Tag Archives: Nick Hayes

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

Anecdotal evidence of success is vital for continuing any Influencer Engagement program.

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EngagementCover.peel3Point 3 of six learnings from our Influencer Engagement Programs is that anecdotal evidence of success is vital for the continuance of any program – yet companies rarely have any way to record this.

Some clients like their engagement programs to be fluid – they believe in them because they know they make sense. Others prefer them tightly orchestrated and documented to the smallest detail. Some of ours have been detailed on Excel sheets with more formulas than I’d have believed possible. But one force has been proved, time and time again, to be more powerful than almost any other, aside from the cold cash of a direct resulting sale. Executives with personal anecdotes. A hundred actions, responses, metrics and the like are nothing compared to a client exec. with the power to approve budget saying “I was at a customer the other day and he was absolutely being influenced by (Influencer X)”.

It might not be scientific proof, or even driven by any kind of data, but one anecdote from the right executive and everyone down the chain falls into place. That’s why senior salespeople are so useful, and perhaps critical, to have on-board though the engagement process. They keep the budget in place during the inevitable dips in more tangible progress.

What’s particularly interesting is how few companies have any existing framework to collate such anecdotes. If the quote comes in as an email it can obviously sorted in a particular folder, or simply printed out, but beyond this, it just doesn’t happen. Yet every engagement program needs to harness these quotes, capturing them at the time and reminding senior management of them at key points down the line. Short-form video is by far the best format, way better than just audio and a hundred times better than an email – yet none of our clients have ever established this without us suggesting it. The quality of cellphone video is now more than good enough and iOS, Android and WindowsPhone can all transcribe to text from video. Collate the various video clips in an online database, even an iCloud Photo or Flickr album will do, and integrate them into your next program or performance review. You’ll be amazed how powerful they’ll prove.

The direction Influencer Marketing could have, and should have, taken.

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The mass-market direction for Influencer Marketing over the next year seems pretty clear to me. Today’s hype is all about brokering commercial deals between pay-for-play tweeters & bloggers and ‘brands’. Brands are desperate to get as many people talking about them as possible, to explore every outlet, and tweeters would love to be paid for their tweets. Both sides want each other, even if the customer or prospect is the one to lose.

The problem is that reaching out to real influencers is difficult, with no guaranteed RoI and certainly no predictable rate of that return. And that doesn’t fit comfortably with today’s need for guaranteed, predictable measures.

It wont last, but it’s set for the next year or so because it helps the metrics that marketers have set for themselves. Having adopted one of the many marketing automation systems (a la Eloqua, Marketo, etc.) they now need to ensure their marketing programs are well reflected in it, and # of social channels, # of retweets / reblogs / shares, size of potential audience, are valuable metrics for this. Forget they’re having no effect on sales, they are reaching an audience.

So marketing agencies, and it is the agencies who are moving this agenda, are improving their odds by reaching out to the most willing individuals. These individuals may not be influencers, almost certainly they’re not, but they’re willing, they’ll reliably add to the brand’s outreach channels. Most importantly, they’re available for hire.

I’ll give it nine months before the groundswell of opinion turns on it. But there’s so clearly a better direction Influencer Marketing could have taken.

The fundamental reason for reaching out to real influencers was, and should continue to be, to improve your chances of completing a sale. These ‘social influencer’ services divorce any connection between marketing and sales.

To reconnect marketing with sales you have to first analyze which individuals are involved in the prospect’s decision-making process – and which aren’t. Now if you could reliably understand who was important and who wasn’t to a sale, in advance of any purchase decision – and be able to scale that process across industries and across regions – well, that would be truly powerful. But it’s not a direction most in Influencer Marketing seem to be pursuing.

Why would a marketer turn to bloggers they’ve never heard of to help their outreach?

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Why would a marketer turn to bloggers they’d never heard of to take their brand message to their highly valued prospects? I’ve never been able to work that one out.

Every marketer should strive to understand their company’s customers and prospects. That’s a given surely. In some B2B markets there are no important bloggers. None. Now if those marketers know their market at all, and let’s hope they do, they’ll already have an idea which, if any, bloggers in their space carry any credibility. Let’s be generous and say that 10% of bloggers on a particular B2B subject are listened to by potential buyers. Don’t you think a marketer would have a pretty good idea which 10% were most credible? And which should just be ignored.

