Tag Archives: Influencers

Our new InfluencerCommunities subscription service

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InfluencerCommunities.com, Influencer Communities, Influencer50, Nick Hayes, The Buyerside Journey.comWe’ve recently launched our new InfluencerCommunities subscription service. Here’s why. There’s a massive disconnect between the importance of an industry sector’s most important influencer communities, both online & offline, and the attention paid to them by vendors’ marketing depts.

According to InformationWeek, special interest communities featured in the top five most likely sources of vendor information for prospective purchasers (both at initial problem scoping and at vendor choice stages).

And while over three-quarters of B2B industry marketing heads rate their industry sector’s main forums & communities (both online and offline) as very important in influencing their prospects, less than one-third are confident their company has ongoing, proactive relationships with those top communities.

So companies really need to know which online & offline communities are the most influential in their sector. Which they should monitor, which to ignore and which maybe to join. Where are their industry’s most important conversations going on and who’s instigating them?

And it’s not just about which communities have the most members. Are their members those people moving & shaking the sector or are they just … followers? Which of their sector’s top influencers are members? And what should they do to engage with those people once they’ve identified the most important ones?

Our new Influencer Communities subscription service answers all of the above and more. We expect it to become one of our most popular services.

 

 

Google’s ‘Winning the Zero Moment of Truth’ – with mobile, more relevant today than ever

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Screen Shot 2015-07-31 at 7.02.49 AMThinking about how the customer journey is changing as buyers increasingly move to their mobile phones, I’m brought back to Google’s Jim Lecinski’s ‘Winning the Zero Moment of Truth’ 2011 eBook.

The title comes from Proctor & Gamble’s analysis that they have to win the ‘First’ moment of truth – when the consumer first sees the array of goods in a supermarket and has to decide which to choose – plus the ‘Second’ moment – when the buyer takes their choice home, uses the product and decides from their experience whether they’re happy with the choice they made. Google then added a ‘Zero’ moment – the initial online search for that product or product category.

Over the past few days I’ve re-read the eBook and think few companies even now have caught up with the insights uncovered within it.

I’d 100% recommend you to download it from Google’s site if you haven’t a copy already.

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/research-studies/2011-winning-zmot-ebook.html

 

Ogilvy’s Christopher Graves: Genuine Influence can’t be bought

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Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 7.50.20 AMIt’s easy to glaze over when we all read the word ‘influence’ one more time. I see so many brainless articles on the subject. So this story, in PR Week of all places, jumped out yesterday. At last – someone talking sense on the subject.

Here’s a flavor:

“The very word ‘influence’ is being thrown around in many contexts and some completely abuse the real meaning or conflate it with popularity.

Real influence means to convince someone to choose to do something on their own—without threatening them or bribing them—which they would not otherwise have done. That’s much tougher to come by. It is earned through sustained relationships, and not fleeting or dependent on compensation.

Influence is a demonstrable chain of persuasion from person to person leading to new attitudes and behaviour. Having a large audience does not necessarily mean wielding influence. Views and likes are not measures of influence though they may correlate or be coincidental.”

Thanks to PR Week and Christopher Graves, Global Chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations. I couldn’t agree more.

http://www.prweek.com/article/1357843/opinion-genuine-influence-cant-bought

 

 

 

Why aren’t in-house vendors & brands talking about their Influencer Programs?

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How come we rarely hear from the brands themselves about the success of their Influencer Programs? Rarely a day goes past I don’t hear or read of marketing agencies touting their skills at working with ‘influencers’, of successes achieved or local awards secured. Many of these stories come with the flimsiest of evidence – mid-range bloggers saying how thrilled they were to work with the brand, a regional magazine writing a fluff-piece about a local agency, or the agency itself spinning numbers of ‘passionate brand advocates’ they’ve engaged with. But rarely do the brands themselves do the talking.

Are they just too busy? – maybe, do they not want to tout figures for reasons of commercial advantage? – maybe also, or perhaps the agencies are just more motivated to shout their perceived successes. All I’m sure are a factor but I think it’s primarily something else.

I think the metrics agencies are working towards just aren’t the same ones that the brands are. The agencies may well be satisfied with seeing a rise in fans, retweets, impacts and OtS (opportunities to see). But this isn’t enough for the brands. The C-level execs running them know these measures aren’t strong enough to bring in new customers, or even move new prospects far along the pipeline.

Until they can tie those important measures into their influencer programs I think they’ll be staying quiet.

You can pick & choose which influencers to engage with, but not which influencers exist.

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A few months back we were talking with a prospective Identification Program client. After a ten minute explanation of our methodology I was asked if we really had to include a number of influencers who the client wasn’t personally interested in. We were asked to ignore any competitors, anyone considered ‘out of reach for marketing purposes’ and any already being engaged with. Could we not discard anyone ‘untouchable’ by their marketing outreach? What we were really being asked for were the names of only the lowest hanging fruit, those most likely to be available for partnerships. The ones who would sign-up to ‘pay for play’.

I had to explain that while we have no issue with our clients subsequently prioritising those people, our original research has to include all those genuinely influencing their marketplace, whether they like the prospect of those individuals or not. The client didn’t appreciate my answer. The more I thought about it, I didn’t appreciate their question. We both agreed we weren’t a good fit for their needs.

They’d be an ideal fit for the blogger influencer peddlers.

India’s time to provide the momentum in Influencer Marketing?

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Reviewing the applications to join the Influencer Marketing & Influencer Relations LinkedIn group we’ve seen that 31 of our most recent 100 applications have been from individuals in India. Typically we’d expect no more than 10%. Is this just a quirk or is this the year of India really getting to grips with its market influencers? Or has something else happened to create the groundswell there?

