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Pat Kelly vividly remembers when he first knew he was a "thought leader":
"In 2005, I met another 'thought leader' and I asked him how he became a 'thought leader' and he said 'I don't know.' It was then that I knew I could be one too."
Pat Kelly showing that he is a true "thought leader" on the This Is That Talks stage in Whistler, BC. (Joseph Schweers/CBC)
Kelly proved his skill at leading thoughts on the This Is That Talks stage this past April in Whistler, BC. As you can see in the video of his talk, Kelly confidently made grand statements, spoke with his hands, and had slides - all hallmarks of a true "thought leader" or "influencer."
"My talk was a big success: I said things and the audience nodded their heads."
Based on the success of his talk, Kelly hopes to appear on a number of podcasts about "big ideas."...
The fashion blogger long ago transcended mere outfit documentarian. Done right, fashion blogs can evolve into full-fledged businesses, with brands clamoring to be featured by the style aficionados.
For some of the biggest influencers in fashion, blogs have served as catalysts to large scale sponsorships, advertising campaigns, design collaborations and book deals. These style enthusiasts have evolved into mainstays and purveyors of style, turning passion projects into brand opportunities.
On WordPress alone, 409 million people read more than 21.5 billion blog pages a month. These aren’t twee daily #ootd posts, either. Here are some of the fashion bloggers that brands can’t get enough of.
Chiara Ferragni, The Blonde Salad: 665,000 monthly page views, per Compete
Since 29-year-old Chiara Ferragni started The Blonde Salad in 2009, she has appeared on the cover of numerous global fashion magazines, wrote a book, dabbled in partnerships with Burberry and Dior, launched a popular shoe line (with styles that retail for upwards of $200) and is in talks for a collaboration with Ladurée....
Now to be honest, sometimes the resources they send are great, and from time to time I’ll even link to them.
But what would go SO much better would be if someone offered me something, anything related to what I’m working on.
So, in light of this movement towards depersonalization, I’m going to pitch you all on how you can engage with people BEFORE demanding something from them, as well as give you some ideas for what you can offer in that outreach email.
Here are 11 ways to build a relationship before asking for something in return.
Last month I wrote a post on the value of measuring engagement vs numbers when selecting an influencer for your company to work with. That post resonated with a lot of you so I wanted to expand on it and talk about the key considerations for your company when working with influencers.
Working with influencers and ‘sponsored content’ is a very popular option for companies these days, and done correctly, it can be a real benefit for your business. Here’s some of the things you should consider before working with influencers...
I just came across a quote in an eMarketer interview with an agency CEO that made me stop and shake my head: “We don’t start to work with an influencer unless they have 50,000 combined followers across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.”
This thinking is soooo backwards and lazy. Picking an influencer isn’t about the size of their network, it’s the connections they have to that network....
At CreativeLive, I'm constantly seeking out new business leaders to introduce to our audience. For me, this translates into a high volume of cold emails to people who are extremely busy.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve perfected my email approach and have had the privilege of opening up doors with people like Rand Fishkin, Tim Ferriss, Brian Dean, and more.
However, it didn't happen overnight. In fact, it wasn't until I had my own active blog and community of people reaching out to ask for help that I realized how poorly some of my emails must have come across. After hundreds of emails and countless hours of real-world practice, here are my top ten tips for emailing -- and getting a reply from -- really busy people. ...
These days, there are plenty of so-called influencers roaming the web trying to get their voices heard, but nine out of 10 of them have little substance and even less to offer.
Most resort to repackaging the advice of others, and end up adding to the noise instead of becoming the signal.
When Neil was starting out, he didn’t aspire to become an influencer. Instead, he worked day and night to find solutions to the problems that he and his colleagues were facing....
As our influencer marketing columnist Raymond Morin blogged sometimes ago, there are 3 main types of influencers: - celebrities - opinion leaders (traditional media, online media, social media) - ambassadors (satisfied customers, happy employees).
With the democratization of social media influence, there are simply more people that yield influence in social media. Perhaps this is one reason why Influencer Marketing continues to soar in 2015. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, because numerous stats have already documented the power of online recommendations...
Every year, Cision creates a list of the top 50 social media influencers on Twitter.
Our media research team pulled various lists of social media mavens on Twitter using Cision’s proprietary algorithm which looks for contextual relevancy, engagement levels, key terms and reach, among other components.
