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.

Shigero Miyamoto - One of the Time's 100 most influential people of the year

I just spotted the bit in LinkedIn Groups that identifies “Top Influencers this week”. In the Connected Marketing Network Group I’m apparently the Top Influencer this week. The fact is though, I’m the Manager for that Group so I add lots of comments and generally hang out there a lot. On the other hand, there are members who post much more insightful comments and who are certainly (in real life) far more influential than me.

At our Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp in London in March, Philip Sheldrake ridiculed the influence calculations of Twitter monitoring solution Klout – highlighting how they were calculating influence based on what they could, not what actually reflected the real nature and complexity of “influence”. The same seems to be the case for LinkedIn: the number of posts you make is no reflection of how influential you are.  It might indicate how committed, networked or bored a person is, but not how much they are influencing people.

This raises the obvious question, is a flawed measurement better than no measurement? Or are we just trying to ascribe value to something far too nebulous, fuelled perhaps by the personal vanity of people (like me) who love to be defined as “influential”.

We’ll be talking about this more at Monitoring Social Media Boston, San Francisco, New York, London and Paris. Hope you can make one of them!

BrandWatch are serious data-heads. Having started out building monitoring systems for the British Government, they struck out on their own, creating a high quality social media monitoring and tracking system of their own. While some services (notably Market Sentinel) employ human intervention to measure “sentiment” in the posts people make on Twitter, forums and blogs, BrandWatch concurs with Scoutlabs, among others, that automation is the way forward when dealing with large quantities of data (as Seb points out, you get real-time trends, regardless of thhe inevitable inaccuracies).

BrandWatch works by enabling companies to set up a range of “classifiers”. These might include “industry”, “country”, “sector” etc. within which data should be tracked. They can then set the “keywords” they want to track within these boundaries – and the system does the rest. Once the data has emerged, the user can slice, dice and present it in a wealth of useful, fun and, if I’m honest, mind-boggling ways.

A particularly nice feature is “Groups” that enables companies to track their keywords across a set list of websites. So Mothercare, for example, might discover that they get more comments about their prams on Netmums, while their baby clothes stoke up more interest in the Confetti.com forums. Similarly, users can check which keywords appear most often in comments and which are increasing in frequency over time – i.e. what the hot topics are. These kind of stats and flows can have a huge bearing on advertising spend.

BrandWatch also measures the Influence of the people making the comments. This is done using a straightforward calculation of the “most mentions for a particular keyword” plus “credibility” – which is gauged by site traffic, in-links, page-rank and the age of the site. Evidently there’s a hole here – Twitter followers for example – but Seb assured me that will be filled in due course.

For anyone not familiar with tracking social media, BrandWatch, like many other services, offers hours of fascination: the peaks of activity on a Monday; the troughs at the weekend; the emotive spikes generated by “new” products (about which people are much more opinionated that old ones); the wild differences in sentiment detected between a brand and it’s latest product or marketing campaign; the amusing acceptance that, no matter how clever they get, computers will never understand irony.

The new version, BenchMark. looks to be a Netvibes-inspired mixture of drag and drop usability with some juicy additional features thrown in. In addition to the inclusion of more video data (i.e. stats and ratings), it will include “proximity” targeting of keywords, i.e. the ability to limit the terms covered according to their proximity to other words. I look forward to trying this out when it’s launched in a few weeks’ time.