Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

State of Play for Influence Marketing in 2013 – Infographic

Businesses are now competing with ? and often losing to ? ?the wisdom of crowds? in the branding battle. Identifying individuals who sway online consumer opinion on specific topics and within specific communities has become critically important to marketers and public relations professionals.

A slew of social scoring platforms have emerged with claims that they can identify who influences who online while providing various tools and scoring systems to rank those who are influential and those who are not on a variety of topics.

However, as with most early adopters, their efforts have been widely criticized. Some say they?re just misunderstood and that the technology is just too new.

Either way, there?s one certainty: Marketers and public relations professionals are taking notice.

Earlier this year, ArCompany and Sensei Marketing surveyed marketing professionals around the world in the ongoing effort to better understand this growing industry and where businesses stand on the issue.

Can social influence truly be measured?
Is anyone using them?
What?s the future of influence marketing?

We’ve created the following infographic to highlight some of the key findings:

How marketers define Influence Marketing
What budgets they?re allocating to Influence Marketing in the next 12 months
How do marketers rate various social influence scoring platforms
What successes they have had with social influence scoring platforms and if they plan on using them in the future
The demographics of audience surveyed

What’s clear is social scoring, while recognized, is being questioned more, with businesses demanding better return for their investment. The technologies that can provide this will be the ones leading the charge in this Third Wave of Influence Marketing.

How about you – how does this data reflect your own personal experiences with influence marketing? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Buy the book that offers the methodologies that answer the needs raised in this report: Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing

Book Authors: Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella
Copyright: ? 2013 by Que Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-5104-1
ISBN-10: 0-7897-5104-6

?Survey Sponsored by:

How Visual Curation Can Help Tell a Brand’s Story

When it comes to helping define what your brand stands for and, by association, helping potential customers or clients see whether you’re a good fit for each other or not, visual content curation is a hugely effective solution.

While I’m not sold on the current trend that “to be a successful brand, you need to be a storyteller” – both Sam Fiorella and Hessie Jones offer valid opinions as to why this isn’t the case – I won’t dispute how a brand’s story can add to the overall appeal.

Knowing the history of a brand, what made it the success it is today, and how this has defined their culture of success, can tell us a lot about the culture of the organization in question. For some customers, that can be the final persuasive factor in giving that brand their business.

Since humans by nature are very visual creatures, the ability for brands to share their story in a more appealing way than simple news clippings and print publications seems a no-brainer.

Two companies who agree are Vizify and Clipsi.

Vizify – A Life Told in Rich Media

In the company’s own words, Portland, Oregon-based Vizify is a “graphical bio” or “visual representation of you”. From their website on why you should use Vizify:

Like it or not, people look you up online before they interview, hire, or date you. Make sure they see your best.

Now while I’m not sure if having a visual representation of yourself for would-be suitors to view you is a great idea, especially in this looks-driven world we live in today, the rest of Vizify’s premise makes perfect business sense.

For job-seekers, it’s a great way to present yourself and your social footprint to potential future employees. By the same token, it’s a great way for headhunters and recruiters to see if a potential candidate is right for the client they represent.

Going a little deeper, and brands can use Vizify to showcase not only their mantra, but how they uphold that online.

While the format is a little more suited to a more visual presentation of a resume, the same features that make up Vizify from a personal angle can also be utilized for a business or brand.

Multiple Twitter accounts can show the diversity of your company’s approach to social, from customer service to support to FAQs and more.
Images can share corporate events, team building, awards, employee news and milestones, as well as customer satisfaction stories.
Videos can highlight the topics you discuss online as well as the people who influence your brand, to show if there’s a correlation for a potential customer.

In addition to these, there’s a nifty Words feature that shows the words you use the most, which gives a great indication of whether your brand’s expertise or areas of interest tie in with those of your customers. As you can see by the image below, if anyone’s interested in talking influence with their mates, I might be your guy!

Additionally, for any customer looking to do some more digging on your brand, Vizify offers a handy Links feature that connects the dots to your online footprints.

Throw in the ability to customize to your brand’s design and some basic analytics behind how your content is being viewed, and Vizify offers a clean and simply way to showcase what your brand’s about when it comes to social.

Clipsi – The New Corporate Media Room

There have been numerous ways to create an online news room that highlights your company’s most important news, milestones and achievements, but recently released Clipsi offers a slick take on it.

By grabbing text or images – or clippings, for the old school amongst us, including me – from either public web pages, or documents from your Dropbox account, Clipsi then lets you arrange them to present an informative and interactive newsroom.

As you can see by the embedded example below, which Neicole Crepeau – the driving force behind Clipsi – kindly put together for me around the topic of the Influence Marketing book.

By collating quotes from blogs, interviews as well as directly from the book, and the research that took place around the case studies and technology vendors in the influence marketing space, this particular Clipsi offers a pretty good feel for the direction the book takes.

However, as cool as the newsroom offering is, it’s where Clipsi is taking steps beyond just offering a public-facing news curation area, and looking to make the platform a true team tool for cross-collaboration, that things get really interesting.

Say you want to create a report or marketing strategy based on what you know about today’s marketplace and where your brand fits in. With Clipsi, you could create a team research board, invite colleagues from relevant departments, and collectively collate any data you feel offers insights into the topic at hand.

With instant visual reference points, as well as clickable links to take you directly to the source, Clipsi moves from being an effective newsroom into a research-driven strategic solution. The example board below, “Social Media is Crack”, is a great example of this approach.

Statistics, research links, authority reports and sources ensure the most up-to-date analysis for your team, which in turn means the most up-to-date reports for your company’s leadership team.

