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With no further ado, check out this jam-packed infographic from TheShelf.com. It’s full of brilliant stats that will help you seize the importance of influencer marketing. Once you’ve read everything, start to identify influencers in your industry and get started!...
...But here’s the thing: With the right tools, time and a hint of talent, creating the perception of being an influencer is possible by just about anyone. Focusing on the signals that commonly lead to the perception of authority, individuals can work on developing their personal brand and popularity far above their expertise and ability to affect action.
Perception vs. reality. Now I’m not saying that everyone who has cultivated a strong personal brand is superficially popular or influential. I’m saying that it’s easy to create the perception of influence through personal brand and companies should take that into account when creating their influencer programs....
Influencer Marketing was a hot topic in 2014 and will continue to gain momentum in 2015 for both B2C and B2B marketers, especially when it comes to content co-creation.
Why the warm and fuzzy for influencer content you ask? According to CMI and MarketingProfs, over 90% of B2B marketers are investing in content marketing. Yet, in an age of information overload where 74GB of data are delivered per person, per day (USC), standing out to business buyers can require unreasonable budgets and resources.
Inspired by the need to scale content marketing performance, a growing number of B2B marketers are creating better quality content that gets shared more often, reaches more prospects and grows their influencer network – all at the same time. How so? Through influencer content programs....
How do people become truly influential in the social age?
If you, like me have been raised with the notion that celebrities, sports stars and politicians were influential because of what they do and not who they are – we’re on the same page. But when you actually examine today’s influential people and how they became influential – the picture has changed dramatically.
Influence is both a natural and learned quality that is developed over time. It can still be inherited, received by winning an election, or conveyed by a new job title – but that’s becoming less prevalent now. I’ve seen influencers in the social age drive tremendous awareness for social causes, leads for companies and votes for presidential elections.
Many of these influencers have mastered the art of communicating what everyone else is thinking or what they should be thinking. They are curious and always ask, “What’s important here?”
With 74% of customers using social media to inform their purchasing decisions, getting trusted people with the right audiences to positively gush about your brand can bring you a real competitive advantage.
Gettting the public approval of influencers can increase your leads, improve brand awareness, and skyrocket your credibility. But none of that happens if you can’t get those influencers talking about your brand and its products. Here’s how you can influence the influencers using only their trusty social media profiles...
What is the source of my influence? I create content, yes. I engage consistently, of course. But at the end of the day it gets down to trust, right?
That’s why the emerging Citizen Influencers have to be very judicious in their relationships with brands. Likewise, brands have to be discerning about their expectations from influencers.
If brands become too exposed with too many bloggers, both parties will suffer. If the credibility of the blogger declines, the effectiveness of their advocacy is doomed.
“No” is a legitimate strategy
That’s why I am saying “no” to most opportunities right now. I have to be incredibly selective. First, it has to be a company I truly, authentically believe in and second, I have to limit how much I do because if this blog ever becomes filled with spammy sponsored posts or suspicious brand advocacy, you’re going to go away. And you should....
...The fundamental problem with influencer marketing is not that some people aren’t more influential than others, but that there is little, if any, evidence that influencer strategies—other than celebrity endorsement—are viable. Yet all is not lost. There is a way to consistently increase the likelihood of viral chains.
In 2001, Jonah Peretti had an e-mail exchange with Nike that went viral on the Web. He was fascinated and, a year later, he met Duncan Watts at a conference. The two struck up a friendship and then a collaboration. They did a number of projects together that had promising results, which they published in Harvard Business Review.
Their approach, which they called big seed marketing, does not rely on identifying a small number of special people, but rather on harnessing the power of a large number of ordinary people. By reaching a mass audience, and encouraging them to share, you increase the likelihood that a viral chain emerges and, even if it doesn’t, you still improve performance.Peretti went on to co-found Huffington Post, which was sold to AOL for $315 million in 2011. His second company, Buzzfeed, is now valued at $850 million. In his extended interview with Felix Salmon, he credits not influentials, but “a constellation of connected things” for making his articles go viral so consistently.
So if you want things to spread, forget about special people with “rare qualities.” Be interesting, reach as many people as you can and encourage them to share....
What factors go into determining how many Twitter followers you gain (and lose) each day? I analyzed thousands of accounts to find the answer.
Key takeaways
- The types of content you tweet have significant impacts on attracting and keeping followers.
- Hashtags probably aren't dead.
- Each tweet that includes an image, has a hashtag, is a retweet, or mentions someone associates with 2-6% more daily followers.
- Just as it does with Rand, your account will likely have individualized factors that move the needle for you.
- You can explore these via Excel! Check your Followerwonk account for a complimentary spreadsheet of your Twitter activity.
