Rewarding Mavens

Was looking into the old Freemium model this morning used by the WSJ and seemed like quite an interesting model for retailers and fashion brands. Succinctly the model offers ’social media mavens’ free content that they can blog about or socially tag, maintaining a decent SEO strategy alongside a paid for subscription model – a partnership that is not always thought of as compatible.

As more and more fashion and luxury brands are creating sites that are not just e-commerce focused and actually offer valuable and educational content, it would be possible to identify a brands social media brand advocate (social media maven) and offer a reward based scheme for covering content from within the brands site, on their blog or by social media tagging. This doesn’t necessarily have to be redeemable points in store but maybes access to exclusive events or one off pieces, to really entrench the blogger in the brand.