influence marketing

The Business of Influence

Since announcing our book at the tail end of last year, both Sam and myself have been asked why write a book on influence marketing.

Additionally, some people have said they’re looking forward to the book because “it will put social scoring [Klout] in its place” (paraphrased).

The answers to both points are simple.

For the first question, while there have been books written about social scoring and growing your own influence, we wanted to write a true business book on how influence marketing can be used for that most important element of business longevity – lead generation, sales, and the customer life cycle.

For the second question, this is definitely not an anti-social scoring or an anti-Klout book.

Instead, we offer our methodology (and the platforms that can use this framework), to truly understand what influence marketing is, why it’s important to business, and how to use it as a lead generation tactic with true measurable results and clear strategies to build advocacy, profits and customer engagement.

It’s what Sam and I call The Business of Influence, and for us it’s where the third wave of influence comes into play and will move the space forward.

Beyond Social Scoring

As I mentioned at the start of this post, we don’t discount social scoring platforms, contrary to the popular belief of some people.

We see where they offer value (initial identification of groups and conversations), but we also understand where their limitations lie. PeerIndex in particular are open about who they cater to – the mass information and data regarding ?the 70,000 people relevant to a topic versus the truly influential seven who can drive real actions and contextual reactions.

For businesses, however, social scoring currently doesn’t dive deeply enough into moving the customer along the purchase life cycle; nor does it offer the kind of in-depth analysis and the way an influence campaign can be disrupted via several situational factors.

It’s this kind of data – how a message is disrupted, how it can be put back on track, who are the secondary and tertiary influencers that can step up to redirect a disrupted message, etc, – that brands are clamouring for, and which we provide the framework for in the book.

The Influencer of Tomorrow

Another reason we wrote the book is because, as marketers ourselves, we saw a core area that the popular definition of an influencer was missing.

Whereas the route for an influence campaign on scoring platforms may be built around identifying mass numbers and attracting with brand perks or similar, to entice conversations around a product, this was still placing the influencer themselves at the heart of the marketing circle.

But, as we’ve seen countless times before from brand campaigns and case studies, if the influencer is either generic or one built on amplification and sponsored by a brand, does their trust factor get diluted? And, if it does, where does this leave brands looking to actually drive sales from these campaigns?

What was needed was a clearly defined path to where influence tips – that moment a decision moves from interest, to intent, to action (ideally, a purchase), and beyond.

By identifying this tipping point, brands could clearly identify who the true influencer is – and, as we share in the book, it’s not the usual suspects of today’s influence model, and is one of the key reasons influence marketing as it stands today is still seen as something of an enigma.

Brands know getting influencers to promote their product or service can be beneficial – but, much like celebrity endorsements, can be rife with risk as well, if the influencer isn’t chosen wisely.

This is where we felt a new methodology had to come into play.

The Path of True Influence

By implementing our methodology with our own clients, and the feedback we’ve received about our framework from leading influence technology vendors like Appinions, Traackr?and?Tellagence, as well as Social CRM vendors like Nimble?and oneQube, we’re confident we’ve created an influence marketing blueprint that will redefine how the medium is used today.

It reduces risk, grows sales, increases leads, builds influence paths and follows the customer at every touchpoint in the decision-making process.

In the next few weeks, we’ll find out whether others agree when our book is released.

If you’re ready to be part of this new method of influence identification and nurturing, and truly take influence beyond awareness and into measured business results, you can preorder now via Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Chapters Indigo.

We look forward to moving the next wave of influence marketing forward with you.

The Third Wave of Influence

Influence marketing is at a crossroads. As we know it today, influence marketing is primarily defined by social scoring platforms like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

However, while these platforms are decent starting points for brands looking to identify influencers, they don’t really go deep enough into contextual and situational human relationships to offer a true metric of influence.

What’s needed is a bigger understanding of how the human psyche works; what makes us tick as people; what impacts our decision process; and where we can predict paths of influence based on transactional relationships, where historic interactions can be merged with current knowledge and the likelihood of a future action based on that knowledge.

To get to that level, though, we need to move to the Third Wave of Influence Marketing.

The First Wave of Influence: Celebrity Endorsements

While Dale Carnegie can arguably be called the Grandfather of Influence as we knew it before social scoring entered the fray, it was the late Dan Edelman and his championing of celebrity endorsements that ushered in the First Wave of Influence.

