Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

Influence

Influence Marketing – This is Where the Fun Begins

As part of the run up to the launch of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing, Sam and I have decided to do things a little differently.

We want to have some fun and really involve you.

To that end, we have something for everyone (hopefully) based on where you are.

Facebook

If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t apart from Tipper Gore, probably), you can catch us on the official Influence Marketing Facebook page. Here we’ll be asking your opinion via polls as well as discussions on the latest influence solutions and technologies, and sneak peeks at some of the interviews we’ve carried out. There may also be fine cigars.

Google+

How the heck I got dragged back onto G+ I’ll never know. Oh, wait – it was the very cool Communities addition which allows for a much more cohesive experience. If you’re on Google+, join the Influence marketing community and take part in Hangouts, access Sam and myself as we brainstorm the book’s topics and direction in daily Hangout snippets, and generally join in a vibrant discussion on all things influence, current and future.

Some Pre-Order Fun

Normally, pre-order offers include “Buy so many books and we’ll do this” and, while we will definitely have bulk specials on the way, in the meantime we want to thank folks who pre-order now on their own. I can’t say what it is, but it’s definitely very personal to you, the buyer.

Want to find out what it is? Hit up the link in the special box below this post, pre-order the book, then email a copy of your receipt to info@influencemarketingbook.com (or just click this link here).

You can also find us over at our soon-to-be-launched website, as well as Twitter (this will just be a curated feed), and we’re going to be popping up in some other unexpected places too, so stay tuned.

We look forward to welcoming you at your favourite online watering hole. 🙂

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgkSKFsptKY[/youtube]

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Introducing Influence Marketing – The Book

You may have noticed there’s been more emphasis on influence and the role it plays in marketing and social media on this blog recently. Well, there’s good reason for that.

Available next Spring, Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing will be my first print book – woot woot!

Published by Que/Pearson, and co-authored with Sam Fiorella of Sensei Marketing, Influence Marketing will go beyond social influence scoring and give you a start-to-finish blueprint for making influence marketing work in your organization.

With case studies, empirical evidence, digital workshops and much, much more, Influence Marketing is something both Sam and I are very excited to be working on, and we look forward to sharing a lot more info in early January.

In the meantime, you can take advantage of the pre-order offer on Amazon and get 35% off the full price – so hop on over and reserve your copy of Influence Marketing now. You can also pre-order on Barnes & Noble if you prefer to shop there, with the same 35% offer.

We look forward to continuing the conversation soon!

Note – above Amazon links are affiliate links.

Social Influence and The Marketer’s Dilemma

Just 20 short years ago, marketing was pretty easy. You got your budget, you allocated it to the media buy (TV, print, radio, direct), and away you went.

If you were conscientious, you’d collect results and give them to your clients. If you weren’t, you’d correlate any increased foot traffic to a store or business to your awesome marketing efforts.

Everyone was (kind of) happy, and marketers went about their merry way of sitting in a lofty seat, controlling the message and how that message was disseminated.

Then everything changed.

With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, consumers now had a legitimate way to take a little bit of control back from the marketers.

While it was still in its infancy, and search wasn’t as advanced as it is today, private forums and message boards soon sprung up and consumers could connect with peers and fellow customers, and offer true feedback and advice versus the limited face-to-face conversations taking place in the home, workplaces and bars.

Jump forward 15 years, and the growth of Facebook, Twitter, enhanced forums and real-time review sites, and now the marketer’s game – or at least, the bad marketer’s game – was pretty much truly up.

Messaging was no longer the domain of the few – now it had to live up to its claims or be shot down in public, in the full gaze of a paying client. Not only that, but now the power of the budget was being taken away by the introduction of social influence – and the marketer’s dilemma began.

If Everyone’s an Influencer…

Before social media, if brands were looking to truly get their message in front of a certain group of people, they’d buy celebrity endorsements.

From Paris Hilton in a bathing suit washing cars to Madonna being paid $5 million for an advert that was pulled by its sponsor, celebrities have been big draws when going after a certain demographic.

The problem with this approach is when a celebrity takes a fall and the brand takes a hit because of it (or would do, if action wasn’t taken on their behalf).

Think about Tiger Woods and his extra-marital problems; or Lance Armstrong and his recent doping scandal. When heroes fall, they taint a brand too – if you don’t take action, you’re seen as endorsing wrong-doing or questionable behaviour.

Additionally, consumers are much more savvy now and aware of how advertising works – do we really believe that Celebrity X drives Automobile Brand Y? No.

Instead, we move back to where we’ve always been prior to the golden age of advertising and marketing – peer recommendations and trusted resources. In social media, these trusted resources are the new influencers, and brands are now looking to connect with them versus celebrity endorsements.

That in itself leads to the next problem – when social media can empower anyone to become an influencer, who do brands connect with?

It’s All About the Four A’s

Thanks to some social scoring sites, anyone can appear influential. Increased activity on Twitter and Facebook can see your score on the likes of Klout skyrocket.

