Sway

Influencer marketing tools are getting a new gear and it’s a good one. Up until recently, influencer relationship management (IRM) tools offered 3 speeds: identifying, monitoring and measuring influencers. That’s good, but not good enough. Corporate marketing teams focused on social media need to find ways to scale their influencer programs without sacrificing micro-segmentation and personalization. That kind of scalability is just what this new gear — call it influencer activation or participation or engagement — delivers.

Ogilvy’s Insider Circle(TM) is the latest entrant in this evolving category. Per the Ogilvy announcement this week:

Insider Circle allows brands to build and scale relationships with key brand influencers – including influential bloggers, Twitter users, brand fans and loyal customers – and quantitatively measure the performance of social activation campaigns. Insider Circle, which is offered by brands on an invitation only basis, allows those brands to make exclusive, shareable content and offers available to a select group social media influencers in categories important to the brand.

This makes perfect sense, when you think about it. We’re accustomed to being able to email or phone influencers directly from our relationship management tools. The savvy providers are moving beyond the basics to help us deliver custom content and appropriate special offers to carefully selected social media influencers.

Revisit your wish list for influencer relations management tools. You might find that wishes are coming true.

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Influencer relations programs focus on 1-to-1 relationships and therefore can be resource-intensive. So it’s a good idea to figure out where you can achieve economies of scale and how to go about doing it. Here are 3 areas with big potential.

Flexible, modular playbooks. A grand plan may work well with a handful of influencers, but it won’t scale across geographies or different types of influencers. Instead, do what the software programmers do. Develop program components that can be reused again and again in various combinations and with minimal tailoring. Communications people have been doing this for decades with collateral. Apply the same principle to influencer interactions.

Examples might include guidelines for an introductory phone call with an influencer, requesting and capturing feedback from influencers on important market issues, producing speaker panels mixing different types of influencers, and templates for frequency and mix of influencer outreach.

Training. Influencer relations requires a baseline of people skills plus some specialty skills. Distance learning, mentoring and shadowing offer different levels of scalability. Distance learning and mentoring offer greater scalability for local and remote one-to-many training. Shadowing is less scalable yet more effective. This approach matches learners with masters, enabling them to observe each other engage with influencers in the real world.

A combination of these 3 models is best, company culture allowing. And, if you’re serious about scalability, couple any or all of these methods with a collaborative knowledge base.

Monitoring. Centralized procurement can help negotiate better pricing on the products and services used for monitoring influencers. You need to listen online and offline. That means monitoring across digital (and possibly physical) media, virtual and physical events, and virtual and physical communities. For multinational programs, consider negotiating with a short list of providers. That’s still the best way to secure consistent levels of quality and coverage across different languages and cultures.

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It’s a sure bet that when CIO and IT decision makers gather in groups, tech sales people circle nearby, angling to slip into the crowd. The common wisdom is that every member of these groups is a sales target. Each member is ripe with purchasing potential. That’s certainly a practical way for tech providers to look at IT peer groups. Yet when you view these groups primarily as a source of sales leads you’re leaving their greatest potential untouched.

High-end IT purchase decisions involve many types of influencers, and some of the most credible and trusted are professional peers within the senior IT and CIO community.  We see the signs of this all around us, and we know the truth from our own lives.  Research studies help quantify what our guts are telling us. Case in point, a late 2008 Forrester Research study*:

The members of these groups are gathering to share experiences, learn from each other and talk shop. In other words, they are influencing each other.

So, think twice next time you are compelled to drop an IT peer group into your lead funnel. You may be dropping highly valuable influencer networks into your cold calling program. That’s no way to treat an influencer.

* © 2008, Forrester Research. From “Using Buyer Social Behaviour to Boost B2B Social Media Success” by Laura Ramos, Oliver Young, Patrick Tripp.

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Influencer programs can be a lever for building and sustaining trust. How well this works depends largely on how we enable influencers to build and convey trust in our brands. This is especially true given the global economic climate.

We know that influencers are trusted advisors. The question is, how are we enabling them to develop and convey trust in our brands. What kinds of stories, facts and insights are we sharing with them? Are we sharing the right points and conveying them in a compelling, repeatable and remarkable way?

Edelman last week released a mid-year update to their Trust Barometer. The study measures public trust in business and government. This latest survey finds an upswing in trust across the board in China, France, Germany, India, the UK and the US. It also hints at what adds up to trust in informed circles:

“Informed publics attribute increased trust in business to tangible actions that companies have taken in the past six months, giving the highest marks to repaying bailout money (81%), reducing CEO pay (80%), and firing non-performing management teams (78%).

“When asked what companies could do to rebuild trust in the long run, survey respondents put a mix of “hard and soft power” items at the top the list: treating employees well (94%), having transparent business practices (93%), and communicating frequently and honestly (91%) — along with maintaining quality products and services (93%), all of which far surpass increasing shareholder value (66%).”

Do a little of your own market research — whether surveys, focus groups or point conversations — to make sure your influencer program is aligned with the way your market thinks about trust.

