infuse - the blog for Influencer Marketing

Directional influence and the Obama question

2008-11-04T12:36:00.003Z

A few days ago I read an interesting post by Auren Hoffman on homophily – the phenomenon of being affected by one's friends and close associates. Intuitively this makes sense – we all make decisions influenced by those around us.

But there’s an important distinction to make between the existence of influence and its direction. What I mean is this: you might be influenced in the purchase of a new digital camera by a friend who has bought one recently. But are you more or less likely to buy the same model as your friend? You might be inclined not to buy that model, even though it might be the best model for you, precisely because your friend just bought one.

I was reminded of this case while reading Dan Ariely’s excellent Predictably Irrational. His example of ordering beer demonstrates the phenomenon at work. It turns out that when ordering out loud people in a group opt for more variety, not less. Ariely suggests that this is because people need to choose something different to show they have a mind of their own, that their order conveys individuality, or perhaps that they are trying to impress.

This might mean that people order beer they don’t actually want to drink. Irrational maybe, but experimentally validated.

The really interesting part is that when people are allowed to order in private, by writing down their order, they order what they want.

Understanding this, from an influence viewpoint, is important:

People are influenced by others, but that influence may cause a decision contrary to the choices made by others;
People may make better (or at least more truthful) decisions by being protected from the influence of others and making their decisions in private.

This is very pertinent today of all days, as the US goes to the polls. The well-documented Bradley effect is an example of how some people will state their voting intentions in public, but vote differently when in the privacy of the polling booth. Will people who said they'll vote for Obama really vote for him?

We’ll see shortly in which direction the US public has truly been influenced.

The influence of online product reviewers

2008-10-30T11:56:00.003Z

Rubicon Consulting has written a white paper based on research conducted on US-based web users. Rubicon is run by Nilofer Merchant, with whom I worked in compiling case studies for the book.

There are some important points to pull out from the study. It finds that those people that regularly post reviews and comments are not your average customer, but enthusiasts (or enthusiastic detractors). Some firms may decide that these folk exist at the extreme ends of the customer spectrum, are not typical of general customer, and can therefore be ignored.

This is a mistake: although average customers don’t post reviews they do read them. Importantly, product reviews drive product purchases, so ignoring the review posters is dangerous. As the paper concludes:

“The most frequent contributors are the influencers, and they have a strong influence on purchase decisions because they write most of the online recommendations and reviews.”

This means that firms can’t ignore frequent contributors, but they have to talk to them in a different way to ‘normal’ customers. This is music to my ears, echoing Influencer50’s own mantra of “Don’t pitch to influencers.”

Other findings I picked out include:

Approaches that work well in one type of community may fail utterly in another. Confirmation of the ‘horses for courses’ guide to influence ecosystems.
Confirmation of the 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers, 9% of users contribute from time to time, and 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions.
Influence of product reviews varies by category. You’re more likely to use an online review to buy a digital camera than you are to choose a doctor. (I’m relieved to hear this!)
Online discussion is theatre: “Web discussion is a performance in which a small group of people interact with each other, and with companies, for the benefit, education, and amusement of everyone else.” Understand this and it shapes your entire approach to online communities.

There is a ton of other information on web usage in the US, which makes interesting reading. For example, the research finds that web users are more likely to vote Democratic. That should be an interesting theory to check in the coming week…

Laura Ramos on B2B Marketing Trends

2008-10-24T12:30:00.003+01:00

Laura Ramos runs Forrester's B2B Marketing programme. I follow her research closely as, although it's US-centric, it produces some fascinating data on what B2B decision-makers do. Laura's latest comments focuses on B2B Marketing Trends. Pretty much consistent with what we see in the UK - the highlights are (with my notes):

Commoditisation leading to a lack of differentiation, which leads to marketing all sounding the same (so true);
B2B buyers buying like consumers. Using peer reviews and social media as decision making inputs (perhaps less true in the UK?);
Ad avoidance and sales call avoidance - using web sources to delay contact with vendors (I think there is generic 'marketing avoidance' going on);
Globalisation. Uh huh.