After personally vetting the lists, I’m happy to present to you our top 50, listed alphabetically...
The term “influencer” is wiggling its way through the tangled web. And it’s a hard one to catch because no one knows for certain what it looks like. Personally, I think that’s where the biggest challenge lies, because an influencer is like a changeling. It has a different image for every brand and often for every campaign of a brand.
Here is my own take on what an influencer is and a guide for where to find ideal influence to promote your business....
The people who you want to know are the influensters. Influenster is a product discovery platform and reviews site that enables consumers to find new products, and gain fresh insight and tips about new products so that all members can make better informed shopping decisions.
And we’re talking five million plus honest product reviews from 1.5M+ socially active trendsters, on over a million products for consumers to discover.
There’s also a gamification aspect to it, allowing trendsters and influensters a chance at receiving more new products....
As digital and mobile become ever more pervasive in our lives as consumers, so marketers need to tap into that and meet the demands of today’s connected consumer.
This is where the adoption of the Four Ms of Influence Marketing needs to be embraced as the natural evolution of the Four Ps, particularly when it comes to lead generation and understanding the customer life cycle via social media.
Why the Need for the Four Ms of Influence Marketing?
For all intents and purposes, any marketing via today’s multiple digital channels is influence marketing. The problem is, influence today is defined by social scoring platforms like Kred and PeerIndex.
While these platforms offer a decent starting point for who could potentially influence your customers to move along the purchase life cycle from awareness to intent to purchase, there have been too few success stories shared to show this is the case.Instead, brands are left with impressive amplification metrics, but no real ROI....
What is “vision”? Simply put, it’s the common alignment of a group of people aiming for the same goal. Whether it’s sports or business, having a vision is the single most important thing to motivate a team of individuals. Without it, you have chaos and you can’t possibly succeed.
What I enjoy so much about the digital media business is the larger vision that’s constantly on display around us, which creates a sense of excitement and motivation for those of us in the biz. This is the reason companies like Apple and Google do so well – because they craft a future vision that’s just the right mix of attainability and overly optimistic enthusiasm. When Apple holds its WWDC, trotting out people like Jimmy Iovine and Drake alongside Tim Cook, you see the company can create a goal and see it through to an end, whether an artistic vision or one that’s more business-oriented....
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What’s a marketer to do? We heard that influencer marketing was the next big thing. We heard about companies getting amazing results with it. But it seems you can’t go anywhere online recently without seeing headlines like this. Note the social shares on those two articles: 242,000 for the first one and nearly 50,000 for the second one. If influencer marketing is burning down, that’s a lot of people standing by with marshmallows to roast. But don’t panic. These two articles, and many more like them, refer to a specific kind of influencer marketing. Generally speaking: the bad kind. Specifically, the practice of writing massive checks to teenagers with a lot of followers on Instagram or Vine in exchange for product promotion. That particular economy, which converted cash to “influence” or “awareness,” was pretty much doomed from the start. You’re in trouble any time you convert real money to something fundamentally unmeasurable....
f you’re thinking about using social influencers to grow your audience, then read on.
As the Director of Marketing for London-based social media startup 6Tribes, I’ve been tasked with quickly growing our user base and have had great success over the last few months using YouTube influencers as a marketing channel.
I’ve learned a lot about how to get the most out of these partnerships, so I thought I’d share with you six things that I’ve learned – which I hope you’ll find useful if you’re considering using social influencers to promote your brand.
Influence marketing and native advertising are gaining popularity as brands continue to shift away from “interruption marketing” and embrace a more customer-centric approach. But in trying to sell without selling, it’s possible brands have made the “soft sell” a bit too soft, disguising advertising as organic influencer posts. Smart marketers have been extra vigilant about disclosure since the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) issued an enforcement policy last December. Actually, the truly smart have been tightening up their own disclosure requirements since the FTC updated its online advertising disclosure guidelines in March 2013. The threat’s been building for years. The agency’s been beating the drums for a while. Statements, letters and guidelines have warned marketers and bloggers of the oncoming campaign against sponsored content that doesn’t look sponsored: social media posts that don’t clearly state that they’re contest entries, influencer posts that don’t disclose that the influencer received compensation from the brand, etc.....
This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of The ROI of Influencer Marketing. This webinar featured Eric T. Tung (@EricTTung) Brand Ambassador for companies like Ford, Microsoft, Verizon and MasterCard, Kathleen Hessert (@KathleenHessert) CEO of Sports Media Challenge and Eric Berkowitz (@tracx) SVP of Global Services at Tracx. This webinar was sponsored by Tracx. We discussed ideas and tips from finding influencers for your brand to calculating ROI on your program.
Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:
- Not all influencers are created equal – Brands should look beyond social metrics into psychographics and contextual intelligence to determine the ideal candidates
- Bigger doesn’t mean better – A large following or readership does not inherently make a person influential
- The ROI of Influence – True influence drives action, not just awareness...
Influencer outreach has taken on a whole new meaning in 2016, and it has become crucial for brands to develop relationships with influencers. Getting the most from your influencers requires more than a simple email or InMail. You need to adopt an extended research and outreach process, cultivate the relationship, and continue it well beyond any campaign-related focus.
Here are 4 questions that you must ask yourself to pinpoint why your influencer marketinginitiative may not be as successful as you had hoped....
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about laptops? The tactile sensation beneath your fingertips as they gracefully jump around the keyboard from home position? The calming ohm sound that seems to emanate from the machine when you turn it on? That alluring hard drive capacity? What about included software? Number of auxiliary outputs? Ooh la la. No matter how you spin it, it’s difficult to make laptops seem…well… sexy. That is until HP had the ingenious idea to take laptops completely out of the tech vertical and see how their product floats with other viewers.
Not to be rude, but HP isn’t exactly everyone’s idea of a luxury tech device. This generation tends to live, breathe, and generally go gaga over Apple’s sleek designs. It oozes fashion, vogue, and lifestyle, honey! However, just because HP is perhaps a more affordable option doesn’t mean it isn’t chic. And to prove it, HP tapped into trendsetters in a completely unique way. Before we go deeper into the big reveal, please allow a brief intermission in which we applaud, bow down, and shower HP’s marketing team with endless pastel colored macarons. Okay, we are done....
Most online influencers say they accept monetary compensation from marketers in exchange for posting about a brand, according to a recent report from GroupHigh.
The report was based on data from a survey of 441 influencers; respondents were selected based on size of reach, social footprint, and vertical. The topics covered by the influencers surveyed include parenting, fashion, DIY, technology, and food, among others.
Some 85% of influencers say they accept monetary compensation from brands, 11% say they do not take any form of payments, and 4% only accept only products....
The Evolution of Influencer Marketing and The 5 Influencer Insights That Matter Most provides an overview of how consumer influence has changed in recent years due to the increased use of social media, as well as a breakdown of the five influencer attributes that matter most to today's audiences. It's time to leverage your influencers for the greater good. Let Tracx show you how.
While I consider myself more of a "creative" type I can sometimes be a nerd for data and numbers and graphs!The other day, I found that I had a ton of recent research reports saved off on influencer marketing. So for my own aid and now yours, I put my ten favorite research reports in a pretty SlideShare presentation and highlighted my favorite facts from each one....
At Onalytica we have been looking closely at the transformation of PR as we know it. Our vision is to evolve media relations into influencer relations professionals by managing relationships with hundreds of key influencers rather than just journalists.
Think about the numerous analysts, politicians, bloggers, thought leaders, industry professionals, stakeholders and influential consumers that all have big audiences that you want to reach. Influencer relations is a truly essential part of modern PR (we also offer a B2B influencer relations platform for PR practitioners)
One of the most time consuming parts of influencer relations (or influencer marketing) is identifying the right thought leaders. What if you just wrote a new blog and you have no idea what influencers would be interested in your content?
We’re here to help! We built a new tool to do this. Before it took up to an hour to find 10-20 relevant influencers, now you can do it in less than a minute…
The amount of digital content that’s produced daily is mind blowing. With so much online noise, readers are getting smart about who they turn to for inspiration and advice, and meanwhile, they’re filtering out the rest. They’re turning to influencers that have earned their trust by constantly providing the best inspiration.
According to a recent infographic by The Shelf, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from other people – even someone they don’t know – over brand content. This changes the scope of marketing for every brand trying to get in front of their target demographic. In turn, they’re creating strategic partnerships with niche influencers to tell their brand story in an authentic way, tap into their audience, build trust, and ultimately, increase their sales.
To learn more about the emerging space of influencer marketing, take a peek at the below infographic....
How do you find, build, foster, and manage influencer relationships? Three subject-matter experts – all influencers themselves – offer valuable how-to tips.
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Very funny take down on thought leaders.