Edelman saw the value in connecting celebrities with brands to share that brand’s message. The middle of the last century saw Edelman employ people like movie star Vincent Price to be the voice of the California wine industry, and people like baseball legend Nolan Ryan and activist Gloria Steinem.

This type of brand recommendation resulted in several successful campaigns, and turned Edelman’s fledgling self-named company into a global public relations powerhouse.

However, in recent years, the sheen has started to dull with celebrity endorsements. In 2008, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published an excellent article on the dangers of celebrity endorsement, which included (lack of) relevance of the celebrity to the brand.

On her agency blog, Margie Clayman took it one step further and highlighted the worst case scenario for brands when using celebrity endorsements – that of the celebrity “going rogue”.

Tiger Woods and his infidelity; Lance Armstrong and his doping scandal; Oscar Pistorius and the killing of his girlfriend (drawing comparisons to the OJ Simpson murder trial).

The combination of dangers associated to celebrity endorsement, as well as consumers becoming smarter when connecting the dots between endorsement and context, paved the way for the next wave of influence.

The Second Wave of Influence: Social Scoring

The social web has opened up a veritable treasure trove of opportunities for individuals to become the “new celebrity”, or influencer. By having access to social networks, blogging and more, everyday web users can grow a sizable audience and loyal following.

Brands began to take notice of this and naturally wanted to connect. There was just one problem – old school broadcast messaging didn’t quite work on the new web. Instead of connecting with influencers, brands came across as spammy. They needed a conduit.

Enter social scoring.

Early movers in the social influence space like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex saw the opportunity to create a platform that could connect these social influencers to brands looking to use them to promote their goods.

Soon, public scores were attached to individuals, with the higher scoring ones being invited to accept free products from brands, in the hope of exposure to that influencer’s audience.

This was all well and good, until the cracks started to appear.

Questions arose over the validity of the data being used, since it was just based on publicly available information versus more in-depth conversations happening behind closed networks and privacy settings.

People also questioned the right of these platforms to create a public profile and attach a score to you, without your specific content.

Privacy violation was also a hot topic, as well as the creation of profiles of minors – a big no-no for the social networks where the scoring platforms were scraping information from.

Perhaps the biggest crack was the resulting shift in how influence was perceived. Instead of context and micro relationships, influence was now judged by a score and how well a user played into the algorithm of the scoring platforms.

Even today, after improvements to the data, people with Klout profiles see their scores drop if they stay away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook for a few days. This “you’re only influential if you’re online” approach has left people questioning the validity of scoring as a method of influence.

Much like celebrity endorsements before them, social scoring platforms are being questioned over the context of how their influence is measured, and where the true transactional influence – that where trust, relationship and more comes into play – sits in their algorithm.

Which leads us to the next wave.

The Third Wave of Influence: The Business of Influence

The biggest problem facing brands today when it comes to influence marketing is the actions and end result that come from their campaigns, and did they result in leads and customers.

While there are various aspects to an influence campaign – short term buzz, new product awareness, donation run for non-profits, etc – the long tail aspect is often forgotten: customer acquisition and loyalty.

The reason for this can be attributed to many things, but the biggest overriding factor is clear – brands are still using influence marketing campaigns as one-offs, and with a campaign mindset.

This means they find their influencers, agree on the promotion, let the influencer do his or her thing, and then analyze how successful that campaign was.

However, this misses a huge opportunity – to turn influence into true advocacy, and build a loyal and engaged army of fans that are also customers. To do this, brands need to start looking beyond the short-term (potential) viral effect of an influencer, and instead address the need of the customer via the influencer.

A CRM platform like Nimble can help in this process, and taking influence beyond buzz and into true actionable business return is the natural next step.

Otherwise, the current direction of influence may erode brand trust. The recent indifference to the Kred and LinkedIn Top 1% emails showed early signs that perhaps consumers are getting tired of where we are today.

Instead of generic, we need to address complexity.

We need to decipher opinions of those that matter and how they impact us;
We need to adapt to fluid influence and how it continuously changes;
We need to move beyond public personas and into micro influencers;
And we need to stop confusing popularity and amplification for influence.

The stage is set for The Third Wave of Influence Marketing, and we look forward to continuing to move the discussion forward when the book is released in the next few weeks.

Moving Influence Beyond Public Personas

If you thought influence marketing was a hot topic at the moment for marketers and brands, it’s only just beginning to really take shape.

