Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

What’s the difference between influence and advocacy?

 

The differences are quite notable but the answers aren’t often sought. Influencers are individuals who’ve earned authority on any given topic and have built a community or series of communities around their body of ideas or work. They have the capacity to cause an effect on the character, actions or behavior of someone or something.

 

Advocates are champions (and/or enthusiastic customers) who align with or embody the tenets or the mission of a thing (in this case a brand) or a cause. Advocates may or may not carry influence individually. When advocates unite, the concerted group can wield influence. On the subject of influence, Technorati recently released its 2013 Digital Influence Report. In it, I discovered some interesting stats about the various ways that brands are approaching influence....

Social marketing can be wasteful. Depending on how often someone checks their Facebook News Feed or Twitter stream, they might rarely see a brand's message unless it was paid to be put front and center. Facebook analytics firm PageLever (recently acquired by social marketing company Unified) said last fall that most Facebook page posts fade off into the ether three to five hours after getting published. But the promise of social isn't one-to-many broadcast-style publishing; it’s creating a ripple effect. Get something in front of the right people and they’ll push it onward and outward. Not only does that serve as a sort of audience-quality filter, but a side benefit for brands is that it can be as inexpensive as it is efficient. Washington Post-owned social agency SocialCode rolled out an influencer targeting tool last year with exactly that intent, and now the most high-profile arbiter of social influence, Klout, has unveiled an analytics dashboard to help brands pinpoint their influencers. "This is really the first step—but a meaningful step—towards a set of tools that will enable brands to more effectively understand and engage with their influencers," said Klout CEO Joe Fernandez. He maintained that Klout remains a consumer company, but Klout for Business definitely levels up the brand side of the business with the potential to become an enterprise-level marketing platform. At launch, Klout for Business aims to tell businesses who the influencers are among their Twitter followers and Facebook fans, including age groups, gender, location and of course what topics they're influential on. Fernandez said Klout rewrote its topic analysis system to give companies a dynamic look at those influencers’ interests. "Imagine Pepsi wanting to know who in their audience is influential about snowboarding and invite those people to a Pepsi competition at Aspen," he said....