Laura suggests that the outcome of these trends will be the death of B2B Marketing. I agree, at least insofar as B2B marketing can't exist in the way it does. The justification that marketing "creates demand" is slammed by Laura as a cop-out. It needs to be more measurable in sales terms and more aligned with sales.

I'm looking forward to Part 2 of Laura's comments...

An interview with Nick Hayes

2008-10-21T10:28:00.003+01:00

Nick, the president and founder of Influencer50, appeared on Webmaster radio last week, covering the basics of Influencer Marketing. It's actually an easy listen, and you can stream the interview podcast here. Or download the mp3 here if you want to miss the commercials!

Welcome Barbara French

2008-10-21T10:10:00.002+01:00

A belated welcome is due to Barbara French, who joined Influencer50's San Francisco office in August. Barbara is well-known in Analyst Relations circles through her Tekrati service and blog. She's already contributing a ton of brain power to our US operation, and is sharing this publicly via her new blog, Sway.

Please welcome Barbara to the fold, and check out her blog for new insights into the world of influence.

How to engage with influencers

2008-10-21T10:05:00.002+01:00

This advice is an older post, but it still bears up as a good template for engaging with influencers.

It is not specific to word of mouth marketing...

Don’t forget the most obvious influencers

2008-10-16T15:36:00.002+01:00

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, the most important influencer on your customers is:
You.

Two particular dimensions are important:

Your product. If your product sucks no amount of influencer outreach is going to fix it. Start there, then consider influencers.

Your sales force. 85% of purchase decisions are impacted by the relationship between your sales force and the customer, according to the CMO Council*. In fact, it’s probably 100% (if you think about it) but remember that the impact may be positive or negative. Get the relationship wrong and no third party influencer has the power to retrieve the situation.

*Closing the Gap: The Sales & Marketing Alignment Imperative Executive Summary. Summary report available free.

Online influence – here comes Google

2008-10-15T10:17:00.004+01:00

Via John Bell, I stumbled across an interesting post by Heather Green at Business Week on Google’s imminent method for ranking influencers. I shudder at the impact this will have on discussion of influence. We’ll end up comparing influencers based on the number of times they appear on a search result or, worse, whether they appear in the first ten returned results.

As John notes, influence is complex and context-specific. The specifics of influence are such that one might be a world expert in a given subject (Scotch whisky, web site development) but have very little authority in an adjacent area (cognac, web site design).

A feature (flaw?) in measuring influence is that you can only measure what you can measure. Google can only measure what it is aware of, which is the frequency and connectivity of web pages. It cannot determine (as far as I know) the impact that reading a particular page has on the subsequent actions of that reader. Did the reader make a purchase decision based on the content of the page, or rush off to sell their stock in RBS? Who knows.

Connectivity – the number of connections an individual has – is a poor proxy for influence. Why? It’s too easy to fake. We all know the people that have 500+ connections on LinkedIn, yet have very limited influence. Likewise with MySpace. The term for people with lots of connections but no influence is Bore.

The longer term, and greater, threat from Google is that influencers are considered a route to market for advertisers. We’ve already seen this sort of thing emerging from Buzzlogic – Google will be able to do this magnified a zillion times.

If Google’s plans get more firms to talk about influence, then fine. But I fear that it will dumb influence down to a few ‘magic’ numbers that have tenuous relevance to real influence.

In the presence of a super-influencer

2008-10-09T12:27:00.003+01:00

I wrote a few weeks back about how to use super-influencers, those rare folk that have true influence over market shape and direction at a macro level. I suggested that you should use them (if you have the opportunity) to attract other, perhaps more focused or local influencers, thus assisting in the overall engagement of the influencer community. If influencers help to attract customers, then super-influencers help to attract influencers.

So it was my pleasure last week to host, for Microsoft, an influencer-only event featuring Steve Ballmer. The audience of influencers was clearly captivated by Steve’s open and candid style of presenting, as well as his ability to field questions on a wide range of subjects.

But most influencers were just keen to be in the same room as the main guy at Microsoft. Just this fact alone gives them something to talk about to their networks, and thereby reinforces their own influence.