And looking at the organizations those individuals are from, it’s clear they’re some of India’s largest global and multi-nationals – in utilities, tech, engineering and auto manufacturing.

Continuing to look at the geographies involved, the majority of applicants were from the most expected regions – led by the US, UK, Germany, India, France, Singapore, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and Brazil.  No great surprise there.

But what was most interesting was which countries weren’t applying. Japan, Australia, China. Leaving aside the obvious language barriers for Japan and China I’m wondering why Australia is so quiet on the topic? It has a common language, a mature B2B and B2C marketplace, and no shortage of marketing skills. LinkedIn is popular there.

So why so few interested applicants?

As mobile search overtakes desktop, is personality becoming irrelevant for the enterprise salesperson?

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iphone-377887Enterprise salespeople have talked for many years about the critical points in their customer’s buying process. For most it incorporates some combination of the following: the initial realization that a problem exists, the scoping of the challenge, the search for an internal budget champion, the visualization of a solution, the long-listing of possible solutions, the early outreach to potential suppliers, their shortlisting, the internal proof-of-concept, the cost/benefit analysis, the final bake-off, the deal negotiation, and finally the sign-off.

When large sections of this process moved online a decade or more ago, many aspects changed. The timescales, the increasing number of long-listed suppliers, the lack of face-to-face time allowed for the salespeople, the fact that sales were only aware of the prospect’s interest far later in the process, etc. For ten years the majority of salespeople have struggled to adopt to this new way of working. And now the goalposts have moved again.

As online search has increasingly moved from desktop to mobile, so the buying process too has changed. Search results appear very differently on a mobile – the attention span is shorter, the search terms briefer, the convenience and immediacy more important. Online contextual text chat more relevant. Relevance and Immediacy have become watchwords. The right content, personalized, in real-time. The skills required of a salesperson are changing again.

I have a friend who’s worked as an enterprise salesperson for many years. She’s very hard-working, diligent, very engaging personality and always willing to travel. She says her skills are less valued than they once were – what’s the point of a great personality when your opportunities to display it are so reduced? When early-stage decisions have already been made on a mobile screen, only those shortlisted suppliers are now even getting to introduce themselves to the prospect. By then, impressions have already been cast – and that’s not ideal for any salesperson.

What vendors are now looking for are banks of prospect analysts, those who can watch a series of online queries and predict, then instantly supply, the information most likely to be of direct help to that enquiry. Sometimes its a real-world conversation, sometimes a relevant case study, sometimes a competitor comparison and at other times a business RoI argument. Offering the wrong option can kill the opportunity – with little hope of getting it back because you don’t know who’s doing the asking.

Mobile is certainly changing what triggers interest (and disinterest) among would-be buyers. And I think the salesperson will increasingly struggle to find a satisfying role.

Proof of the power of Peer Reviews. Some “used as blackmail”.

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Fascinating news story on the BBC site about just how influential Peer Review sites can be. Plenty of ethical issues brought up by the counter-arguments in this. Should those being reviewed have the right to equal visibility replies? Should reviews with clear factual mistakes be removed? Should review sites be able to choose not to publish extreme reviews?

According to the BBC article, written by Kevin Peachey, “Businesses are ambushing rivals with fake reviews and customers are using the threat of online criticism to win discounts, research has found.

Allegations have been made of people “blackmailing” firms with poor reviews to get money off, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said.

Review sites may leave negative commentary unpublished to allow firms to resolve complaints, the CMA added.

Consumers could be unaware that some endorsements in blogs were paid for.”

For the full story, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33184207

 

Influencer50 launches new ‘exec benchmarking’ subscription service

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We just issued a new service allowing clients to benchmark the influence of their own execs against those of their top competitors – something we’ve been doing informally for a while now. Here’s the official announcement.

Influencer50 has launched a new subscription service by which companies can have their chosen executives benchmarked for influence against each other, or against execs from competing companies. Our new Executive Benchmarking service is based on our award-winning offline, online and social influencer methodology.

Influencer50’s approach to Influencer Identification differs from those of other ‘influencer’ companies in our focus on real-world prospect & customer influencers rather than the currently trendy ‘blogger influencers’.

Each executive is rated on seven fixed criteria – Market Reach, Frequency of Impact, Expertise, Persuasiveness, Thoroughness of (Customer) Involvement, Peer Group Citations and Online Connectedness. Each of these criteria is applied with their ‘customer influence’ potential in mind. Clients are also able to select one additional measurement criteria.

The objective is to analyze which individuals yield the most influence within the client’s marketplace, and better understand how this influence is both established and maintained. Clients are then provided with custom advice on how they can systematically improve on their influence. No criteria can be ‘gamed’ by over-eager executives or their support staff.

A single subscription spans eighteen months and allows for three separate influence reports allowing subscribers to monitor the changing trends in influence exerted by their execs. Pricing for an eighteen month subscription (one immediate reading, a second at nine months and a final report at eighteen months) is $9490 for up to five execs. or just $4990 for up to two execs. Each report includes a detailed analysis of why each executive rated as they did – and, importantly, how to improve their influence. (Pricing for higher number of execs, or for longer durations, is also available.)

“Time and time again our clients have been as interested in how their own execs fare for influence as they are in who their company’s external market influencers are. Whether for performance measurement, recruitment or marketing purposes, an executive’s personal influence has become a vital factor in how one organization can out-compete its rivals. It makes sense that we now introduce this as an affordable, stand-alone subscription service.” explains Nick Hayes, Principal at Influencer50 Inc.

Influencer50 is a leading influencer identification, engagement and measurement firm operating in the B2B and B2C marketplaces. With offices in San Francisco, London and Sydney we have conducted influencer programs in over 40 countries across four continents.

For more information go to influencer50.com/benchmarking