While much of the conversation both here on this blog and across various networks has concentrated on where social influence is today, this is a just the prelude to where influence marketing will be tomorrow and beyond.

In the next few weeks, our book will be released and we’re excited to share the concepts and methodologies that we’ve come up with in both our research for the book as well as real-life case studies we’re documenting with our clients, using our framework.

Our goal with the book is simple – while early movers in the social influence space have provided a starting point for brands to understand this tactic, the real business value requires actions and solutions that go deeper than a score and an “influencer” based on amplification and popularity.

Additionally, online influence is just one component of a very large picture, and only paints a small part of that same picture. Let’s talk about that a little more today.

Decisions Based on Limited Information

Social influence data as it stands today is based primarily on one core metric: public social profiles and footprints. So if you have your Twitter account set to public, then companies like Klout and Kred will create you a “profile” and allocate you a score, based on their algorithm.

If you sign up and connect your other accounts, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, the score will change, since these companies now have more information about you. So far, so good.

The problem comes when the accounts aren’t set to public, or you have different privacy settings for different accounts. So, Twitter and Google+ may be public, but Facebook may be primarily for friends, so your sharing method on that network is very different.

But let’s say it’s these private conversations where the decisions on the majority of the choices you make are made, when it comes to making a purchase.

These choices are the ones that are defining the influence factor at that time:

Is it situational, where your current situation (financial, need for a product or service, etc) comes into play?
Is it emotional, where the desire for something outweighs the logic of not actually needing it?
Is it personal, where your partner/wife/husband puts the foot down and says no?

These are three simple factors that can’t be measured directly – and yet they have a direct impact on you as a person, because they influence your decision.

Because this process isn’t measured by public scoring algorithms, it can lead to distortion of data when measuring a brand influencer program.

You may have initially shown positive signs of interest in a new product launch, as featured on an influential blog, and that would go down as a success metric. But the truth is, the real influence was exerted when the situation came into play in your private conversation(s).

It’s this missed data that (currently) limits the reporting metrics on some of today’s platforms.

The Offline Influence Equation

Another part of this equation is the fact that most influence platforms don’t take into account what happens offline – they simply measure online noise and conversations.

While this approach still allows for a lot of data to be collated about someone and their influence, as well as who and what influences them in return, it’s still only half the big picture.

As Pierre-Loic Assayag mentioned when we interviewed him about the approach his Traackr platform takes, imagine trying to decide a large bank loan with only half the financial information about a person available to you – you just wouldn’t make that call.

In fairness, this limitation is being recognized by the influence platform developers. Kred, for example, allows you to upload your offline achievements (although they don’t validate them so you could still upload false information), while Appinions measures reactions and opinions from traditional media as well as online publications.

However, as much as we try and measure how offline decisions impact measurable public conversations online, there’s still the question of what truly impacted the decision to take an action or decide to pass at this moment in time?

To get to that stage, we need to move beyond just public personas when it comes to influence, and begin to look at the macro and micro influencer level, and where they sit in the influence circle around each of us.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be doing just that. We look forward to sharing with you.

Can the Everyday Influencer Still Exist?

Earlier this month, Twitter published an article on their developer blog, about new metadata being added to the Twitter API. There were two additions – one to help identify the language of a tweet, while the other was the ability to allow developers to “rank” tweets.

This second addition is of particular interest when it comes to influence marketing, and how we identify influencers, since – in our opinion – it offers the potential to further dilute the ability to truly connect relevant influencers and advocates to the brands that are looking to work with them.

Now, in fairness, Twitter hasn’t divulged exactly how the ranking ability may work, apart from the option to possibly gauge tweets by a “none”, “low”, “medium” and “high” rank. It may be there’s a lot more context to the way the API will identify these tweets.

However, in the meantime, the worry is that true influence, yet again, is being demoted to nothing more than an algorithmic rank with no real context behind it. When this happens, it takes us back to the “influencer elite” we’ve talked about on here previously.

Which begs the question, can the everyday influencer still exist?

The Grading of the Social Web

It’s not just Twitter that’s taking this approach. Take a look at Google and the importance they’re placing on their Authorship Markup algorithm. Or Facebook with its ever-changing algorithm that places more emphasis on paying for a Sponsored Story to have your content seen, versus organic appearance in a feed.

There’s no doubt that the social web is becoming an arena of rank and perceived import – yet questions remain as to the validity of the import when it’s based on how well you play with a platform’s rules.

