Referrals or Intent? Or Both? What's more important in #socialmarketing? #twt

Let's take a look at 2 interesting social marketing solutions, @LocalResponse and @Extole. Both have seemingly different approaches to social marketing and interestingly, their approaches are centred around 2 of the largest social networks at the moment.

LocalResponse boasts of marquee clients such as Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Walgreens and McDonalds. The basic premise is that when consumers tweet about something, their DirectResponse platform analyzes the tweet to figure out the intention in the tweet. Let's say, you tweet to your friends that you are starving and want to grab a bite, you could potentially get a coupon from Pizza Hut. Brands could also encourage their customers to check-in from a particular store location which will elicit a response from the store with a promotion or offer relevant to that specific store location. LocalReponse is Twitter-centric and is not clear how their solution would work with other social networks.

Extole, on the other hand, is Facebook-centric. Their platform is designed to take advantage of the nearly billion people already on FB. They pretty much ride on FB's Open Graph and focus on social referrals, expressions and promotions, but they do track referrals thru Twitter as well. The intent is to amplify the views of brand advocates and thus drive word of mouth marketing - socially. This hopefully leads to increased awareness of the brands eventually leading to conversions. Extole sounds like a good old referral program for the social generation.

Have you come across any other interesting social marketing tools and solutions. Would love to hear from you!