I expect some of the influencers (they’re from the small business community) will blog separately about their morning with Steve – I’ll link to the interesting ones as they appear, but here's a taster from Emma Jones.

WOMMA launches Influencer Marketing handbook

2008-10-08T09:17:00.002+01:00

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has just launched its Influencer Marketing handbook for comment. It’s worth a look.

I’m hugely relieved to see that WOMMA has resisted much of the nonsense that is talked about influencers, especially in the consumer markets. No paid “brand advocates”, no Big Seed Marketing, and no celebrities. Instead, some straightforward advice to get firms thinking about influence, and who might have it.

WOMMA tends to be very consumer-focused, and I’d like to have seen more reference to B2B influence, where the dynamics work differently, but that will come over time. More importantly, it ignores the subject of how to identify and rank influencers, since (I assert) some influencers are more influential than others. My guess is that measuring influence is in the ‘too hard’ tray, certainly as far as proposing a standard that works across all markets and sectors.

In all, the handbook is a useful source for those considering Influencer Marketing, and its bibliography is the most comprehensive I’ve seen. It certainly introduced some blogs that I’d not heard of, so I’ll check these out.

The handbook is available for public comment until Oct 20th.

Marketing spend grows, but in the wrong direction

2008-10-02T09:16:00.003+01:00

IDC has announced its latest marketing budget figures* for 2008. Rich Vancil’s program has been running for several years now, and it’s based on a consistent sampling of traditionally big spenders in marketing. It’s an excellent gauge of marketing’s current and intended spend amongst large IT vendors.

This year’s figures show an increase of 3.5% over 2007. Lower than the past three years, but at least it’s growth, right? Wrong. The percentage growth doesn’t account for inflation, or for the overall IT market growth, both of which are higher. So, in real terms, marketing spend is declining.

Does this indicate, or pre-empt, a decline in the overall market conditions for IT? Could be. Certainly, the prospects are gloomy (read here* and here).

But it’s always struck me that marketing, if it does what it’s supposed to, should be one of the last things to shrink in times of adversity. If marketing works, which means (to me) that it enables sales, then you’d think firms desperate for sales would do more marketing, not less, during a recession.

Which then leads me to conclude that either firms are just daft for not recognising this, or they know that marketing doesn’t really work that well yet were still spending money on it. Which is itself daft. Or that they don’t know whether marketing works or not, but it’s something that everyone else does.

Which is even dafter.

*Free registration required

Marketing in times of uncertainty

2008-09-30T07:38:00.001+01:00

Someone told me that recessions cycle around roughly every 18 years. What do they know?! It seems just like yesterday when the IT industry was flattened by the post Y2K and post 9/11 gloom. An now here we are again. If you’re in any doubt of what’s coming, read Richard Holway’s pessimistic but usually accurate view of the short term future.

Marketing’s core purpose comes to the fore in times of recession. If it doesn’t impact sales, directly and measurably, then it’s impact is questionable. Demonstrable short term sales impact is the best defence against cuts, because in a recession it’s all about short term sales.

Budget cuts are inevitable. This is good news, if you’re still in a job to be able to spend your diminished funds.

Firstly, it means that you must stop doing things that don’t work, or can’t be measured. What would happen if you didn’t do the next event you’ve got planned? What’s the impact of not doing PR for a quarter? Is that DM campaign really worthwhile? Cut what doesn’t work and invest it activity that truly generates sales. Be bold. Ask tough questions.

Budget reductions also mean that you have to be creative, which is what marketing types should be good at. So try new things. I expect more companies to invest in social networking technologies, as they try to reach their customers in new and innovative (and cheaper) ways. I think word-of-mouth campaigns will grow, looking for referrals and leads from existing customers. And I believe vendors will engage more with partner organisations in structured and sophisticated ways, like SAP’s Industry Value Network approach.

Recession is tough for everyone. But there are opportunities to take, if you’re brave enough to chuck out old and ineffective ways of marketing.

Batten down the hatches. Good luck.

