There are several good reasons to replace the terms “influencer” and “influencer marketing” in the marketing vocabulary. What are the best alternatives? I don’t know the answer, however I see signs of a backlash against misuse and abuse of these terms.
What are the issues with the word influencer?
To start, not everyone likes being branded as an influencer. As Evan Quinn so often tells me (and I’m not the only one), many analysts bristle under the “influencer” label.
Then too, there’s the growing confusion around who is an “influencer”. As Duncan Brown so often says, not everyone is an influencer. You can’t transform anybody into an influencer. Finding influencers is just not that easy, even in the wild west of social media.
Finally, as Nick Hayes says, “None of us has ever seen anybody with a business card that says ‘Influencer’.”
By contrast, there are the outstanding examples where the terms are applied appropriately and best practices applied flawlessly. Case in point: Don Bulmer’s program at SAP. Such clearcut instances are more exception than norm.
The right words are out there. If we pay attention, we’ll recognize them when we hear them.
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Looking for a useful definition of “influencer” within the context of influencer marketing? Duncan gives a great run down in a B2B Marketing Online feature on influencer marketing by Meg de Jong, acting deputy editor:
“Duncan Brown, European managing director at specialist company Influencer50, points out that in terms of B2B marketing, marketers will be specifically interested in those individuals that impact on the buying decisions of firms.
“Depending on the specifics of your business, a large variety of people – both internal and external to your target companies – could be identified as influencers. These include journalists, consultants, academics, authors, sourcing advisors, management gurus, procurement advisors, systems integrators, regulators, government executives, standards setters, industry associations, resellers, lobbyists, events, forums and bloggers, among many possibilities.”
I am surprised to find Duncan saying that it’s rare for customers to be influencers. Sales professionals repeatedly tell me that customer references and customer case studies are highly valuable in winning business — not only towards the end of the purchase decision, but during short-listing as well.
Otherwise, it’s a excellent overview of B2B influencer marketing.
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Can winning industry awards help sell products and services? According to the Influencer Marketing book, the answer is no:
“Industry awards are primarily self-congratulatory ‘feel good’ exercises, which have limited marketing value and all but zero influence on the top decision-makers.”
– Nick Hayes and Duncan Brown
They do credit awards with some value in the early stage of a decision process, such as in response to a Request For Proposal.
Is that the practical extent of the value of an industry award?
I agree with them insofar as few industry awards have the impact of the Oscars. However, that seems more a shortcoming of the typical awards organizer than the nature of awards in general.
Every industry has its awards programs that amount to little more than karaoke. It pays to avoid those. Or, bury them.
Likewise, every industry has its awards programs that do matter.
As with all forms of influence, the trick is knowing which is which.
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It’s easy to get caught up in what to say, how to say it — even how many characters to say it in — and completely lose sight of the simple truth that our words are just words, unless they’re backed by actions.
This is certainly not a new idea. However, it’s being expressed by lots of different people right now. Everyone has a different context. Witness:
Seth Godin talks to it in terms of authenticity.
Greg Cordell talks about it in terms of love.
Duncan Brown touches on it in terms of what makes a good analyst.
We’re all facing the same tough year. Maybe this is a good time to take stock of ourselves and the people we trust. Ask some of the hard questions. Look for the proof points. See who measures up while the chips are down.
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Scott Brinker blogged about propinquity and Twitter last week. I’d never heard the word propinquity before. However, propinquity seems to be a label for a familiar concept — the notion that physical promixity promotes relationships. My parents harped about that while I was a teen. Happily, Scott takes a different tack. He suggests that social media applications such as Twitter may wear down the effects of physical promixity in relationship dynamics. I wonder what kind of effect they will have on relationships with influencers. And how we will measure it.
Today, we use several criteria for measuring influence for our Influencer50 clients. Our metrics include factors such as an influencer’s
- market reach
- frequency of impact
- quality of impact
- closeness to decision
“Closeness to decision” is where propinquity comes into play. We include physical proximity and timing in this metric. So, we already think of closeness to a decision as a measure of more than physical distance.
It’s not hard to envision extending “closeness to decision” with new metrics focused on social media, mobile communications, or both.
Several companies already use Twitter as a way to engage with influencers and customer conversations online. Duncan has written about this development in The Influencer, our free newsletter.
One thing is clear. We haven’t gotten our collective heads around the implications of social media in terms of influence. We’re still caught up in early adopter personalities and tactics.
Sometime soon, we’ll need to stop counting social media links and echoes. We need to start agreeing on what counts as distance and what counts as closeness and what counts as influence.
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One group of influencers is about to undergo sweeping change in the U.S.: government agencies and regulators. Government influence varies greatly by industry. Yet it is present to some extent in virtually all industries.
In the book, Influencer Marketing, Nick and Duncan identify three likely roles for government agencies and regulators:
- proclaimers - those who mandate or “proclaim” how the world will be
- aggregators / communicators - information gatherers and disseminators
- negotiators - determining anything from ethics to environmental requirements
It’s easy to see what they mean. Look at the green tech / clean tech markets. These have become a hot spot for government influence. Many governments are encouraging — if not mandating — rapid adoption. They are raising awareness among consumers and businesses. Some governments are pioneering new standards. Still others are funding R&D, manufacturing, professional training, entire industries, and jobs.
Every new administration in the U.S. federal government brings substantive changes throughout the uppermost layers of government. Sooner or later, the changes trickle down to local governments.
Changes in government influence are headed your way. Be ready for it.
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Update, Jan. 19: this event has been canceled.
My colleague Duncan Brown will give the opening presentation at the Influencer Marketing Summit next month in London. His presentation, “Capitalise on influencer marketing to accelerate brand performance and drive sales”, will focus on how to:
- Determine the effectiveness of your influencer marketing by knowing what to measure and when to measure it
- Align influencer marketing with business objectives to drive brand performance, increase business growth, validate marketing cost and optimise return
Marketing Week has put together an impressive speaker line-up for this summit. Brand managers hail from the likes of Cheapflights, BT, Nokia, T-Mobile, and LEGO. Plus, several experts will share insights specific to core disciplines of influencer marketing applied to brand management.
Check it out, and if you are attending, give Duncan a shout.
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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.
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Today I saw 2 more threads in the ongoing debate over whether social media popularity is a good way to measure influence.
First, my colleague Duncan Brown writes that Google is launching an AdWords-style SEM program across big social networks.
As an online publisher, I can see how this Google program makes perfect sense for media buyers. It will play from Madison Avenue to Main Street. After all, the big advertisers say they plan to shift their remaining 2008 and 2009 spending, cutting traditional ad spending while increasing spending on word of mouth and other forms of social media. (For the latest CMO study visit Epsilon; hat tip to Ken Rutowski for flagging it in his newsletter.) Google is offering just the right media product to pick up those extra dollars and euros. I’ve got no issue there.
However, I do see a potential downside. Call it collateral damage. Google is portraying the program as a measure of influence. Duncan describes the confusion this could cause:
“If Google‚Äôs plans get more firms to talk about influence, then fine. But I fear that it will dumb influence down to a few ‚Äòmagic‚Äô numbers that have tenuous relevance to real influence.”
Meanwhile, Graham Hill and I compared notes this morning on Peter Kim’s post, “Influencer Lists as Ego Traps“. We came up agreeing, in Graham’s words:
“Popular people are not necessarily good influencers. And influencers are not necessarily popular. There is much more to it than that.”
We’ve got some very bright people on both sides of the debate — those advocating that we equate influence with popularity/connectedness, those advising against it. Neither side is ready to blink.
In the end, the media buyers may have the final vote on whether online popularity is the path to the influentials.
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