Influencers are magnets. For example, we know that an influential keynote speaker is a sure-fire way to attract an audience. Yet, influencers are not simply intermediaries between us and our customers. They can also attract other influencers to our brands, our causes and our communities.

Robert Scoble demonstrated this dynamic to me during the Supernova ‘09 reception last month. I had approached to ask his opinion on the growing raft of influencer ranking tools and we got to talking more generally about how influence works. Within minutes, Mashable’s Ben Parr interrupted, intent on getting Scoble to say he’d attend an upcoming event. Scoble was having none of it, until Parr mentioned that a particular person would be there. That changed everything. Scoble turned to me and said, “See, that’s one way you influence me.”

You’re not likely to be in Ben Parr’s position, in terms of knowing the one precise name to drop and when to drop it. However, you can get there. Here are some simple tips on how to attract influencers with influencers.

1. If you have a 1:1 relationship in place, just ask. I know it seems too simple. However, the best way to find out is to ask. Pose the question in an appropriate context. Be upfront. You might explain that you’re building a larger circle of thought leaders, and want to include the people that they would most like to associate with. Or ask, “Who influences you? Who most influences your thinking?” If you’re producing a panel discussion ask your influencers to name their dream panel.

2. Create opportunities to discover and develop relationships between your influencers. Let influencers mingle by arranging dinners or adding social time to your business events. The key is to facilitate introductions and conversations without being a control freak. Don’t hover every minute: allow private conversations within the group. Stand back and observe the social dynamics. Then figure out what you learned and how to apply it to make your influencer marketing program even better.

3. Open the door to diverse people inside your organization. It’s good practice to assign an employee as a buddy to an influencer - but only to a point. Make it easy for influencers to tap into different parts of your company and get to know a mix of personalities and roles. Put this capacity into the DNA of your influencer marketing program. Examples include issuing a descriptive contact list, enhancing a private influencer portal with selected employee profiles, or involving different topical experts each time you brief your opinion leaders.

4. Watch for signs of trouble. Every one of us comes with baggage. It’s our nature. So, make no assumptions about who attracts who and who repels who. As you get to know influencers as people, you’ll find that some at competing companies enjoy opportunities to rub elbows while some who appear repeatedly at the same events and in the same press stories privately loathe each other.

Ask, watch, listen, think. Trust me, there’s just no app for that human touch.

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One of my activities for 2010 is helping get the word out on the CIO Summit of America in New York and the full 2010 CIO Leadership series. I’m supporting this event series because I believe it offers compelling value as part of a tech company’s influencer relations agenda.

Peer-to-peer events are growing more important. Research keeps telling us that peers and colleagues have the greatest influence on enterprise IT decision makers. HMG Strategy’s CIO Leadership series recognizes this. Each event brings together IT leaders within a region for a day of exchanging, sharing and learning from each other.

The events at a glance:

• Market focus: regional to local attendees, enabling alignment with sales territories
• Short: 1-day event, appealing to busy IT decision makers
• Agenda: timely themes tailored directly by the speakers and attendees in the room
• Experts/influencers: CIOs, COOs, CxOs, IT directors and VPs share their strategies, experiences and lessons learned; pundits are scarce onstage and off
• Caliber of participants: Generally these CIO Leadership events draw an impressive group of speakers and participating attendees; in some cities, the summits are conducted in partnership with IT associations
• History: while still a young endeavor, there’s now an established track record of events for attendee/sponsor assessment

The 2010 schedule is posted at the HMG Strategy website. It begins with New York and San Francisco in February.

As IT peer level events go, the CIO Leadership series puts many of the right pieces together. Consider adding it to a line-up of industry conferences, analyst events, professional association events, meetups and unconferences. Please let them know you read about it here.

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The SAP Influencer Summit dominated tech media and Twitter backchannel conversations about SAP all week. The event offers a good example of real time influencer relations management. If you’re planning an influencer summit for 2010, consider these 3 points:

1. Open discourse. Several tech providers nixed live blogging and live micro-blogging (Twitter) during their influencer events this year. SAP set an important precedent by keeping all social media channels open and participating in conversations in real time. Live sessions were blogged, reported, tweeted and debated by people in attendance and by virtual attendees around the world. Follow SAP’s example: Limit NDAs to the situations where they make sense, such as the strategy development work leading up to an event like this. When the content doesn’t mandate an NDA, don’t curb use of social media.

2. Employee engagement. Many SAP employees expanded on speaker and audience comments via Twitter. Creating a wider circle of employee commentators makes perfect sense. And you know what? The press, analysts and consultants were likely to contact their “unofficial” employee sources anyway. It’s a much better idea to involve more employees by design, than to pretend that exchanges are limited to the featured spokespeople and handlers in the room.

