Marketing Under the Influence
Congratulations are in order. You just landed a new client at the agency; one in the Personal Fitness Products space — which is adjacent to your normal agency practice of Consumer Goods, but, not one you’ve ever really worked in before. Eager to make an impact for the client, you use one of the new “Influencer” tools to find really influential people who might jumpstart the first campaign.
Within a few days, you have a targeted list of over 100 “highly influential” Twitter voices to contact, all of whom have an influence score of 70 or higher.
So you begin your first campaign for the client. After a week, you look at the results, and they are disastrous: out of 100 contacts, you have 0 who have responded favorably and taken action.
You are unhappy. The client is unhappy. Not a great start to the relationship.
Sound familiar? I hope not. But chances are you recognize this scenario as it plays out time and time again across PR and Marketing agencies, where the agency staff uses the wrong tools which leads to the wrong results for the client.
This is especially playing out in the world of “Influencer Identification”. There’s a lot of talk and buzz over Influencer identification tools, Influencers, influence scoring and the “holy grail” of uncovering a handful of really influential people on Twitter or elsewhere who can magically propel your campaigns to the next level.
The notion of “Influence” and “Influencers” is very real, and has been a core part of PR since PR began. Historically, the Influencers were the journalists and the media covering the space our clients marketed and sold in. However, with the advent of bloggers and social networks like Twitter and Facebook, there is now a plethora of potential influential voices to listen to and potentially engage with to help spread one’s messages.
The need to find these voices has led to numerous methods and tools to identify the most influential voices across social networks, albeit with very flawed results from flawed approaches. The net effect today are a lot of PR professionals “marketing under the Influence” of false Influencers; and getting failed results for their clients.
At mBLAST, we’ve spent the last years measuring influence, and creating solutions which properly identify those voices having a real impact in the market. Based on years of experience, a lot of data modeling, and talking to scores of PR professionals to gain insight into best (and worse) practices, we offer some things to think about as you create an Influencer management strategy:
- The topics voices are talking about, and your market is listening to, matter – a lot. To properly measure influence, one has to look at what each voice is talking about, how often, and with what authority and influence in the market. As an example, the blogger “John Smith” might be seen as highly authoritative and influential for the Personal Fitness Products space. He is widely followed and his voice matters to the market. Conversely, he has no influence in other spaces such as “ceramic kitties” or “hydrogen fuel cells.” Your market cares about topics and keywords and is looking for solutions in this space. Your strategy for finding Influencers must factor this in.
- Beware of single Influencer Scores which signify someone is ubiquitously important and influential to all market segments regardless of topics. Just because someone is given an Influencer Score of 75 or 82 by some of the software tools in the market, it does not mean they can actually be an influential voice to your chosen market segment. As pointed out before, each voice will have many different scores for the different topics and market segments we care about; and these topic-based scores should be used to make decisions – not some generic score that really is not indicative of their ability to reach a particular market segment.
- Being popular does not mean you are influential for the market I care about. Certainly to be an Influencer, you have to have the platform to be heard. But just because someone has a huge number of followers on Twitter does not automatically make them the most influential voice for the market segment we are looking in. Someone with far few followers for the Twitter community at large, but with a huge voice within the community or market segment we care about, should have a much higher Influencer score for that market.
- Twitter is not the only place to measure Influence. Your market may not be just looking just to Twitter for advice, guidance and education. A solid Influencer program will scan not just Twitter, but also blogs, articles, Facebook and all other sources.
- Influence Scores change constantly. Influence changes all the time as things are said, written, quoted, retweeted, etc. Influence must be measured constantly throughout the day in a world where conversations are going on 24×7. Any tool which does not update constantly is delivering you with outdated results.
Influencers matter – a lot. They always have and they always will. Smart PR professionals are adopting strategies and programs which take into account topics, addressable audiences, broad reach, authority, impact and influence over time as they seek to find and work with the voices that can and will impact their market.
Marketing Under the Right Influencers can and will produce exponential results for PR campaigns. Marketing under the Wrong Influencers will produce disastrous results, as it always has when campaigns are not properly targeted to the right media with the right messages.