For example, let’s say you don’t have Google Authorship enabled on your blog or website, yet you write a fantastic white paper on the origins of mankind that challenges everything we’ve believed until now.

When someone searches for “the origins of mankind” on Google, your expertise would (should) probably be the one that people should read. Yet because someone with less expertise utilizes the Authorship Markup script, they actually appear more reverential than you for that particular search.

The same goes with Twitter’s new API. Let’s say they base their authority score on the amount of retweets and engagement a tweet receives. While this is a good starting point, it lacks the more important aspects of context, perception and situation at the time.

This is particularly true when large events are happening.

Let’s say someone uses the hashtag for the Oscars to post an asinine comment about the price of popcorn at their local 7-Eleven. It gets 1,000 reweets and 500 favourites. That may appear as a high scoring tweet based on the new API.

But does it have the context of an Empire Magazine journalist in the UK only getting 20-30 retweets as he/she live-tweets from the UK? Doesn’t their expertise in the movie arena make them more authority-driven?

This is the problem with grading importance based on reactions versus instilling a true action – the sign of an influential impact. It also changes the very fabric of influence – no bad thing on its own, but when it comes to trying to clear the muddied waters of the last few years, it can add to the confusion.

Which brings us back to the topic of this post.

The Everyday Influencer and Where They Fit Today

One of the criticisms levied at influence marketing today is the lack of results for brands using the medium. And that’s a fair criticism.

This can be attributed to several things – generic social scores with no real relevance to the brand in question; lack of understanding and education on the brand’s behalf; and the gamification of social media channels to be seen as someone of influence.

Whatever the reason, influence has undergone some drastic changes in the last few years when compared to Carnegie’s view, and not always for the better. The biggest impact this has had is in nullifying true individual influence, the kind that brands really want – and need – to connect with.

Activity and popularity online has led to people being seen as influencers, when the true influencers – the ones not worried about social scoring and perceived ranking – are the ones that should be the ones being identified.

These “everyday influencers” are finding themselves marginalized because they’re not playing to a computational score; nor are their hands being tied by a search engine’s goal of making you use all their products to be seen as relevant.

The problem is, these are exactly the people brands should be connecting with. They’re the advocates; the consumer marketers; the people who truly have the ear of those that make a difference when it comes to the purchase cycle of their friends, colleagues and peers.

As public scoring and authority plays continue to evolve and find bigger footholds across the web, the question becomes:

Can the everyday influencer still exist, when the games being played to “be” one nullify results based on much deeper questions?

We believe so. In May, we’ll show you why and, more importantly, how.

Influence Marketing Survey for Marketing and PR Pros

Social media has opened many opportunities for businesses, such as direct communications with customers and prospects, peer-to-peer support groups, improved customer service channels and real-time reputation management.

This new communication channel has proven valuable to the sales, marketing, customer service and PR functions of businesses large and small.

Yet, as more consumers grow their social graphs, access social networks through mobile devices and engage in more brand discussions online, the increased noise has also added many new challenges.

Influence Marketing Today

Among the social media marketing tools created to better manage and drive greater value from this over-populated communication channel are social influence scoring applications.

They?re designed to collect and analyze a person?s social media activity in order to determine the influence he/she has over others on various topics, and then use that person as a conduit to deliver a recommendation or brand advertisement to prospective customers.

As the public?s penchant for social media communications grows, these tools have become more popular with new start-ups joining the fray every few months.

Yet this growth has not been without a fair amount of criticism regarding the accuracy, methodology and ethics of those providing the service and those who participate in their scoring programs.

However, both advocates and pundits agree that we?re just at the beginning of this growing marketing practice. A lot of growth is still expected and required among software providers and marketers alike.? Still, the question remains: in what direction will it go?

The Next Wave of Influence Marketing

Sensei Marketing and ArCompany have partnered on an initiative that seeks to better understand the attitudes and forecasts of surrounding this hot topic.

The first part of this effort is survey of international marketers and public relations professionals, which will provide additional data for a planned whitepaper on the future of influence marketing.

If you work in marketing or PR ? as a consultant, for an agency or employed by a brand directly ? we invite you to participate in this short online survey.

It?s completely confidential and takes less than 5 minutes to complete. The data collected and the subsequent analysis will be shared publicly in a whitepaper to be released this spring.

Go to the survey >>

Note: No personal information collected during the completion this survey will be sold, shared or made public at any time.