3. Diverse attendees. SAP invited a diverse group of influencers to participate. Among tech industry influencers, big brand analysts and media dialogued side by side with solo opinion leaders and every size in between as well as customers and bloggers. Gathering diverse opinion leaders together to share the same information at the same time at a flagship event is smart on several counts. One, it’s efficient. Two, it sets up diverse, multiple touch points with marketplaces. It also helps build enough momentum to flow directly to offline conversations. In other words, no single point of failure and lot of juice.

For more on the SAP Influencer Summit, check out:

• Timo Elliott, an evangelist for SAP. He offers light commentary on what was going on behind the scenes here.  He also links to a PDF document of Twitter feed from #sapsummit.
• Jonathan Becher, SVP marketing at SAP and official SAP blogger for the event, posted here.
• R Ray Wang, an analyst with Altimeter Group, offers one analyst’s summary of the event themes and SAP’s performance here.

Update December 14th: Adding 2 more links to analyst reactions. Please feel free to add more attendee links in the comments. - B

• Jon Reed, a fellow with PAC , weighs in on the experience and resulting expectations among attendees here
• James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, gives a candid analyst viewpoint that was widely accepted among other analysts here

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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.

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Seth Godin recently pointed out the benefit of focusing on just one thing — being a “wallah” — as opposed to trying to do a little bit of everything. Being a wallah means focusing on excelling in one particular area of business. That strikes a chord with me and the evolution I see for analyst relations within tech marketing.

Today, most people see analyst relations as being all about the analysts. If you do analyst relations, they see you as the analyst wallah. You get the analysts to think, say and publish positions that benefit your business objectives. And you bring information back from the analysts that benefit your business objectives.

What I foresee is a shift from being the analyst wallah to being the relations wallah. Getting people across the company to build mutually beneficial 1-to-1 relationships with different kinds of decision-maker influencers. You mentor and support and measure the relationships that benefit your business objectives.

AR will continue to play a vital role in tech companies for years to come. Applying the AR skill set not only to analysts but also more broadly is a logical evolution for this role. For each of us it comes down to this: What kind of wallah do you want to be?

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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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Analyst relations is entering a time when the tech industry not only acknowledges – but celebrates – the rich diversity of decision-maker influencers. This shift to influencer marketing presents new opportunities for transforming AR programs and careers. Many of the skills that contribute to successful analyst relations translate smoothly to relations with other types of influencers.  And some skills do not. Building a checklist of AR skills is a good way to see where you stand.

A skills checklist can help you focus objectively, analyzing which skills have greatest value across the influencer relations spectrum and which are valuable only within classic AR. Plus, the process of creating the checklist can help reveal any significant gaps in skills, whether in AR or broader influencer relations.

Here’s a example of how I would build it:

Analyst-to-Influencer Relations Checklist

Skill: Influencer Profiling
Portable: Yes
Value beyond AR (0 to 10): 10
Assessment: Analyst relations provides a good model for developing influencer profiles. Typical AR profiles of analysts contain descriptive biographies, real-time media citations, blogs, reports and other recent publications, appearances, past and current consulting / services contracts, and ties to competitors.

Skill: Matching influencers with relationship owners
Portable: Yes
Value beyond AR (0 to 10): 10
Assessment: AR routinely matches analysts with company representatives for specific projects. They also do this for sustained relationships, as in executive buddy programs. Matches take into account the obvious – title, breadth and depth of technical expertise, shared experience, language – as well as subjective qualities leading to a healthy chemistry.

Skill: Cultivating influencer relationships
Portable: Yes
Value beyond AR (0 to 10): 10
Assessment: AR understands how to work with both analysts and internal stakeholders to help initiate, nurture and maintain relationships.

Skill: Mutual influence
Portable: Yes
Value beyond AR (0 to 10): 10
Assessment: Best-in-class AR professionals are skilled at facilitating analyst-vendor contact where the outcome is mutual influence. Much of this is achieved by structuring engagements as two-way dialogues and driving follow-through.

Skill: Ranking methods
Portable: No
Value beyond AR (0 to 10): 3
Assessment: The concept of ranking influencers on a relative scale is valuable. However, AR ranking methods rooted too deeply in an apples-to-apples context are not useful when ranking diverse influencers relative to each other.

And so on. I can easily think of 20 AR skills for evaluating this way.

This exercise is a good sanity check for career purposes as well.

