Sway

Influencer marketing entails many aspects of public relations. Along these lines, CloudNine PR agency is sharing results of its bespoke study of how 300 IT chiefs in the UK prefer to access news and info about the IT industry. I’m quite surprised by 4 findings in particular: LinkedIn ties with vendor emails as a useful or very useful source for 31%; and Twitter and YouTube are on close to even footing as well for about 20%.

What methods do UK IT chiefs find ‘useful’ or ‘very useful’ for keeping up-to-date on IT industry developments, including general news from vendors? Here’s CloudNine PR’s take:

1. Online publications 64%
2. IT blogs 52%
3. Trade shows 50%
4. Printed publications 47%
5. Vendor Events 44%
6. IT Analyst blogs 40%
7. IT analyst events 38%
8. Vendor emails 31%, LinkedIn 31%
9. Twitter 20%
10. YouTube 19%
11. Facebook 13%
12. SlideShare 12%

About the study: CloudNine PR commissioned Vanson Bourne to conduct the survey. It consisted of a poll of IT decisionmakers, including CIOs, IT directors and IT managers in 300 UK companies. The sample included organisations with 50 to 250 employees, 251 to 1000 employees and over 1000 employees. There was an approximately equal split of companies operating in Financial services; Manufacturing; Retail, Transport and Distribution; and Business and Professional Services.

Popularity: 20%

NewComm Forum is a social media and influencer marketing event I always make a point of attending. This year, I’ll attend on Weds April 21st. Per my earlier post at Tekrati, I’m pleased to give you discount codes for both the 1-day package and full conference.

Let me know if you’ll be there on the 21st. I’d love to meet you in person.

Conference: http://www.newcommforum.com
The NewComm Forum 2010 One-day Pass
Wednesday, April 21st
San Mateo, Calif.
Cost: $395, when you register and use discount code NCF1D

• Full Access Pass for the 21st
• 3 Keynote Sessions: Jackie Huba, online marketing expert and author; Dave Carroll, singer/songwriter, “United Breaks Guitars”; and Tim Westergren, founder, chief strategist, Pandora
• Access to all conference sessions – choose from 16 breakout sessions in five tracks
• Networking Activities and Food & Beverage Events

If you’d like to attend the entire event, use discount code NCF300 to save $300 off the full conference fee. Or, contact me directly for a slightly deeper discount.

One bit of advice: Be a focused networker to get the most out of this event. It’s a small event. Put yourself forward and you’ll easily go from merely rubbing elbows with top social media authors and practitioners to forging relationships with them.

You may wonder what draws me to an event like this, when I have free passes to industry analyst events around the planet. Here’s the thing: I always come away from NewComm Forum with new ideas and new relationships that contribute directly to my own thought leadership, services and strategies. Check this year’s agenda to see who’s of interest to you.

See you there!

Popularity: 21%

If you work in influencer relations in Silicon Valley, you want to be at the Churchill Club this Monday March 1st for an evening event featuring John Byrne, Richard Edelman, Paul Bergevin, Peter Diamandis and Frank Shaw.

The event comes on the heels of the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, a global opinion leaders study mentioned in my last post. The Trust Barometer is freely available. Bring your toughest questions or just show up for a great evening of discussion, debate and networking.

I’ll be particularly interested to see how this year’s discussion compares with the 2008 event (my comments).

See you there!

What:
What the Public Believes: New Trends in Corporate Reputation Management
Corporations are in the combat zone, struggling to build back trust among all of their stakeholders in the midst of the global economic crisis. Faced with an overall meltdown in confidence, how is corporate leadership—including marketing, PR, investor relations and public affairs—to respond? How should companies retool their communication strategies and address the right stakeholders with the right issues and strike the right tone? This panel of thought leaders speaks out on the most current trends and strategies for managing corporate reputation and sharpening stakeholder engagement.

Cost
Individual Churchill Club event tickets run $58 - $90, and normally it’s a cash bar. Reg, more info.

Twitter
Hashtag will be #churchillclub.