For brands that can’t afford to put the legwork in that truly identifies the real influencer for their audience, social scoring sites offer a quick overview of who may be the right person, and let you filter out only those that meet a certain score and above.

While this can give you a quick introduction to the kind of people you’re after, it can also see you miss these very people as context and relevance can often be missed by a simple score.

Additionally, whether social scoring helps you identify people or not, to truly get your message out there you still need the Four A’s:

The Four A's

  1. Audience – It used to be the medium was the message, but now the audience is the driver – without knowing them, the message is useless, no matter what medium it’s on.
  2. Acceptance – You can have the greatest product and message ever, but if the audience isn’t ready to accept it, will it even be heard?
  3. Application – How you’re perceived can define your success, and how you approach us defines how you’re perceived.
  4. Amplification – The golden ticket, and not just for brands but for social scoring and influence: how far can you get your message?

These four tenets are core to the marketer’s success – but without knowing how to identify true influencers, how can you get all four aligned and working together?

The conversation is just starting on that one…

The Continuous Challenge of Social Influence

Matt Hixson

This post from Matt Hixson of Tellagence originally appeared on the Jugnoo blog.

I was flattered (and a bit surprised) when? Jugnoo asked me to speak at their summer social media event in Toronto, Social Mix 2012.

We?ve been in conversation about the challenges around measuring the marketing effect of social media since we met. I guess I said something of interest.

So what did I speak about? My presentation was titled “Influence: Today and Beyond”.

When I was first asked me to speak about influence I thought, “Either people are going to be excited about this or they are going to want to punch me in the throat.”

I hear from enough people to know that the market is fed up with the influence conversation but they know they need to be able to get their messages heard and acted upon in social networks.

[Read more…] about The Continuous Challenge of Social Influence

Social Influence and the Shift of the Carnegie Principle

Meet the social instigators

When Dale Carnegie wrote the book on influence more than 75 years ago, he probably didn’t realize the impact he was about to make on society. Just ask the 15 million people that have bought the book since 1936.

But, more than just sharing some evergreen ideas on how people and ideas can really connect with each other, Carnegie also pioneered how we – as individuals – are perceived by others.

Swap that to social influence today, and brands are now looking to highlight those they perceive as influential, to market their services and products for them.

Whereas Carnegie looked to show you ways on how you could make friends quickly, get you out of a rut, and make you more effective all round, today’s influence is finding uptake with brands looking to (often) bypass the legwork that Carnegie advocated, and utilizing shortcuts instead.

These shortcuts mean quicker access to the many; identification of who can spread a message; and more cost-effective approaches to outreach programs and brand advocate partnerships.

This has led to the popularity of companies like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex, as well as niche offshoots like Reppify, Connect.me and Tawkify, to name but three. Each have their benefits, and proponents of these platforms highlight the importance of their place in today’s social media-led marketplace.

However, critics of the services point to today’s influence measurement being nothing more than activity based – the more you are online, the more you’ll be measured as influential, whether you encourage people to act on your activity or not (the dictionary standard of influence).

Perhaps the middle ground offers an insight into where Carnegie’s vision and that of social scoring metrics need to be.

Context

One of the most-discussed areas of influence in the current iteration of social scoring is that of context. As mentioned earlier, proponents of social scoring platforms point to activity being a valid metric – if you’re online a lot, you understand the nuances of the space and how it can be influenced.

Critics point to automated social feeds with little to zero engagement that – while enjoying a high influence score – would be rendered useless when it came to being an influencer to partner with in a social media campaign.

This is where the context argument plays its hand. By definition, context is:

… the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs.

By that definition, it’s the very thing that influence looks to do. By connecting the right people with the right brand, and sharing the right message to the right audience, the results should be favourable every time.

If the context of the message is right, and the relationship between the person and the product the message is promoting fits, then there is an immediate “belief” in the message being more than just a sales promotion.

Find the context, and the pieces of the influence bubble begin to come together.

Relevance and Readiness

If context is important, relevance is equally so (if not more so). You may trust the person/influencer sharing a brand’s message with you; you may even be the perfect audience (based on demographics and research) for that message and that product at that given time.

Until you hit the relevance angle.

  • Are you really in the market for this new product right now?
  • Are you financially available to be the customer?
  • Has your situation or taste changed since you last bought a product from this brand?
  • Are there external issues at play here?

The relevance to how ripe you are as customer is something that no influencer can bypass, no matter how much you trust them, or trust the message.

It’s why the social influence market is only just beginning to grow and mature. Activity may be an early barometer of someone’s potential to a brand and its audience – but there are far more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to add.

Context, relevance and readiness are three – but even they’re just the start.

To truly mature the social influence – and, by association, the influencer – market, we need to remember how many aspects there were to Dale Carnegie’s seminal book and how they all had to be aligned to work their magic.

Then we can really start to move the social influence needle.