It's ALL to do with alignment

2008-09-25T20:15:00.003+01:00

Funny how two unconnected things come together at the same time to contrive an “Aha” moment. Serendipity, synchronicity or spooky co-incidence. Whatever.

Anyway, Christine (Influencer50’s biz development lead in San Francisco) and I are discussing methods of engaging influencers. With over 20 different types of influencer to consider, we need an integrated method for the process, while catering for the wide differences in agendas, personalities and expectations.

Then just yesterday I was re-reading a Hugh post on Digital Nomads, when he uses the word “Alignment” to describe Dell’s blog attempt to sidle up to mobile workers.

Aha!

Influencer engagement is ALL to do with alignment. It’s about finding out what influencers do, when and how they influence, and what their agenda and motivations are. Once you know this you can (and should) align your outreach activities with your influencers on an individual (or at most clustered) basis.

So what? There are two traps to fall into when considering alignment with influencers. The first is that it’s actually quite hard to align yourself with a host of differing types of people. In fact, it’s hard enough aligning with different types of journalist or analyst. What about academics, community leaders, customers, regulators and the other numerous influencer types? Some discipline and structure is require, which is what Christine and I are working on.

The second trap is perhaps less obvious, but it is more commonly encountered. It is that alignment requires you to align with the influencers, not the other way around. Most vendors want to get influencers to agree with them. You should be looking for ways to agree with influencers, even if this means changing fundamental things about your business.

They are the influencers, after all.

Influence as vocabulary for integrated marketing

2008-09-19T16:08:00.001+01:00

One of Influencer50’s first clients initially thought that Influencer Marketing could unite the disparate silos that existed in the marketing department. Thanks for the confidence, guys!

Much as we’d like to position Influencer Marketing as a panacea for marketing’s ailments, it doesn’t work quite like that. But strangely, and probably because the client’s expectation was set from the beginning, the outcome was closer to their aspiration than we thought possible.

It works like this.

A major issue in marketing is the silo mentality that divides operations into a wide range of disjointed activities. So we have PR, AR, partner marketing, events (from conferences to podcasts), user groups, collateral development, and so on, as well as a host of telesales/telemarketing and mailings.

Now Influencer Marketing doesn’t promise to unite all of these distinct activities. But what it does do is identify where the influence on decision makers lies. It does ask the question: “How does this activity relate to influence on decision makers?” And it does suggest that if and activity cannot demonstrate an impact on influence then you should stop doing it.

Influencer Marketing applies right across the marketing operational domain. It covers press and analysts, and partner organisations, and end-users, and events and other influence categories. So it offers a vocabulary for discussing the widest range of marketing activities, uniting at least the terminology for discussing and managing marketing.

Our client runs marketing operational management meetings, at which all representatives report on their activities. The reports are provided in terms of their impact on the identified influencers relevant to the activity. So PR reports on progress in engaging with the most influential journalists. Events are scheduled to leverage the most influential conferences (a diminishing category), and influencers are solicited to speak at client-arranged seminars. Partnership strategy is oriented around the most influential people in third-party organisations, even if formal partnerships don’t already exist.

Thus influencers have become a way of everybody reporting back using the same terms, and with the same degree of focus on who really carries influential with decision-making prospects.

We, and our client, are smart enough to recognise that this isn’t truly integrated marketing. But it’s a useful start, easy to implement, and aids management. It also helps to present marketing in a more organised and professional light to the rest of the organisation. This is important, especially with a recession looming and the budgetary axe being lifted.

Influence in SMBs

2008-09-17T09:32:00.003+01:00

Barbara has picked up on the new CMB Sage Market Pulse study, which shows who SMBs use in making IT decisions. A high dependence on independent consultants and peers, followed by (whisper it) vendors' sales reps.

The influence of vendors on their own markets is typically understated. A typical buying pattern of an SMB is: get quotes from three vendors. A consultant or systems integrator or VAR may provide this quote gathering and assessment service by proxy. But that's pretty much all there is to it in the supply chain.

