Meeting friends on your daily scroll

On how JET8’s system of Peer to Peer value creation was ahead of the curve

Noticed anything different on your daily scroll? In the wake of the recent newsfeed changes that prioritize posts from friends and family, businesses are facing a new reality. A groundswell of changing public sentiment has led to a review of the what we value in social media interaction, and the word ‘community’ is being reintroduced into the equation.

Relevance

A return to the origins of social media usage- connecting with friends and family near and far, is aimed at reducing all that ‘noise’ we’ve been putting up with, by decreasing low-quality content and restricting publicity to paid ads.

For businesses this means that if you’re dependent on non-paid forms of social engagement to get your message out there, you’re going to be forced to diversify. For the rest of us, it means more actually relevant posts. Which makes for a nice change.

Transparency

But the changes don’t stop there, and it’s more good news for the end user. As of May 2018, marketers will be facing a whirlwind of restrictions with the introduction of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The focus here is on data collection and storage practices, ensuring that companies get “specific, informed and non-ambiguous” consent for branding related data usage, or risk fines of up to 4% of global revenue.

Ahead of the curve

All this is great news- as it represents mainstream adoption of principles surrounding user needs and transparency, but it’s hardly groundbreaking. So where is the ground breaking exactly?

Peer to peer influence- where everyday users are staking a claim for their online value, pushing back against disingenuous ‘celebrity’ endorsements, and demanding a piece of the marketing pie. That’s where.

The Landscape.

The influencer marketing industry is expected to grow to a $10 billion industry by 2020, and is rated as the fastest-growing customer acquisition channel for marketers (1).

However, the industry is faced with increased consumer scepticism of ‘celebrity’ endorsement; and conventional influencer marketing (connecting brands to a database of influencers) is both expensive and hard to gauge.

This means that whilst conventional influencer marketing is 3 x more likely to accelerate referral flow (3), research shows that peer-to-peer marketing is in fact the leading driver behind 20–50% of all purchasing decisions (4), with 81% of consumers reporting peer influence on purchases (5).

Customers acquired through peer support, also prove to be easier for brands to convert, and have a higher lifetime value than a customer acquired through paid media- because they chose to engage with a brand, product or community from the outset.

With an increased use of ad blockers (over 615 million devices polled had ad blockers installed (8)), and the peer focused millennial mobile population in dynamic growth (70% of millennial consumers reported peer influence of purchases (2)), the message is clear:

Peer to Peer marketing succeeds in connecting consumers with messages from people they trust, rather than corporations they don’t.

The JET8 Solution

Within the JET8 ecosystem, anyone has the opportunity to progress from app user to influencer, community creator to brand, content producer to media channel, and spectator to platform owner. The J8T Token is fuelling the expansion of a model in which people are the nodes, the centres of creation, influence, and earning potential.

Retailers, platform owners, communities, and the media can now be part of these networks, rather than the centre of them. This is what ‘democratizing influence’, is all about.

The Technology

JET8 pioneered the world’s first peer to peer mobile engagement platform through the use of branded digital assets, which include stickers, frames and themes which users integrate with their own content.

JET8’s API is the first technology to recognise the value of the selfie, and to allow users to monetise content creation and data sharing- through a range of digital services that streamline community building and retail connectivity.

These digital services include (but are not limited to) JET8’s Full Stack of customised social mobile applications, Content to Commerce Mobile Engagement, and Product & Social Sampling.

Users are prompted for their consent (that’s the GDPR covered) and given the opportunity to earn J8T’s at every stage of the consumer experience (that’s tokenized reciprocity right there).

On top of it all, the decentralized nature of this tokenized system means creating communities within your own app, that seamlessly link with other social media platforms and communities. No barriers, just connections.

Relevant, Transparent, Consensual, Remunerative

The whole ecosystem proves the practical application of digital rewards in exchange for social influence. Genuine, reciprocal and consensual relationships are all the rage right now, after all.

1[CollectiveBias] 2[Tomoson] 3[Heinz Marketing] 4[McKinsey] 5[MarketShare] 8 [PageFair]

Find out more at www.jet8.io