Do you know where your most valuable customers spend their time online? Do you regularly interact with bloggers and journalists who shape your industry’s agenda? Who are the people with the online “street cred” to influence people’s actions?
These questions (and more!) are at the heart of the PR industry’s recent focus on influencer relations. What exactly is influencer relations, you ask? At the most basic level, it’s the process of identifying and engaging with people who have the ability to influence others. It’s sort of like finding your brand’s online VIPs. Now, that doesn’t mean the list should include only “A-list” online celebrities. Rather, influencers could be loyal customers, bloggers who reach an audience relevant to your product, service or industry, referral sources, or even editors of enewsletters that hit your target audience.
We know that monitoring and listening are key components to a successful social media strategy. Part of this monitoring should include following conversations to help identify influencers and discover opportunities to engage with them. As we discuss on this week’s episode of PR 2.0 Chat TV, companies need to figure out what they want to say on social media and who they want to say it to.
Chuck Hemann, VP of Digital Strategy & Analytics for Ogilvy 360DI, is this week’s guest on PR 2.0 Chat TV. In our five-minute conversation, Chuck explains how to build influencer lists and then what to do with that information. Thanks for watching!
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As a measurement and monitoring focused professional myself isn’t it a bit odd that we are stacking people in lists and herding them like cattle? Each one of these getting a brand that basicly says, “I’m worth your time” or “I’m more worth your time”
So many folks out there that talk about the web really being the great unifier and I am one of those people. Social media really does enhance the ability to generate relationships and strategic partnerships. However, I think we can run into the problem of putting too much focus on the numbers and turning it into digital segregation.
Now, I understand the need for data and analytics and I understand the need to be able to scale but it’s one of those things that can backfire very easily.
We need to talk more about culture. Especially for companies new to the space.
Oh man, just hit recall message on my pitch blast to list of more than 500 “influencers.” Kidding. Nicely done, Chuck and Heather. Such an important topic. Influence is like social media measurement in general — no silver bullet. Sorry folks.
And the GigaOM example is solid. What publications does your target consumer audience read? Who do they follow and trust? Find that out, do the research, create a list, start building relationships (not through an e-mail blast, btw) and consistently re-evaluate.
@KeithBurtis Keith, that’s totally a valid point. As soon as I hit “publish” i hopped in my car to come to a meeting and was thinking about a follow up post (which apparently is a comment instead!). I used to do a lot of work in K-12 education. The schools were funded by tax dollars, so a big part of my job was to let taxpayers know how we were spending their money. Even 10 years ago, we were identifying influencers and tracking them … we just didn’t have a fancy term like “influencer relations.” Prior to town hall meetings, we’d hold “pre-meetings” with community influencers. Those were the PTA presidents, union heads, inflential parents, business leaders, etc. I don’t think influencer outreach is something new. As with many things, the web just gives it a new name.
That said, there are lots of companies that don’t know who to talk to or where to start. So, while they can’t put all their eggs in the “A-list” basket, they do need to focus their efforts somewhat. Like our old-school pre-town-hall meetings, the point was to find a cross section of traditional VIPs and “in the trenches” people who could help convey our message to a broader audience. And, I think that’s where I think this process can be helpful.
All that said, cultlure is also important. Social definately isn’t a one-pronged approach …
Thanks for adding your two cents!
@KeithBurtis Hey Heather – thank you so much for asking me to do this interview with you. It was fun, and easily the fastest five minutes of my life
Keith – I think that’s a fair question, but I wonder if the notion of the social web being a unifying force isn’t a utopian point-of-view. In reality, large brands cannot engage with everybody that talks about them. Could you imagine how many resources they would have to dedicate to such an effort? Think about Starbucks. Or Whole Foods. They’d need an army of personnel. Is that the way some brands are going? Yeah, but not that many right now. Until that point, companies need to “bucket” people who are talking about the brand(s). Whether that be a group of influencers that receive direct engagement, or individuals who might get a pitch (the horror) or individuals we just listen to, companies need someone/something to help them make sense of 500m users on Facebook. Just my $0.02.
Agree about the different qualifiers for influence, not just numbers like reach and frequency. Authority, expertise, credibility along with how often to what extent it’s shared, should also be considered.
