose partners included Apple, Microsoft, Verizon and Amazon.com. Through a series of mergers, the company is now known as the Orchard. He served in various senior management positions and on the company’s public company board of directors, helping build the company to $50+M in revenue.

Influencer analysis has really come into it’s own in the last 12 months and I see this being a huge growth industry in 2011. A few weeks back I highlighted Klout’s push to be come the default influence analysis grader online and now, thanks to Brian Solis, I’ve since tried out PeerIndex, which does a very similar thing.

Although their business model looks to be based around selling access to influencer lists, PeerIndex has set up sample rankings for various topics, such as environmental issues. It’s quite cute – though obviously you don’t get to see under the hood.

I looked at their social media influencer list and, although it only showed a sample of 5 of the top 50 most influential people discussing social media, I was still a little disappointed (see above). Although the people mentioned definitely have credentials, I wouldn’t have picked any of them in my top 50. Maybe that’s the beauty of it. Maybe machines are better than mankind after all. Maybe.

And then there’s PostRank Connect, which looks fascinating and aims to do a similar thing (though I haven’t tried it personally, yet) and a “nifty little service cooked up by Edelman” called TweetLevel, which does pretty much what Klout does, but without the fanfare.

These tools are obviously limited to gauging online influence, rather than absolute influence, but they still provide a useful service in sifting through the millions of content spammers, plagiarists, snake oil salesmen and self publicists you’ll find clogging up the cyberwaves. Traackr also provides a similar service to the paid version of PeerIndex and I’ve heard good things about the results.

The standard business alternative to these free or paid influencer analysis tools is to pay an agency to analyse an industry for you and provide a list of the top 50 influencers – at a cost upwards of $20k . Evidently, this is ludicrous if your industry is likely to have influencers online, which the majority of industries today do.

There is an alternative though: simply to get online and start interacting with the movers and shakers in a specific industry yourself. Set up a few Twitter keyword searches or get a low-cost monitoring tool (Uvbervu or ViralHeat) and do the same. Within a few weeks of genuine engagement you’ll soon start identifying the online infuencers. Importantly, you’ll have bridged the chasm that influencer tools leave you staring at – i.e.  how to actually engage with the influencers once you’ve identified them. After all, what use is knowing someone’s important if you can’t connect with them?

While I’m not keen on bogus science or flawed assumptions – having read Peter Shankman’s road-to-Damascus post that describes the moment that he realised how valuable it would be know how influential your customers are before they walk in the door – I have to say, I’m getting there.

He describes how, through companies like Klout, which use freely available data, businesses can now get a short, snappy rating against which to instantly gauge how much fawning a customer really deserves – or whether to simply send them packing.

It’s obvious really: we all have credit ratings; why not influence ratings?

The question of how this rating is calculated – whether it’s based on Twitter Followers, re-tweets, inbound links or shoe-size – is simply going to run and run…. and run. And the funny part is, most of us haven’t knowingly suffered as a result of a company knowing our “influence” rating (in other words – our commercial value) yet. Imagine when every shop, garage, restaurant and bar knows exactly how influential (or not) you really are. I predict that’s a 2-3 years away yet – but, boy, are we going to get irate about it.

“Do you know who I am!”
“Well, Sir. Actually – yes, we do”.

I’ll be discussing Influence and more at Monitoring Social Media in New York, London and Paris, in Nov and Dec.