Our new InfluencerCommunities subscription service

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.

 

 

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

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.

Are brands getting what they intend when they pay their ‘social influencers’?

pay-for-play blogger

I don’t have big numbers to share. I have five anecdotal conversations – each with a CMO, or equivalent, of organizations ranging from $35m to just shy of $1bn revenue. Here’s the first. There’ll be more to follow.

This East Coast marketing chief paid $9,000 in total to get five bloggers to write two blog posts and a minimum of four tweets over a four-week period about their supposed adoption of a new tablet accessory. These tweets were then re-published as part of the vendor’s launch invite activities. Each blogger then attended the San Francisco launch earlier this year. That’s approx. $1800 each person.

Was it worth it? The marketing head, who’d identified the bloggers through a ‘social influencer’ database provider, was initially “ok with it, though we’d already known two of the five so we could have approached them direct. We’d have preferred to work with independent bloggers who didn’t need payment, but we were told most did, so we went along with it.”

“It felt a commercial arrangement throughout, with them having all creative control. That was a surprise. It felt like it was all give from us. The upside was that all four turned up at our launch, it wasn’t obvious to anyone else we were paying for them, and we could use their endorsements in our web ads. Financially it wasn’t a bad return for us, but I’ll definitely read their future posts with a lot more skepticism than before. I’ll always wonder if they’ve taken a payment to write about what they have.”

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

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.

The second of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs

EngagementCover.peel2

Point 2 (of 6). Many critical influencers don’t have any existing relationships with our clients. We’ve recently concluded one of our Influencer Perception Audits for a client of ours – one of the best known global software companies. One you would imagine knew everybody who mattered.

Having identified the top market influencers in a particular business sector we conducted a one-to-one audit on how each of those identified influencers currently viewed our client in that sector. One of the questions we asked was ‘ Do you have any existing working relationship with any of (our client’s) point executives, and if not, is this something you would like to have?’ It’s a typical starting point question we ask so we’ve come to know the likely trend in responses. The findings are made more interesting by the fact that in advance of the audit, we ask our client which influencers they already have a working relationship with.

As emphasized in our most recent audit, our client’s execs typically believe they have existing working relationships with perhaps 50-60% of the individual influencers. Sometimes it’s less, but rarely more. When we ask those identified influencers the same question, closer to 20% believe they have a working relationship with any of our client’s execs.

How much of this ‘over-belief’ by the client’s execs is just the bravado of human nature, how much is “I might have met him/her only once but I’m sure they’ll remember me”, and how much is the assumption that “it may not be me personally that knows him/her but I’m sure one of our team must know them”, is impossible to say. But our experience shows that it is never the case that the influencers believe they have a better relationship with the client than vice-versa. Clients always over-estimate the strength of their relationships. Sometimes by an astonishing degree.

It makes me wonder to what degree this also relates to the executives’ working relationships with their prospects & customers. How accurate is their gauging of the strength of those relationships? If there were a similar 30-40% gap between opinions then that could explain plenty of lost sales.

Aside from informal surveys such as ours I’m not sure how many vendors seek to qualitively measure the strength of their existing relationships. The acid test most used – “did you win the sale?” – is a winner-takes-all moment in time, with no opportunity for a second attempt. So the homework needs to be done in advance. Starting with the customer’s key influencers.

The first of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs

EngagementCover.peel1I was putting together a presentation on our Influencer Engagement Programs last week and thought it might be useful to outline some of the key learnings we have. There’s way more than six but I’ve chosen six and I’ll write about each in separate posts.

Point 1. Marketing depts. are still heavily, and rigidly, compartmentalized. And that’s a problem. The influencer model requires breaking that apart. As soon as we’ve identified the key customer influencers for a client, those influencers are then typically segmented into those the client routes to the PR agency, those to the social media team, those to the AR folks etc. Those that can’t be dispatched to these teams are mentally put into the ‘others’ category. Most companies have little existing mechanism to deal with these others. Through no fault of their own, they’re considered ‘awkward’ to accommodate. The cause is that their benefits are ‘awkward’ to measure.

Let’s go back one step. Marketing depts. are intrigued by who the individuals really influencing their customers are. There’s a genuine interest to find out. And an excitement with the ‘identification’ results – the feeling of a new dawn. But when they do find out, clients rarely have the internal structure & processes to act on this new knowledge. And then they can stumble.

Marketing depts. don’t have to break anything to commission us to identify their real customer influencers. They have to have interest, and a budget. But to act on our findings they often do have to break something internally. Because much as they’d like to create a new way of interacting with these new-found influencers, they’re restricted in how to deal with them by the existing fiefdoms within their organization. And they get into people-politics.

How do they choose to engage with the single consultant, who occasionally blogs, sporadically contributes an article to a trade mag., but who regularly consults to a number of large prospect opportunities? The PR team doesn’t want to lose that person from their long list of journalists, even though they’re never going to be a priority on that list. The client’s consultant relations team hasn’t the resource to proactively engage with small consultants either, preferring to spend their time with the much larger consultancy brands. And in terms of the influencer outreach program, how do you measure the value that influencer contributes when they act only as a background advisor to one or more prospect companies? Keeping them ‘onside’ with you costs time, patience, budget, and your influencer program needs to show a return on investment each quarter.