Gary presently is CEO of mBLAST, and has over 25-years experience in high-tech marketing, product management, development and executive management in various global telecom and high-tech companies including Nortel, Sprint, General DataComm and three venture-backed global startups. His background also includes time within a global PR and marketing agency, Mi liberty, where he was North American CEO and worked with numerous large and small wireless companies and brands.
At mBLAST, Gary is driving the company’s solutions to change how marketing identifies with, and works with, the individual influencers of its market who are daily shaping public perception of one’s company, product and services.
Learn more about the company here.
Posted on: May 11, 2011 at 3:10 pm By Todd Defren
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A lot of times, people are using online tools, data points and scores because they haven’t done the hard, time-consuming work of being in the space before social media became “flavor of the month.” So, they have no idea who’s who in the zoo.
They’re late to the game, they’re scared, and they’re making up for it by depending upon Klout/PeerIndex/etc. and then firing out mass emails, which are, of course, deleted and/or ignored.
Hint: the way to reach a blogger is on his/her blog, or wherever else we tend to live online. We don’t sit in our email IN boxes, breathlessly awaiting your pitches.
Who DO I listen to and respond to? The professionals who connect with me as a person, over the long term, offline as well as on (the IRL conference experience is so NOT dead) and those who develop a relationship before attempting to (gag) leverage my influence for their own benefit.
Thanks for the comment. Your note on IRL is especially important. Relationships still matter. Always will. That’s why the “engage” portion of our model is so critical and fun. It’s one thing to find the voices who are impacting your market, but interacting, getting-to-know and finding ways to work together is far more than just sending an email blast as you accurately describe.
Well put!
grl
Thanks for the great post! I love #2 because it seems like so many companies are focused on one measure of influence, especially klout as the score of the moment, and that one measure is really only a snapshot of a much bigger picture. Also, #3 is such a great point that so many forget. . .an influencer is only such for the specific area they have expertise or reach in.
Rachel – thanks for taking the time to comment. We’ve developed our thoughts on influence after many years of hands-on work in this area and even lots of math models our really smart folks have derived to explore how to measure many of the effects of influence across the web. Fascinating area and one we’ll continue to explore, debate, question and lead.
I’ve seen this story played out all over the place. It comes from lazy marketers/pr who cookie cutter solutions rather than taking the time to figure out what is the most effective strategy/tactic/tool for the job. Of course some of this could be due to agencies relying on unseasoned junior staff tasked beyond their abilities to keep operating expenses down.
It has little to do with arguments about how or why to use Twitter, what to measure, etc, and more to do with how smart and innovative agencies really are. Many agencies win business because they throw around buzz words like “ROI”, “social media”, “influencers”, “web 2.0″ without actually understanding what they are doing. Let’s face it, most marketing and most agencies that do it are horrible. Agencies that know what they’re doing are few and far between, but clients don’t know it if they haven’t worked with a quality agency.
To me, less important is the idea of influence as the idea of conversion. They guys that write the checks could give a shit how far your Twitter reach is if it doesn’t end in a sale. I’ll take 100 unique visits per month over a million if 50% of that hundred converts (disclaimer: our average product is priced in the tens of thousands). Now, more is better for lower cost products/services, but my point is that going with the strategy of driving lots of traffic, or getting lots of reTweets, or having a video “go viral” (ugh) is not appropriate for every brand or customer. Yet, many companies want to hear just that, and many agencies are built on the model of giving the client what they want (or what everyone else does) rather than what they need. Sometimes a billboard is a better idea than a Facebook app! Sometimes direct mail is better than having Robert Scoble blog about your new product. Sometimes all you need is a Tweet.
Michael – thanks for taking the time to comment.
You make a great point: effective marketing professionals, agency and corporate, need to understand what to measure, how to measure and when / where to measure. Your goals stated here are about conversions and how these conversions can be made with far few site visits than someone else might need. You clearly understand your business and how your marketing efforts can best drive sales. Kudos for that.
Knowing what you need to measure, do and how to drive actions is a critical part of the marketing mix today, and I believe understanding how to measure influence can be a critical decision set for many in this process. I believe we have a far greater set of ways to measure marketing than ever before in the history of marketing, and that makes both the empirical and creative sides of the marketing industry a fascinating place to be.
Best of luck to you.
Gary,
You’re right on. Measurement is key. Imagine a chef that doesn’t eat his own food, ridiculous!