So why would they pay a ‘blogger platform’ company to ‘suggest’ tens or even hundreds of previously unknown bloggers, none of which the vendor then has a direct relationship with. Those bloggers, all of whom have made themselves available for hire, then agree to promote or reference the marketer’s message in their posts? It’s a nonsense, doing untold damage to the marketer’s brand. And all while the talk in marketing circles is for brands to create ‘authentic conversations and relationships’ with their prospects and customers.

Marketers are always looking at starting intelligent conversations with their customers and prospects. The problem is that most often they don’t know where to begin. Why not begin by asking your prospects which bloggers they follow? Maybe give them a list to select from, if you really don’t want to leave a free choice. You’re asking them an intelligent question, you’ll probably get intelligent replies.

If any marketer were ever to compare the list of bloggers as voted by prospects, with those provided by the blogger platform sellers, the two would be very different. Blogger platforms offer up only those bloggers available for hawking. It’s insulting to hear them called influencers.

How come no-one knows how buyers buy?

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It’s always astonished me how so much time, budget & energy is spent on B2B marketing – the advertising, the packaging, the promotion, the pricing, the launch event, the mail shots, the online outreach – when so little has been spent on understanding the process by which its buyers’ buy.

Ask any head of marketing for the four main job titles of the buyers who buy its products – and they wont be remotely accurate. Sometimes they’ll be in the right ballpark – they’ll say “the CFO”, “the head of software development”, or “whoever looks after security” – but they’re just guessing. Oftentimes they’re merely repeating phrases they overheard from a salesperson several months back. It’s just not a conversation that goes on in many marketing depts.

Ask them who’s most likely to be sitting in the room when their salesperson presents their solution to the prospect, and they’ll have even less idea. Is it typically one person, two, five, or more? If you don’t believe me check it out in your own marketing dept.

I know this to be true because of the number of times I speak with senior sales people and  how loose their explanations are. Their responses are peppered with “well, usually there might be …”, “sometimes we’ll find …” and “it depends on …”. They have to really think hard about who they’ve presented to in recent months – and it’s clearly the first time they’ve had to think about it since those meetings, so I know they definitely haven’t been briefing their marketing folks.

It’s not always the fault of those in marketing. I’m often struck by how random those sales situations seem to have been, how difficult it would have apparently been for the salesperson to predict who they’d be presenting to. It might be a new experience for a particular salesperson, but is it really that random? Or is their field of experience just necessarily narrow? With greater experience, a broader set of historical data, could it have been predicted? And would that have likely helped the outcome? I’m pretty convinced the answer to both is Yes.

But no-one has that data.

I’m far from the social marketing skeptic you might think

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I was reminded in my podcast conversation with Paul Gillin the extent to which he views our company’s work as going against the perceived wisdom in our industry. Paul’s a social marketing consultant – and very good at it. He’s a strong advocate of the power of social marketing and he mentioned a couple of times that I have the opposite view. I’ve been thinking about this perception.

I’ve never actually thought I do hold the opposite view – in some situations I’m a complete convert to social marketing. I look at my own teenagers and there’s no doubt they’re constantly swayed by what they’re reading and watching on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and more. But the media is obsessed by teenager marketing, and portrays every audience as behaving in the same way. And that’s what I disagree with.

The fact is, the B2B marketplace still works in a very different way. It will evolve, and it may evolve into something similar to today’s teenager marketing. But we’re such a way from that today – and our clients want to know how to engage with their influencers now, not five or ten years time.

The perceived wisdom in marketing circles seems to be that every stage of the buying decision process is now carried out online – problem identification, decision to act, solution scoping, etc. And that’s just not the case. The reason marketers act as if that’s the case? Because marketers have a far louder public megaphone than buyers do and they want to be at forefront of trends. Buyers might not agree with how marketers are framing their world, but buyers just get on with their buying and try not to be swayed by what marketers are telling them. And buyers see no reason to bother putting them right.

You want proof? Find a friend you know who buys products or services for their employer. It might be office furniture, software tools, real estate, human resources or whatever. Ask them who or what most influenced their eventual selection. Online search is almost always part of the process, but aside from Google, the other influencers are likely to be individuals – individuals that influenced them offline! Co-workers, bosses, previous experience, people they’ve emailed, policy-makers specific to their industry, third-party consultants. Individuals who likely don’t have a very large online presence. Try it and tell me if I’m wrong.

