Businesses have always understood that word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful ways to shape opinions and drive awareness, preference and sales. “Influencer marketing” is simply the new, fancy way to describe word-of-mouth. The difference now: the spread of influence is directly measurable, and there are all kinds of tools designed to help you identify and manage influence marketing programs.

So what are the elements that actually make up an influencer marketing program?

Personal influence measurement tools are commonly used by communications firms to keep tabs on influencers with whom they are building relationships on behalf of their clients. But relying on Klout or Kred scores to identify the right influencers is not enough—these tools should be part of a balanced, integrated approach to understanding influencers, and identifying the right ones for your brand or your client. We spoke to Zoetica founder and PR veteran Kami Watson Huyse to get her take on how she uses personal influence measurement to build and manage relationships with the right influencers for her clients.

If you’re going to start a Twitter war on behalf of your brand, you’d better make sure you have some key weapons in your arsenal: a simple, easy-to-understand story, a fair and just cause, and an army of fans ready to fight for you. Yesterday, Walgreens started a Twitter war with Express Scripts, a prescription drug insurer–around a fairly complicated issue. Did fans show up for the fight?

Announcing The Realtime Report’s Guide to Online Influence Measurement Tools — a guide for brands, agencies, developers and anyone interested in understanding the rapidly evolving, innovative, controversial and potentially very disruptive field of influence measurement. And asking for your help to make sure that we’re creating something truly useful!

Last Saturday, a group of protesters from the Occupy Wall Street movement entered a Citibank branch in New York City, reportedly to close their accounts. About 40 minutes later, 23 or 24 of them had been arrested by the New York City police. The story quickly went viral: ”In the stupidest public relations move in history, #Citibank had customer arrested for closing their accounts” reads the tweet that is re-posted by hundreds of people. Two days later, a video showing some of the arrests taking place has been viewed by nearly 150,000 people.

Can you spell PR nightmare? So what do you do?

A new report from Buddy Media and Booz & Company shows that 95% of companies are planning to invest more in social media, and breaks down how companies are planning to direct those investments. Based on input from more than 100 leading companies, the report looks at the social media platforms being used, which company departments are handling and using social media the most, and measures the projected spend on social media.

ConAgra, along with their agency Ketchum, is the culprit in the latest self-inflicted PR blunder, breaking every basic rule of social media and blogger relations to create a public embarrassment for themselves. “Bloggers Decry ConAgra’s Bait-And-Switch At Underground Dinner” is the headline from Huffington Post’s coverage of the incident, in which groups of bloggers were invited to enjoy an intimate dinner cooked by a celebrity chef–only to find out they had been served Marie Callender brand frozen pizza and dessert.

Part 10 of our summary of tweets from #RLTM NY 11 Realtime Conference attendees. These tweets summarize the Case Study titled “McTrends: Starting Buzz and Managing Rumors” presented by Rick Wion, Director of Social Media at McDonald’s.

Managing a corporate Twitter account is like realtime publishing and, just like in the magazine world, you need to have an editorial plan and assign beats, says PR Newswire’s Victoria Harres in this interview with Women Centric’s Pattie Simone, which was filmed at TWTRCON NY 10 last June.

In November 2010, internet marketing agency R2i surveyed 296 marketing professionals at a mix of B2B and B2C companies about their social media marketing strategies, and found that 36% of respondents …