@Chemann @KeithBurtis Chuck, I think we agree more than you know as I dealt with these challenges at Best buy. However, as Cisco says… It’s a human Network. I really believe that. It’s all about balance. There is no cookie cuter answer.
@Chemann Chuck, I think we agree more than not as I dealt with these challenges at Best Buy. However, as Cisco says… It’s a Human Network. I really believe that. It’s all about balance. There is no cookie cutter answer.
@KeithBurtis @Chemann
@KeithBurtis @Chemann What I took from the video is that Chuck and Heather are actually endorsing a less automated method of identifying influencers, which is a welcome message. Rather than blindly taking the recommendations of a tool, human intervention and thoughtful strategy is needed to determine those most influential for a given organization.
Of course, influencer relations is nothing new — in the past, these were typically analysts or other “taste makers.” I like that there is a certain democratization now, with social media, since influencers can come from anywhere.
As Keith notes, identifying and targeting influencers doesn’t excuse you from building relationships with the larger community. But it can be another useful tactic in spreading the word about your organization.
@KeithBurtis @ChemannKeith – I think the numbers are just a proxy for the same influence analysis that we do in our heads in the offline world all the time. The metrics are important for social because, given the scale of the social web, there’s no way you could conduct the ad hoc analysis that you do in the offline world. Using these automated approaches to classifying people on the social web shouldn’t have any effect on how real/human the conversations are though.
Here’s an example of how this mirrors the offline analysis we do to classify people…suppose two people are presenting at a conference. One is an industry analyst giving the keynote on my topic and the other is a sales VP presenting on the last day in the vendor showcase. I’m naturally going to classify these people differently and my approach/level of effort towards building a relationship with each will differ accordingly. Subconsiously, what I’ve done is plug in a set of metrics/variables that I use to classify them (# of attendees at presentation, employer, job title, type of presentation, day of conference, topic, etc.).
@paulmay Smart analogy, Paul. You, @KellyeCrane and @HeatherWhaling are right. We have always done influencer identification, we’ve just done it on our heads and now we’re looking to track it, just like online WOM. And like with the latter, the evolutuion of inlfuencer outreach online has caused us to attach numbers and look for a one-stop metric to judge, dare i say, Klout
. I think everyone hear agrees it’s not possible to judge influence with one metric. Never has been, never will be. That said, I think Klout, Authority, Rank, Traffic can absolutely be pieces of the puzzle.
@KeithBurtis @Chemann Influencer ID and culture are different topics, IMO. The former can beget the latter. IOW, a company putting its influencer ID process on paper and socializing it internally/externally can lead to a larger conversation about the importance of relationship building in general and change the way a brand’s conversation with its customers evolves over time. But to ask an org that is just getting into social media to make the jump to a culture shift that prioritizes online customer engagement is too far of a jump in most cases. We need to build a bridge across the river, and influencer outreach, a smaller jump similar to a tatic companies have always done, can help build that bridge.
Sorry, little late to the conversation, but…
I really enjoyed this article and video! I’m interested to know how PR pros are approaching influencer outreach and how it differs from the traditional media relations approach. Within these approaches seems to be much more strategy, and so to me it seems like it may be easier to switch your focus to a smaller number of people, rather than a list of 500. Influencer outreach requires more listening, monitoring and engagement, so I wonder if it is actually better to think smaller and focus on a more manageable number. I realize that this depends largely on the goals of the campaign, but I’d be curious to know how much of a difference this would make on the outcome of a campaign (small versus large outreach number).
Also, one important piece of influencer measurement that I think was overlooked is how much activity one can generate within their community. They may have a large audience, but if they don’t have the ability to motivate their community to take action -whether it’s purchase something, reading something, etc. then they’re not going to be very helpful to any campaign.
http://traackr.com
Heather
I really like what Chuck said and the emphasis he puts on relevance. Influence exists in context. Context is not a keyword ( I think that’s what some of those tools that measure influence on twitter use)…it’s more an eco-system. Where I work, we see social media as a network of niche communities (tribes to quote Seth). So finding influencers has to take that into account. Some communities are huge. For example here, we mapped 2000 influencers, through their blogs, on beauty; we rank them in this context. But we also mapped tiny communities of 50 for some customer that had a very narrow, b2b centric, type of business.
Laurent