Little analyst penetration at this price point. But what's stranger is the absence of journalists and bloggers, much of whose information and opinion is widely available and free. And where are the other sources of advice, such as industry associations, government agencies and other influencers not in the supply chain. Was this an omission in the survey?

Anyway, the survey supports Forrester's own study last year, which found similar sources of influence, though in a slightly different order.

The main point is that SMBs are influenced by different folk than larger organisations. Indeed, SMBs are not a contiguous group, and there are many variations in influence dynamics within segments of the broad SMB space. So watch out if you're targeting firms other than enterprise size - you may be surprised who pop up in the influence ecosystem.

How to use ‘super-influencers’

2008-09-17T09:27:00.001+01:00

Sometimes we come across super-influencers. We define these people as having a high and broad level of influence across a wide variety of decision types. Most often, upper-influencers hold the most senior positions in business and government. Think Davos or TED, and you’re close to defining a commuity of super-influencers.

The problem with super-influencers is that they are too high-level and too hard to reach that, unless you are trying to influence other super-influencers, the effort required to engage with them is disproportionate to the likely benefits. The entry price for a corporate executive to Davos is something like $250,000 and even then there’s no guarantee of sitting next to the person you really want to meet.

The truth is, most decisions affecting your corporate health are made in a much more mundane, but reachable, community. Which is why most influencers on an Influencer50 list are grounded in practical, though deep, influence on decision makers.

Still, when a super-influencer drops in your lap, you should feel obliged to use them well. So the next time your CEO announces a visit, what should you do?

Super-influencers are so-called because they influencer other influencers. So get your super-influencer in front of as many other influencers as possible. Attract other super-influencers and make an occasion of it. Get influencers talking to each other. Why? Because influencers get a lot of their influence from networking with other influencers. Make this happen, be seen as the facilitator, and your influencers will thank you for it.

Idea diffusion and influence

2008-09-11T11:00:00.003+01:00

I was prompted to think more about Duncan Watts’s ideas by Sarah Fraser’s comment on my post on influencer communities, and by her post on professor Watt’s theories.

In fact, I’ve just finished reading Watts’s Six Degrees, which was excellent and more accessible (I found) than Barabasi’s Linked. So Professor Watts is top of mind right now.

Here’s where I think the key difference between what Watts says and my practical experience. Watts talks about the role of influencers in the diffusion of ideas. As Seth says, use ‘sneezers’ with influence if you want to crack a market. Watts disagrees that you can predict what ideas diffuse, or even whether you can identify influencers that might make diffusion easier or more likely. It’s pretty much random, according to Watts.

I agree. If you’re trying to use influencers to spread ideas and concepts, then good luck but don’t bet the firm.

My own view is that influencers can be identified, and can assist greatly, in the decision-making process. That is, not whether an idea is spread or not, but whether an idea is adopted in the end. Idea diffusion is part of the process, but it’s just the start. A decision-making process is often a long and time-consuming activity. In the B2B world especially, a decision may take years to emerge. Idea diffusion is necessary, but not sufficient.

I explored this relationship between influence and the decision-making process in the book, and also posted on it (in summary form) here. Idea planting (as I called it) is right at the start of the process, but is relatively low down in the awareness of senior decision makers. Thus idea diffusers (connectors, sneezers, etc) may not be that influential in affecting the ultimate decision. There are a whole bunch of other influencers that intervene after ideas are sown.

Idea diffusion is also important in the process of deciding whether to do something. Do I adopt SOA? Do I need a Web2.0 strategy? Do I need a new car? But it plays less of a role in the subsequent decision of what to buy. Different influencers are in play at this more practical stage, like product reviewers or case studies or implementers.

The only problem I have with Professor Watts’s arguments is that when he doubts the role of influencers in any aspect of life, it doesn’t fit with real world experience and intuition. My guess is that we can all think of people who are influential in certain areas of life. Fitting this experience and intuition into a practical marketing approach is what Influencer Marketing is all about.

Evolving PR towards influencers

2008-09-09T12:09:00.003+01:00

Seth reminds me that PR is a diminishing activity, in terms of its importance. The more enlightened PR firms accept that their business has been commoditised, with minimal opportunities for differentiation and fierce price competition. The question is, what do you do about it?