- Don't forget to follow me @petebray so that I can test whether this blog post significantly moves my follower count! :) And let me know what you uncover.
Seth Grimes goes into detail on how you can use promoted tweets to study competitive positioning and identify influencers around particular topics of interest.
...What our customers made us realize — through their expanded use of our platform and the practice it enables — is that influencer marketing is not a component of marketing alongside content marketing, market research and marketing automation. Instead it is the operating system for modern marketing.In an online social world dominated by self-organized communities of people, knowing who is most likely to impact your business and developing relationships with those impactful stakeholders is paramount, irrespectively of a specific craft or initiative (what you do with that information will very much vary based on your craft and initiative).
To the modern marketer, the world should be seen through the lens of these people contextually important to their brand, initiative or intent: becoming acutely aware of them and building strong ties to them is an essential ingredient of success...
Want a quick & easy way to connect with influential people on Twitter? This blog shows you 2 easy ways to find top influencers on Twitter.
Influencers are influential. They have a significant following on their social channels and are so knowledgeable about a topic that people not only like to consume their content, but share it. Engaging an influencer and being promoted by them is a great way for your brand to increase visibility, grow a following, and rank in search. Sounds simple right? It’s actually something many brands struggle with.
There are over 500 million registered Twitter accounts, 300 million active monthly Google+ users, and 1.26 billion Facebook users. Add to that the 150 million people that are active on Instagram in any given month, the 70 million on Pinterest, and the 238 million members on LinkedIn and it’s no wonder finding influencers is a bit like playing “Where’s Waldo?”
But it doesn’t have to be. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of tools out there that can help find influential people in your industry in an easy, cost-effective manner. The problem becomes how to choose from all of those tools. Don’t worry; we’ve made that easier too. Here are three tools we love for finding influencers on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn...
I’m often asked by companies who have hired us for Social media consulting “should we use something like Kred or Klout in our hiring process?” This question makes me cringe and my answer is always: absolutely not. But, and yes, there’s a but, you can use them to gain some insight as to what someone is about. It has always amazed me how quickly social media managers, HR managers and even CTO’s jump to adopt new measurement tools, analytics and data, just because someone comes out with it. A brief look at a couple of the most well-known social media influence measurement tools and my opinion....
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Consumers trust recommendations from other consumers far more than they do branded content. With that in mind, businesses are jumping in head first. Unfortunately, the process can get out of hand pretty quick, but here’s the good news: As businesses start to see the importance of working with bloggers, more tools are becoming available to empower marketers to run seriously smart campaigns.
From finding the right bloggers to managing outreach to tracking campaigns, here are some of the best tools to manage blogger campaigns from start to finish....
But Opinion Elites aren’t just using social media to learn about companies for themselves. According to the study, 54% of Opinion Elites globally said they increasingly hear of what’s going on with companies through social media, and an additional 35% said they shared information about a company with others through social media or email in the past year.
Their efforts to influence others span both the real and virtual worlds – 37% said they proactively tried to influence their friends’ and family’s perceptions about a company because of something they learned about how it conducts itself. So, it’s clear that Opinion Elites are in a strong position to amplify… or not…. a company’s reputational story...
I was recently quoted as saying, “I don’t give a shit” if Instagram has more users than Twitter. If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit.
As quoted: "If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter — important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures."
Of course, I am trivializing what Instagram is to many people. It’s a beautifully executed app that enables the creation and enjoyment of art, as well as human connection, which is often a good thing. But my rant had very little to do with it (or with Twitter). My rant was the result of increasing frustration with the one-dimensionality that those who report on, invest in, and build consumer Internet services talk about success....
“How do people become truly influential in the social age?”
Clearly, Mark and I admire many of the same people. His article is full of examples where he showcases leaders in new media marketing and speaks to their qualities.
Monsters of Influence
The Forbes article inspired me to create my take on the qualities of a person of influence. It became a slide deck with a fun Halloween-themed twist and earned a spot as SlideShare of the Day.
I hope you enjoy it, share it, and comment below with your feedback and any ideas you have about the qualities of influential people.
There is famous and there is famous to the family. Cousin Aaron is famous to my family. Or, to be less literal, the family of people like us might understand that Satya the milliner or perhaps Sarma Melngailis or Peter Olotka are famous.
And famous to the family is precisely the goal of just about all marketing now. You don't need to be Nike or Apple or GE. You need to be famous to the small circle of people you are hoping will admire and trust you. Your shoe store needs to be famous to the 300 shoe shoppers in your town. Your retail consulting practice needs to be famous to 100 people at ten major corporations. Your Wordpress consulting practice needs to be famous to 650 veterinarians or chiropractors. Famous the way George Clooney and George Washington are famous, but to fewer people.