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Those of us who watch the watchers tend to use phrases like “the analysts”, “the media”, “the integrators”, “the bloggers”, “the academics”, and so on.  In most cases, we use these phrases simply as short hand.  We know that there are few common denominators uniting the people in these positions.  However, that’s not the message we send to our colleagues and clients when we use these terms.

And perhaps no one is more sensitive to this misrepresentation than the people we’re talking about.

A Twitter exchange this morning with @dale_vile and @NaomiHi reminded me of the importance of being — at times, at least — a bit more articulate, a bit less concise.

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Human relationships tend to be complicated, and relationships with influencers are no exception. Yet, you need to know where you stand with an influencer and to share that insight with others in your organization. That’s why so many of us strive to describe influencer relationships in terms that are simple, meaningful and broadly applicable.

There are many different systems for scoring relationship strength and, if you’re like me, you’re likely to develop a custom system rather than adopt something off-the-shelf.

Some systems are based on the old media mentions scoring. These score influencer relationships the same way that one scores media mentions: positive, negative, neutral or unknown. Usually there’s an “inactive” choice thrown into the mix.

Other systems go to into greater depth, all the way up to using 10-point scales for various attributes that average out to an overall “strength”. Typical attributes include knowledge, information exchange, willingness to engage, willingness to recommend, frequency of contact and more.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this. What matters is that you capture useful information in a professional, consistent and repeatable way and that you act on it.

Whatever method you use, consider adopting these 3 tenets:
1. Keep it as simple as possible.
2. Apply it as honestly as possible.
3. Respect the time and privacy of your influencers as much as possible.

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In today’s Email Insider newsletter, guest contributor Chad White (Smith-Harmon) points out fundamental differences between email programs used tactically and those used strategically. His points resonate with influencer programs as well:

Those that are using it [email marketing] tactically view email campaigns as isolated one-off events. An email is sent out and sales are tallied up. There’s no bigger picture. Their subscribers are just numbers that produce more numbers.

Those that are using it [email marketing] strategically view email campaigns as part of an ongoing conversation, an ever-changing relationship with individual subscribers. To those in this group, their email list is an extremely valuable and closely guarded asset.

Many companies fall into the same traps with their influencer programs.

The press, bloggers and analysts tend to complain about being treated in a tactical way. They bite back. Or, they stop answering calls and emails.

What about other types of influencers? They are less likely to complain. Their attention simply shifts to companies who demonstrate greater respect and interest in their opinions. In some cases, they include your treatment of them as another insight they share about your company culture, setting low expectations with prospects and others in their circle of influence.

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Please join us for what promises to be a lively discussion about what’s wrong with marketing and how an influencer program can fix it. On May 20th, we are hosting a reception and presentation on influencer marketing at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

Check out the details below. We’ve reserved complimentary tickets so email me (barbara.french@influencer50.com) or any of us, to get onto the guest list.

“Marketing Is Broken, but Influencers Can Fix It”

Purchasing decisions made within organizations have changed over the past decade, but marketing hasn’t. Today, networks or “ecosystems” of influencers shape enterprise purchase decisions. Hayes draws from work with clients such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Orange Business Services to show how to identify the diverse individuals who influence decision-makers in a market, how they influence, and how to engage them.

Date: May 20, 2009
Reception: 5:30 PM
Presentation, Q&A: 6:00PM
Where: Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105 (directions & parking)
 Phone: +1 (415) 597-6700

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Influencers often have a say in the purchase critieria used by decision-makers. Often their influence is direct, such as inputing to a request for bid. Indirect influence is an important factor as well. While the most widely known (or perhaps infamous) example in the tech market is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, most indirect influences are far from obvious. Influencer relations programs search out and track these influencers, for action or simple monitoring.

 

Here’s the kind of thing you want to find: This week, Jon Peddie (JPA) proposes a change in the benchmark criteria for graphics-enabled motherboards. Jon makes the case that today’s consumer wants the most performance per dollar, with the lowest wattage. He’s put the 3 factors together into a simple-looking equation and calls it the PDW mark (performance-dollar-watts).

Will it be adopted overnight? Hard to say.

It’s this sort of low-flying advice that can ripple out across entire markets over time. If you run an influencer relations program, keep track of the shift in thinking as well as the drivers behind the shift. This is vital information for your sales and management teams.

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Companies providing social media monitoring tools and services provide many ways to find and monitor influential voices out on the web. One of the latest proclamations is from Visible Technologies, now promoting a social marketing ROI study:

Leading companies ‘use multiple approaches to identify the individuals who wield the greatest amount of influence in any given topic area and to track changes in their influence over time,’ according to the report. ‘Best-in-Class companies engage these top influencers as brand evangelists, and then track the impact of their words and actions in terms of return on marketing investment.’

The same holds true for identifying those who wield influence out in the physical world, through offline means: associations, personal networks, professional position, education. There are many ways to find these individuals. In our work, we use several tools and entry points to uncover top influencers in each market. There’s no silver bullet. No one method does the trick in any market, let alone every market.

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