As ever, it’s a mindset change that’s required. Most start-up firms I know begin their marketing activities by recruiting a PR agency. Why? Because that’s what everyone else does.

Why not try to engage with the 50 most important people in your target market? Sure, some of these will be journalists, and you should definitely reach out to them. But you’ll probably find there are only a relative handful of them, which means you can treat them differently. Find out what they want to hear, what they’d find useful, what they’re interested in. Concentrate on being a resource for these most important journalists.

It means you don’t have to go chasing after the hundred other hacks that cover your space. Then use the time saved to focus on other influencer types, such as analysts, academics, consultants, bloggers, standards bodies and regulators.

The catch? It’s hard to determine which of the hundred journalists are really influential, by which I mean influential on decision makers. And it’s even harder to determine who else is influential, beyond journalists. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, or can’t, do it

Influencing outsourcing

2008-09-09T11:52:00.003+01:00

Barbara points to a new study by Global Services and AMR on the role of outsource advisory firms. Interesting stuff, and good insight into an often under-the-radar group of influencers.

In the book's case study on Wipro, sourcing advisers played the central role in their influencer outreach strategy, more important than analysts and business consultants. So their role is well understood by at least some services firms. But how many have pro-active and funded programmes to engage with sourcing advisers?

More lists of influencers

2008-09-04T14:23:00.003+01:00

You know how I like lists of influencers. Or rather, how I like to rant at their general pointlessness.

So I got all excited about another list source, called Most Public. It’s an index of the most influential public figures in some predefined news community. Like New York.

I'm troubled by any information source that claims "a teenage Twitterer may have as powerful a voice as the New York Times editorial board". What nonsense, at least without qualification (such as, influential on whom?).

Oh, and it has to be online influence. The measurement criteria, which are published, make it clear that it’s the online world that is being indexed.

In fact, I actually quite like the idea of this type of list, especially when there’s an obvious methodology in play. Disagree with the method, but you can’t claim that the list is made up randomly (unlike most compilations of influencers).

Still I can’t help wondering, who are these people influential on? My first guess is, other people on the list. There’s a tendency in the online blogosphere twitterverse web2.0 world to refer to other people in the same community. This is, of course, natural since we gravitate to others like us. Fair enough. Except don’t assume that the online community is a proxy for the rest of the world. It isn't. In a recent survey we conducted for a client, the most popular answer to "Which blogs do you read?" was "What's a blog?"

I’m left with the impression that the New York Most Public list is interesting, like a top ten list of marching band music is interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. From a practical point of view, I’d rather see a top 50 list of the most influential restaurant critics in NY. Or who’s influencing advertising trends in print media. Or who’s influencing the economy. Or who’s influencing voting intentions.

Lists are all very well, but they beg the question, what are they for. Too often, this question is left unasked.

A reminder

2008-09-04T14:17:00.002+01:00

When considering influence, please remember to pose the question: influential on whom?

It saves a lot of bother if you have this question in mind before embarking on any Influencer program, or start composing a list of “influencers”, or even dismissing the concept of influencers.

It also helps if you have a decent understanding of the answer. Hopefully it will be something useful like “Influential on our customers and prospects”.

Holiday thoughts on marketing

2008-08-28T17:27:00.001+01:00

Just back from holiday during which I had time to reflect on fundamental stuff while horizontal and sunkissed. In fact I had some great “being marketed to” experiences, which just confirmed the basics in market. (Context: tourist volumes are down by (some say) 30% in Tenerife.)