Please let me know if you use this idea and build your own AR-to-Influencer Relations checklist. Or if you’d like my help.

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This is a reprint of my article in ‘The Influencer’: Q3′09. Register now for alerts on future issues.

Nick and I were fortunate enough to spend quality time with a number of new clients and prospects in Silicon Valley during the first half of the year. One of the influencer topics that cropped up again and again during our conversations was the ‘hidden influencers’. There’s a particular interest right now in understanding how to spot hidden influencers and what to do about them.

Hidden influencers can represent up to half of a tech company’s top influencers in a typical B2B market. We’ve identified more than 24 categories of these influencers. They’re considered ‘hidden’ because they don’t have business titles reflecting their roles as decision-maker influencers. Most lie beyond the reach of product marketing, public relations and analyst relations programs. At best, they are scattered across various silos: direct sales, channel, alliance, developer, corporate and product marketing. Many simply fall through the outreach net.

When it comes to hidden influencers, awareness is the first step in a revolution. Once you become aware that your programs are ignoring up to half of the people influencing purchases of your products and services, you’re ready to take some sort of corrective action. Here are three essential steps you can take right away.

1. Conduct research to identify the top influencers operating outside the company envelope. Identify a realistic market segment and then talk to typical decision-makers, known influencers, successful salespeople and trusted partners within that segment. Who do they respect as experts? Who do they run into during the normal course of business? What specialist knowledge do they value? Where do they turn for information?

This research begins to shed light on influencers you don’t know. Just as importantly, it indicates what you need to know about them and their motivations.

2. Use your research to model a typical decision-maker ecosystem. Every single decision-maker puts together a unique ecosystem of advisors for an important purchase. However, you’re likely to find that certain categories of influencers are common to many individual ecosystems.

This exercise gives you insight into the types of influencers you should be addressing, even if you are still unclear at this point as to the specific names and faces. Don’t be surprised to find 10 or more categories of influencers joining the more familiar categories, such as journalists and analysts.

3. Map your influencer categories across the decision lifecycle. Different types of influencers play different roles during a decision process. Some are active early in the decision process, such as those who help decide whether a purchase is even appropriate. Others are active late in the game, such as those who advise on pricing and terms.

This third step helps you visualize the way that influencers interact with decision-makers and with each other. You may find that some influencers engage at multiple stages of a decision process.

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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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TechCrunch has edged into the syndicated research business, the traditional turf of analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research, IDC, Burton Group, et al. The idea behind TechCrunch Research is elegantly simple: package up quarterly reports based on the open source CrunchBase wiki database, sell the reports at economical price points and promote the service across the TechCrunch media network.

What are the implications for analysts and influencer relations managers? Hint: This isn’t about the upfront revenues from selling research reports, or annual subscriptions.

The implication for analysts who cover tech and mobile start-ups is serious new competition for the coveted role as a trusted and well-known expert. TechCrunch Research is promoted across the TechCrunch network — a network that garners 5.5 million unique visitors each month and is wildy popular with VCs, start-ups, early adopters and C-level tech execs. Name an analyst firm that can compete with that kind of audience on this particular market segment. In an attention economy, TechCrunch Research looks like a winner.

There is another implication and it goes far beyond analysts who cover start-ups. TechCrunch Research is the first serious competitor basing paid research subscriptions on open sourced content.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the difference this represents in the cost of acquiring data and the options for making money off of it without sacrificing integrity.

CrunchBase covers close to 19,000 start-ups, plus funding activity, acquisition activity and profiles of some people. Contributors include the TechCrunch staff plus readers and those wanting to be listed. In other words, it’s community based.

Plus, it’s published under a Creative Commons Attribution License [CC-BY], thus it is “open source”. It’s also freely available, however try not to confuse open source with free. “Open source” is strictly about the license rights, “freely available” is strictly about the price tag to the buyer.

Finally, what about analyst relations managers and others involved in influencer relations? First, take a hard look at the TechCrunch demographics to understand how the readership maps to your decision-makers and their influencers.

If it counts, then consider what you’ll need to track: TechCrunch Research reports, the CrunchBase database and coverage and comments impacting reputation across the TechCrunch media network.

Regardless of whether or not your interests center on start-ups, take a good look at CrunchBase. How will you manage relationships with research outfits when their researchers include the community as well as the named staffers? That’s an interesting picture.

And just in case your knee-jerk reaction to any of this is, “Never gonna happen on my watch”, remember this: where TechCrunch goes, others follow. Many others.

For more on TechCrunch’s entry into the research market, see my coverage at Tekrati, TechCrunch Reinforces Entry into Syndicated Research Market“.

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