By famous, I means admired, trusted, given the benefit of the doubt. By famous, I mean seen as irreplaceable or best in the world.
Here's how to tell if you're famous: If I ask someone in your community to name the person who is known for X, will they name you? If I ask about which store or freelancer is the best place, hands down, to get Y, will they name you? If we played 20 questions, could I guess you?
Being famous to the family is far more efficient than being famous to everyone. It takes focus, though.
Every day I get nonsensical pitches asking me to become a brand advocate and write about a brand, watch a demo for a brand, or accept a guest post (about auto glass tinting, tanning beds, accounting software?). I guess it’s predictable … like anything in business, when people find a good thing, everybody piles on.
But what dismays me is that even many great companies are doing this all wrong. Like any consumer, I form relationships with my favorite products almost as if they were my friends. This notion seems to be lost on most people tapping into influence marketing.
So sitting in the seat of a company marketing executive trying to get my attention, here is what I would do. This is a personal post. I am only speaking for myself. But I think these general themes probably also apply to many other “Citizen Influencers” who have a powerful online voice.
Here is your game plan for getting your product mentioned on my blog (and speeches and classes and podcasts)....
Do you want to be a sought-after resource in your niche?
Do you need tips on how to become a Twitter influencer?
To be a leader on Twitter, it’s important to understand the dynamics of Twitter conversations and the role of influencers.
In this article I’ll show you the two most important types of Twitter influencers and how you can become one....
We've been compiling a list of top presentation resources that will help you become a master presenter. Check out the resources below nicely divided into categories of articles, infographics, Quora and videos. There's something for every presenter!
Via Baiba Svenca
The tide of influence hunting on the web is rising beyond public relations and social media to digital marketing at large. In particular, there’s growing attention being directed towards influencers as gateways to new audiences.
Influence as the ability for a person to inspire action amongst a community is a very powerful thing and therefore, increasingly appreciated by digital marketing and PR pros alike. An influencer program that identifies, qualifies, engages and maintains relationships with industry influencers can serve as a formidable “force multiplier” for everything from content amplification to product feedback to content co-creation. Beyond the “brandividual endorsement”, people with a strong center of influence can provide valuable context and credibility to a company seeking to connect with an audience of buyers. But in an age of information overload and the ability for anyone, anywhere to publish, finding those influential connections in your industry can prove to be a challenge.
Here are 9 of many tools that can be used for the initial task of finding influencers aligned with specific areas of subject matter expertise. Several go beyond discovery and also support filtering, managing, engaging, monitoring and reporting....
When was the last time you checked your Klout score? And more importantly, did you really care about it?
The answer to that question could help explain why, late last week, Klout gave itself a whole new business model. Now it won't just measure your score and offer dubious perks, it will also provide you with a stream of content you'll most likely to want to share, actively boosting your score. It went from playing the referee to playing the coach.
During a conversation with Mashable, Klout founder and CEO Joe Fernandez insisted that the new service change is "not a pivot" — rather, it is a response to the most common question he had been asked by users for five years: How can I boost my Klout score? "We always knew the Klout score was the foundation," Fernandez says. "We think of this as extending our value proposition."...
In 2014 we can expect to see growth in influencer marketing including investment in identifying influencers and in the growth of outreach strategies to engage such influencers.According to InNetwork around $240m is spent in North America each year on influencer marketing. This is a figure we can expect to grow in 2014, partly because there is so little trust in advertising, but primarily because people trust people.
Surveys have consistently shown a low a level of trust in marketing such as advertisements, with some surveys finding up to 75% people do not believe advertisements. This is in marked contrast to recommendations from other people. The 2011 Neilson survey asked people what sources of information were most relevant to them when seeking information about products and services. The response was overwhelmingly recommendations from people. Over 90% of people felt that recommendations from friends were highly or somewhat relevant to them and 75% felt that consumer opinions posted online were were highly or somewhat relevant to them. This compared to ads on social networks being down at 36%....
Social Media Influencers: How do you know that the blogger who is writing a guest post for your blog is the best influencer for your readers?...
The five ¨Cs¨ of marketing influence in social media In one of my first items listed on this column, I suggested an initial list of nine indicators of value influencers. A list which allowed, in some ways, to assess all aspects of an influencer, compared to a marketing campaign of influence in social media.These new indices show influence value can be now grouped into five ¨ C ¨ parts
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Content marketing is definitely a buzz term as of late, but influencer marketing? Hold on a second! This article from wersm provides a great infographic with all the stats you need to understand the importance of a influencer marketing.
Are advocates the key to brand success? This article suggests that gaining key influences can make a big difference.