1. Have a great product. Let people try the great product, for free. If it’s truly great they’ll buy it. Example: every restaurant along the beach front is touting for business, showing their menus and encouraging reluctant holidaymakers to venture inside. One restaurant, not even on the beach front, is full. That’s the one that’s handing out free samples of fried cod. It tasted great. There was a queue just to get the free samples. Why did no other restaurant try this, and hand out samples of paella? Near-zero incremental cost, ROI in one order.
2. You can differentiate in a commodity market. In Tenerife, all the resorts look basically the same. All the beaches look the same. All the restaurants serve the same food. All the shops sell the same stuff. Differentiation comes through service, through care for customer needs, through creativity. (Note to self: not everyone will appreciate attempts at differentiation. Elvis impersonators appeal to a niche market.)
3. If you have to lie to your prospects to get their attention, there’s something fundamentally wrong in your approach. I’m not sure exactly what the young people offering prize draw scratch cards were selling (timeshare?) but after the fifth time of being accosted even my kids recognised the script. No, you cannot hand the winning ticket in to the tourist office. There are not only three winning tickets each day (or I am improbably lucky, since I won five times). No, I haven’t possible won a cash prize, but I’ll bet you a tenner I’ve won the “free” holiday.

And they say holidays are relaxing…

Why does advertising slump in a recession?

2008-08-07T09:50:00.002+01:00

The FT notes that advertising budgets are being cut, typically by double digit percentages.*

If advertising works - that is, it sells more of what you're selling - you'd do more of it in a recession, wouldn't you? When every penny counts, surely you'd pump every available budget into selling more, including advertising. If advertising works...

Which just makes me even more convinced that advertising really doesn't work.

I also hear on the grapevine that operational marketing budgets are being cut at many tech vendors, as recession looms. Again, why would they do this if marketing works?

In a recession, every sale is harder to make, since customers are more reluctant to part with cash. Effective marketing must surely be an imperative.

Is this too simplistic a view? Please tell me.

*Free registration required.

What constitutes quality in an influencer?

2008-08-05T20:48:00.002+01:00

One of Influencer50’s criteria by which we score and rank influencers is Quality of Impact. But what is 'quality' in terms of influence?

Firstly, quality is not an all-or-nothing concept. It might be obvious if an individual has a lot of it, or none at all, but what about the large grey area in the middle?

We use Robert Cialdini’s book (bible?) on influence to provide the framework for our Quality measure. In his discussion on authority, Cialdini poses two questions:

Is this person truly an expert (measured by the person’s credentials and the relevance of those credentials to the matter in hand)?
How truthful can we expect the expert to be?

We simplify these to 'Expertise' and 'Independence.'

In the book we discuss the relative importance of these two dimensions, and offered the following diagram:

The diagram implies that 100% expertise and 0% independence means that influence is severely constrained. Similarly, 0% expertise and 100% independence also represents low influence. But is this true in the real world?

There are many cases where people have 100% independence and 0% expertise. My own influence on the wine trade is a good example of this (never trust my wine suggestions), and it translates (intuitively) to low influence. But is the converse true? I think I’d rather buy wine from an expert who works for a wine producer, even if they recommend their own wine. In fact, I’d surprised if they didn’t. As long as they’ve declared their interest I know that the advice I’m getting is trustworthy, if qualified.

Back in the real world, can vendors be influence on the market? Absolutely. No-one expects them to be independent, but they can demonstrate their ample expertise, and be influential.

So the relationship between expertise and independence looks more like this:

In other words, you’ve got to have some minimum level of relevant expertise to be influential at all. Independence increases influence, but it is not a pre-requisite for it.

Why fifty influencers?

2008-07-30T15:10:00.001+01:00

You’d be amazed how often I get asked, “So, why Influencer Fifty?” Easy answer: because we identify a minimum of fifty influencers for our clients as a kick-start to their influencer community programs.

But why fifty? What if we only want 25? Or what if we want 100?

It turns out that, for most B2B markets, fifty is the optimal number of people to reach out to, to manage appropriately, and to draw some conclusions from. Too few influencers, and you risk identifying just the obvious influencers: analysts and journalists. Too many, and you’ll get swamped: few organisations can appropriately manage more than fifty influential individuals.

Often, our clients will know some of the influencers we identify (though they usually don’t know their relative ranking). So we typically provide the top 75 or 80 influencers, so that they still have 50 or so individuals that are new to them.

In four years we’ve never had a client that has known more than half their influencer community. Usually it’s 10-15% - that’s between 5 and 8 influencers known to a vendor organisation.