Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report is one of the most provocative pieces of work I’ve seen on marketing via social media.

While it’s a business-building white paper, from one of the biggest and most experienced interactive marketing and technology companies in the world, there’s no harm in that. The report is bound to get you thinking.

Among its ingredients …

Survey research on social media usage, specifically with respect to associating with brands. For example:

• "29 percent of respondents reported associating themselves with specific brands on social networks … this is a sizable user segment that chooses to openly align itself with brands online. Fans of brand pages are not simply forming these affiliations and then forgetting about them — 57 percent of respondents indicated visiting these pages every few months or weeks, and 27 percent reported interacting with them every few days or even daily … Respondents are purpose-driven when they align themselves with brands … they do not “fan,” “follow” or “friend” brands simply for the sake of doing so."
• 10% of social netters share recommendations at least every few days; another 19% do so every few weeks.

The report examines the relative identification with brands via social nets across a number of specific interest categories (music & entertainment come out on top), but unfortunately they don’t specifically look at charities or causes. It also looks at degrees of trust consumers place in social media content and referrals.

A methodology for measuring "Social Influence Marketing" is proposed — the SIM Score — which combines a reach measure with a "sentiment" measure (are netters having positive or negative conversations about a given brand or category?). This kind of "scoring" of social media conversations typically uses linguistic analysis to evaluate and "code"  huge numbers of messages collected from blogs, Facebook etc pages, online forums, and so forth.

Fluent shows how this is done, using a variety of industry brands and categories to illustrate, for example, how one can produce a competitive analysis  of the "buzz" received by leading brands in a category.

[My pals at DonorTrends are doing just that with respect to charities and causes. First off the shelf is SociaLeaders (our reach measure, which helps you identify the missionaries amongst your donors), which Roger described yesterday. Soon to follow is our tool for canvasing what is being said about your cause (and your competitors) in the social media arena.]

The report includes an intriguing discussion of "social graphs" (an individual’s personal online network of relationships). It shows how the portability of these personal networks, and the ability to integrate them with brand websites (e.g., your nonprofit’s website), through tools like Facebook Connect, Microsoft Live and others, will transform word-of-mouth marketing, referrals, brand evangelism.

And finally, no social media report these days is complete without a discussion of Twitter. Fluent includes a "ten step" approach for adding Twitter to your social networking arsenal.

Fluent is a 50+ page report … you’ll need some time with it. But it will be time well spent.

Tom