Popularity: 18%

Vendor-side influencer relations programs tend to focus on public relations, analyst relations and blogger relations. I’ve talked before (e.g. here and here) about the value of broadening these programs to include other types of influencers, such as the research leads at professional associations. Announcements today from CEA and ESA underscore why this makes so much sense.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) today debuts CEMarketMetrics.org, a enhanced version of its well known Market Activity Reports and Analysis (MARA) service. The service, available only to CEA members, tracks shipments of more than 50 CE products from the factory to U.S. consumer sales channels through weekly and monthly reports. Data is supplied directly to the CEA from the manufacturers. Members used it to measure market trends and compare their sales against industry performance.

Meanwhile, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) today releases results of its 2009 holiday shopping poll. Conducted by KRC Research, the market research covers consumer holiday spending plans relative to computer and video games. This is a timely poll from a proven source, presenting juicy data points to media and bloggers.

So what’s the take away? Why makes these kinds of associations so attractive as additions to influencer relations programs? Here’s how I look at it:

• Industry associations such as CEA and ESA are continuing to improve the extensive market research delivered to their members, and members can become involved in scoping and participating in these studies with their peers. Read between the lines: that means helping shape the focus and timing and therefore downstream findings of landmark studies.
• These groups are continually making better use of online and traditional media to promote their story lines, guest speakers and member sponsors.
• Lobbying and government relations outreach extends the groups’ influence across industry participants and across government and regulatory leadership. This can add additional touch points to most public affairs programs.
• Association-produced events extend influence to buyers, media and other interested publics.
• Most associations are already experimenting with social media and collaboration tools for stickier peer to peer networking.
• There is no question about the bias of these groups. They clearly represent their member interests. Plus, vendor involvement in major initiatives is usually spelled out. No wasting time investigating those points. Partner, counter, parry as appropriate.
• Managing relations with industry associations depends on many of the same skill sets used in successful PR and AR programs.

Popularity: 12%

You can’t do influencer relations without a good set of tools for identifying influencers and measuring and tracking their influence. Here’s a new tool for your consideration: Edelman’s TweetLevel, by Jonny Bentwood. TweetLevel calculates an “importance” rating of 0-100 for anyone with a Twitter handle. And, it’s free to use.

Most of the big agencies provide their clients with pricey dashboards and services for monitoring company reputation, PR programs and more. So it’s refreshing to see this Twitter discovery and ranking tool out in the public domain offered free of charge.

The total “importance” score is based on measurements in 4 areas: influence, popularity, engagement and trust. The underlying data comes from a combination of respected 3rd party influence/activity ranking sources, such as TwInfluence, and original Edelman calculations.

TweetLevel saves you time and gives you repeatable results, which we all need. From there, it’s up to you. It can’t tell you who the influencer is engaged with or whether the Twitter exchanges are positive, negative or neutral.

How would you use it today? A couple of ways to consider even now, during beta:

Popularity: 14%

Britton Manasco sparked an interesting discussion over the weekend on PR, influencers and the caliber of a client’s vision messaging. Britton’s take:

PR firms, too often, are letting their executive clients down. They are encouraging them to stroll out in the public square unclothed and unprepared. Result? Their clients are exposed as leaders without vision… It seems to me that too few have the strengths, expertise and capabilities necessary to help their clients develop and articulate a powerful vision.

I agree with Britton that CEOs and other corporate leaders need to differentiate themselves and their companies with a compelling vision of their market. There are too few CEOs who inspire us with a vision of where we are and where we could go.

We disagree somewhat on how much of a role a traditional PR team can be expected to play in the development of vision. I say less, Britton says more.

In my experience, vision is not a PR project. Vision isn’t the result of a messaging brainstorm. It comes from everyday dialogue and reading and observation. The group of people best equipped to inspire and nuture a CxO’s vision come from inside the company and from the CxO’s peers also deeply engaged in the marketplace — external thought leaders from the ranks of management consultants, competitors, partners, academics, etc.

Check out Britton’s post and comments from Chris Selland, Ardath Albee and Steve Parker and me.