Described by Neicole as “Pinterest for business”, the analogy is apt – yet, for me, Clipsi offers much more of a business solution than the popular image curation board it’s compared to.

Clipsi is currently in beta – you can find more details here.

The Media is the Message

There’s no doubt that businesses are using visuals more in their content creation. Twitter’s introduction of Cards, and the redesigned Google+ and Facebook interface that favours rich media, shows this trend is only going to continue.

As brands look to compete in an ever-noisy space, the ability to show and tell versus just tell is a key ally. Vizify and Clipsi understand this and are helping redefine how we both represent and consume information.

While blogs and social accounts will continue to help these brands position themselves to their would-be customers or future employees, the ability to go a little deeper from a central point makes that positioning a little more attractive on both sides.

Where the media truly is the message, ?don’t let your brand miss out on sharing its version.

Why We Need More Partnerships Like the @Traackr and @Nimble One

The middle of May saw a pretty big announcement in the influence marketing and social business space.

Influence platform Traackr and Social CRM platform Nimble announced a partnership that would see seamless integration of the two solutions, and allow much more effective management of influencer outreach programs.

From Traackr:

As of today, our users can connect their Nimble accounts to their Traackr projects and centrally manage influencer outreach efforts. It?s a huge step forward in closing the loop on influencer marketing.?What makes the Nimble-Traackr duo worth considering is that now you have Traackr?s contextual influencer identification and content tracking coupled with relationship management tools that enable you to create a plan, implement that plan, document the results, and even follow-up periodically with a complete interaction history.

From Nimble:

Up until now, companies that have invested in influencer marketing have faced the challenge of reconciling siloed solutions to manage their marketing programs with discovery, research, engagement and management happening in different places, making it difficult to truly nurture relationships. Using Traackr and Nimble together provide users the ability to perform influencer discovery and tracking, relationship building and nurturing, as well as activating and measuring results.

When I heard about this partnership, I was ecstatic. From a personal point of view, it was validation for the methodologies Sam Fiorella and I talk about in the Influence Marketing book, and what the future of that vertical looks like (integration between complementary platforms).

From a business and marketing point of view, it’s the kind of common sense partnership we see too little off, and yet one that reaps dividends for all involved – the two partners, their clients, and anyone looking to effectively use social media to drive leads, sales, customer service and more.

While this particular partnership is built around influence marketing, it offers a path that other businesses could [should] take when it comes to their own customers and the solutions they offer.

Social Behaviours and Decision Making

For any business, one of the primary goals – if not the main one – is understanding its customers better. These could be existing or potential, as well as stakeholders or employees.

Take it beyond customers, and switch the wording a little, and you get the same thing – donors, political party supporters, activists, etc.

If we, as businesses, can understand what makes our customers tick, and offer them solutions based on their freely submitted data and information, we can identify certain behavioural aspects and provide a message or solution accordingly.

Tie that into their social behaviours online, and then use complementary software that monitors, analyzes, segments and recommends, and we’re moving into an area where we can truly be smarter about how we meet the needs of our customers.

Not only that, but we understand what makes potential clients or strategic partners tick.

Whereas before it could take months or even years to gain enough knowledge to turn a cold call into a warmer introduction, using Traackr’s identifying process along with Nimble’s project management tools gives us data we can really use to break the proverbial ice.

New contract details;
Personal and professional milestones;
RFP timescales;
Deciding factors;
Competitive influencers;
Peer connections.

Information in business is king – analytical information even more so. The Traackr/Nimble partnership brings this information to us in a more cohesive manner than before.

Collaborative Consumption is the Way Forward

Apart from the obvious business solutions the partnership brings, it also enables both companies to fine-tune their own offerings based on how their clients are using the new combination.

For instance, while Traackr has an excellent influence marketing solution, especially when it comes to identifying who influences the influencers, they don’t go quite as deep on the measurement path when keeping track of where someone is in the purchase life cycle.

For a sales team, this information is more key than knowing who the influencers are in a particular vertical – that would fall more to the marketing team to handle.

With Nimble’s integration, a sales VP could allocate team members different leads, at different stages, and base success criteria on how well that sales person moves the potential client into the next stage of the decision-making process.

Each time the lead is moved into a new section – from awareness to research, for example, or research to intent to buy – a new set of influencers could be identified by Traackr. The warmth of that lead would then either increase or decrease based on what needs to happen next.

Alerts are set up to monitor sudden spikes in activity, or mention of certain keywords that would suggest the intention to buy soon.

Now, instead of influence being used for promotion and social share of voice, it’s a true, lead generation tracking tool. All because two companies decided to partner as opposed to leaving clients to figure out how to connect all the dots themselves.

The Possibilities Are Limited Only By You

It’s this kind of forward movement that today’s technologies allow and, for the smarter companies out there, actively encourage.

Developers that build their solutions with Open APIs in mind – the ability for different technologies to connect to each other reasonably easily – are the ones that will be positioned to lead the marketplace.

It’s one of the reasons ArCompany doesn’t tie itself to specific vendors. We may announce strategic partnerships but we’ll still present the most relevant solution(s) based on a client’s specific needs.

At this moment, we’re working with a technology vendor in Toronto to provide the next level of content analysis for both brands and bloggers, and how that solution can tie into other technologies based on verticals and goals.

While we may not be technical engineers, we know what our colleagues in this space are asking for, so it makes sense for us to partner with a vendor that can deliver on these needs, while looking ahead to see how much further we can take the basic premise.

As the conversation around social media and business matures from “oh, nice to have” into an actual business conversation, partnerships like the Traackr and Nimble one will become ever more prevalent.

It’s about time.

image: Nimble.com