The majority of B2B influencers still operate very much offline. And while there certainly are some important online influencers, the overall picture, whatever your industry, remains a mix. I’m just in the minority talking about it.

Just recorded an interview for Paul Gillin’s excellent podcast series

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Nick Hayes, Influencer50, Influencer Marketing, The Buyerside JourneyRecorded a very enjoyable 20mins interview with social marketing guru Paul Gillin earlier in the week. It’s now available on the Hobson & Holtz Report site here:

We covered plenty of ground – why vendors have so little understanding of those influencing their prospects, why certain types of influencers are routinely being ignored, the trio of online to offline influencers, and of course, the perils of so-called ‘influence marketing platforms’.

Hopefully you’ll find it’s worth a listen. Hat-tip again to Paul – he does a great podcast series. And there’s no-one in our industry I respect more.

Majority of respondents in a Gallup survey said that social media had no influence at all on purchasing decisions!

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Really good article in last week’s WSJ. Exactly what we’ve been talking about for years. Here’s a snippet but for the full thing I encourage you to go to:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/companies-alter-social-media-strategies-1403499658?mod=e2fb

Note the line “A majority of respondents in a Gallup survey said that social media had no influence at all on purchasing decisions”.

Social Media Fail to Live Up to Early Marketing Hype

Companies Refine Strategies to Stress Quality Over Quantity of Fans

WSJ - Just Being SocialIn May 2013, Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. bought ads to promote its brand page on Facebook. After a few days, unhappy executives halted the campaign—but not because they weren’t gaining enough fans. Rather, they were gaining too many, too fast

“We were fearful our engagement and connection with our community was dropping” as the fan base grew, says Allison Sitch, Ritz-Carlton’s vice president of global public relations.

Today, the hotel operator has about 498,000 Facebook fans; some rivals have several times as many. Rather than try to keep pace, Ritz-Carlton spends time analyzing its social-media conversations, to see what guests like and don’t like. It also reaches out to people who have never stayed at its hotels and express concern about the cost.

Ritz-Carlton illustrates a shift in corporate social-media strategies. After years of chasing Facebook fans and Twitter followers, many companies now stress quality over quantity. They are tracking mentions of their brand, then using the information to help the business.

“Fans and follower counts are over. Now it’s about what is social doing for you and real business objectives,” says Jan Rezab, chief executive of Socialbakers AS, a social-media metrics company based in Prague.

For the full article go to:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/companies-alter-social-media-strategies-1403499658?mod=e2fb

What better message than ‘Make yourself memorable’?

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I’ve just finished reading Seth Godin’s ‘The Icarus Deception’. I think I’ve read most of his work to date. I found this one a little disappointing because I felt it re-trod the same ground I’ve read many times before from him. To me, Seth basically has one message, which he dresses in different clothes for each new book. That message is ‘Be remarkable’. That was certainly Purple Cow, Lynchpin was ‘Have the confidence to be yourself’, Icarus was ‘You have to stand out’, Permission Marketing was ‘Be so interesting that people want to let you into their world’. The enemy of each is ‘going with the flow’.

Then I reconsidered and thought maybe having just one core message is a good thing. By now, readers know what Seth Godin stands for and they either want to hear that message or they don’t. Maybe if he was telling us different things in each book we’d be confused on where he stood. And I have to say that every time I read his work I feel re-committed to standing out.

Maybe his own Purple Cow is that in the business world he’s come to own that ‘Make yourself memorable’ message. In a few years my own children will be of career-seeking age. What a great message to give them.

Speaking at PROOF Conference on Influencer Marketing, Phoenix AZ, 10-11th Nov.

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PROOF ConferenceI’m excited to be a speaker at the just-announced first PROOF Conference on Influencer Marketing. I’ll be alongside one of the people I most respect in our industry – Paul Gillin (@paulgillin)- which makes me look forward to it even more. Paul’s book, ‘Attack of the Customers’, was one of my favorite business books of last year.

If you’re interested in attending the conference, which is equally for brands and agencies, use the special code ‘NHayes’, for a $100 discount voucher.

http://www.proofcon.com

Phoenix AZ, 10-11th Nov.