Popularity: 4%

Transparency is one of the words that has become a victim of Web 2.0.  Everyone has their own idea of what transparency means in social media, and what constitutes embracing transparency.  A good example: the recent MobileCrunch expose on Reverb Communications and the Apple App Store.

The plot is simple enough:  an integrated PR-marketing agency has paid staff (whether employees or interns) purchase its client’s applications and then write reviews on the Apple App store.  MobileCrunch’s Gagan Biyani raised the flag because the reviewers do not include a disclaimer in each review that they work for an agency being paid to promote the application.  In other words, not enough transparency. Reader responses to the article — from Reverb Communications and 150+ others — reflect the opposing views on what constitutes transparency and acceptable standards of ethics on UGC sites.

This sort of thing is hardly news.  It’s been going on for years at “reader” product reviews at media sites.  Companies and their agencies have been planting positive reviews for as long as we’ve been reading them.  We — the audience — all knew that this was going on.  The only thing that has changed is the type of site where it appears. Few of us are surprised this practice is cropping up in social media and user-generated content sites.

So, what’s the moral of this story for marketers?

It demonstrates that marketers need to get past the notion that it’s OK to each craft our own definitions of transparency.  We need to come together, as the marketing industry, to agree on a shared definition and best practices for transparency.  The definition needs to span all the marketing silos — PR, advertising, marketing communications and every other marketing discipline — using social media as a communications channel.

Until then, all marketers are at risk of being viewed as little more than carpetbaggers intent on plundering social media sites for personal gain.

Popularity: 2%

I’ll be at BiteBash in San Francisco tonight, “Navigating Your Brand through the Great Recession”. It’s such a timely topic. Bite’s David Hargreaves sums up the risks and opportunities that surround marketing right now:

“Harvard Business Review recently reported that companies who slash marketing spending often find that they later have to invest much more than they saved in order to recover from their prolonged absence from the media landscape. A separate article from Harvard Associate Dean John A. Quelch suggests organizations should even be spending more during a downturn to exploit the gaps left by their competitors.”

I’m focused on working with influencers as a straightforward approach to aligning marketing with business objectives so I’m keen to hear perspectives from the different speakers and the audience participants.

Please say hello if you’re there as well.

Popularity: 2%

Duncan raises some good points about the evolution of blogs and microblogs (i.e. Twitter). Blogging is becoming the online publishing platform of choice in many industries, from politics to pharma. This has a couple of implications for influencer programs in 2009.

Top of my list, is that 2009 should see the end of consternation over classifying influencers as “bloggers” or in terms of their other roles in a market or community, be it their job title, employer, profession or expertise.

The crossover point started to become clear in mainstream tech media relations when you could no longer distinguish between columnists and bloggers at ZDNet and other top-10 media networks.

In analyst relations, Gartner brought the point home a few months ago with the launch of the Gartner Blog Network. Trust me, no one is dithering over whether to reclassify Gartner employees from analysts to bloggers.

Sure, some people will be best classified as “bloggers”, just as we still have syndicated columnists from the hardcopy print days. In general though, the confusion over doctor-lawyer-blogger man-thief should die down.

Popularity: 1%

Many of us are thinking about how we weave influencer relations and social media into traditional marketing programs. Todd Defren, a popular blogger and principal at SHIFT Communications, spends a lot of time on this, and in particular on the intersection of PR and social media. He’s raised a valid question: is there a point where the label “PR agency” no longer applies? Should public relations agencies deeply engaged in social media channels adopt a new category, such as social media agency?

There’s no right or wrong answer to Todd’s question. Nonetheless, it’s important for each of us to follow his example, and ask. Growth is messy and organic. We can’t throw a switch to jump from a traditional track to running on a whole new set of rails. Instead, we have to stop and step out of the moment, and take in where we are and ask ourselves what we’ve become.

Influencer relations, mobile communications, and social media will challenge each of us to decide whether to come up with new definitions for our old marketing labels, or to adopt new labels.

Popularity: 2%