PR depts. and agencies think they have a hard enough time justifying their own existence – yet their traditional focus on journalists & the media means their eventual return can at least be measured in column inches, site stats, audience ratings, etc. AR teams can find they have a harder job because often only the analysts’ written reports are seen as tangible returns, when their actual role can be much broader. But how do you persuade your bosses of that? Yet compared to other categories of influencer, the returns from AR & PR activity are relatively simple to display on a PowerPoint chart. And that’s what seems to count. When each category of influencer may require a slightly different RoI metric to reflect the success of your outreach, it needs a particularly motivated, secure, senior and understanding client executive to support the ongoing engagement stage.

No surprise then that so many marketing depts. opt for the instant, though sugary, gratification of social media outreach. All those retweets, shares and weblogs look so much better on a PowerPoint graph. Whether they have any effect on sales is a very different argument.

The unbelievable return of EAV (Equivalent Advertising Value) metrics to blogger outreach.

Has marketing forgotten what it learnt twenty years ago? In the 1990s I ran a PR network in Europe. Agencies looked a lot at measurement techniques for the media coverage they were achieving on behalf of their clients. For a short while the industry used an EAV (Equivalent Advertising Value) metric. Some clients liked it but it was always a house built on sand. What was the point of knowing that a particular press clipping on page 87 of a monthly magazine would have cost $190 were someone to have advertised in that spot? The client wasn’t advertising in that spot (for no doubt good reason), the magazine didn’t take ads on that page (so the EAV was an arbitrary value anyway), and the coverage was not exclusively focused on the client (as any ad would have been), so the comparison was impractical from every view. Clients soon saw through it and agencies dropped the metric. Why raise a claim that could be so casually, and easily, shot down. This issue sprang to mind when I was recently reviewing what’s being called ‘blog outreach software’.

I couldn’t be more critical of the current generation of blog outreach software. It’s nothing more than extremely low-end advertising. The bloggers being courted by these software providers are only interested because of the payments they’ll receive when mentioning particular products or services. If the bloggers have any current influence, and there’s no proof they have, that will be immediately lost once they start product placing within their posts. But the thing that most struck me when looking at this software were the metrics they were using to measure the validity of each blogger. ‘Potential impressions’ and ‘estimated impressions value’! Two entirely hypothetical metrics. Have people learn’t nothing in twenty years?

I well remember a marketing director in the 1990s tell a large group of employees that the ultra-expensive Formula 1 sponsorship deal he’d just signed (the firm’s logo was on a car’s wing mirrors) had a potential TV viewership of hundreds of millions of people. He justified the spend by multiplying the likely TV viewing numbers by the length in minutes of each televised race to arrive at that number. As if the tiny wing mirror logo (on two of the twenty cars) would be visible for even 1/100th of each broadcast! In reality it was more like 1/1000th.

So for blogger outreach, why measure each blogger by ‘potential impressions’ and ‘estimated impressions value’? Why is this any more credible in the era of bloggers than it was in the far more stable, and less busy, era of print titles? I look at the (mostly) agencies supposedly using this software and I wonder what story they’re telling their clients.

 

How could Twitter become a platform of real B2B influence?

twitterAm currently writing a paper asking the question ‘How could Twitter become a platform of real B2B influence?’ I’m basing it on the core six hurdles for Twitter to overcome before it’s a credible source of business purchase decision advice. Maybe you think it’s there already.

But can you imagine being questioned by your boss on what strategic partner to opt for, what million-dollar investment to make, what financial accounting system to choose, and saying, “Sure, let me check what’s being said about that on Twitter.” Thought not.

So what would have to change? Anything to contribute to the paper?

The difference between a typical PR mindset and an influencer marketing mindset.

IMIR logoOne of my roles is to chair the ‘Influencer Marketing & Influencer Relations’ LinkedIn group. It now has well over 900 members, all from the vendor side. It’s not a group for agency staff or contractors. I’ve posted before that we admit approx. 40% of those who actually apply – simply because 60% of applicants don’t meet the entry criteria we’re looking for.

Over the past four months or so, I’ve been approached several times by a very senior in-house marketer with a primarily PR background. They’ve been looking to join and I’ve hesitated. I was concerned they weren’t a good fit. In early Jan I accepted them. Since then they’ve continually uploaded discussion items with links to their own posts on the Forbes management site. The posts are generic management pieces not specific to influencer marketing. It struck me this person is indicative of the gulf between a typical PR mindset and that of (what I hope is) an influencer marketing mindset.

What this person is proving is that she wanted to join our LI group to broaden the distribution for her own posts – more channels equals more eyeballs seeing her work. Even if her contributions weren’t on-topic. That’s the traditional, or at least historical, PR mindset. The influencer marketing mindset is, or at least should be, quality over quantity. It’s about reaching out to perhaps far less people, but that those few are the most important ones, knowing that they’ll relay the intended message to those they themselves find most important, and so on. Rifle-shot not scatter-shot.

So I wonder why someone apparently so interested in joining an influencer marketing forum would then miss the very point of it?

New Entrants Flooding Marketing Technology Industry

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 2.51.38 AMThis post from UK Marketing News reports on the astonishing rise in marketing tech vendors over the past few years, up from 100 in 2011 to 1900 this year! It states that influencer marketing is one of the specialist areas behind much of that rise.

http://www.ukmarketingnews.com/new-entrants-flooding-marketing-technology-industry/64/