influencers

Are Bloggers/Influencers, Worth the Money to Influence Consumers?

Are bloggers/influencers, worth the money to influence consumers?

My take…

#1… it’s all about the situation, the context, and the bloggers/influencers. #2… it’s most often, although not always, more about the content than the “influence.”
#3… everyone influences someone, so empower your customers, potential customers, and especially employees personal influence.
#4… most of what the marketing community refers to as “influence” is simply media.

You are buying media impressions (hopefully contextual and/or interesting ones) so measure and invest in them that way.

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Brand Immersion with Contests… Don’t Forget About the Relationship!

A well-structured contest — wisely integrated in social media, encouraging participation of groups, and easily enabling the sharing and including of the social graph of participants — will bring consumers into your brand experience.  Savvy marketers can leverage contests to increase both short- and long-term return.

As with any marketing campaign using social media, a contest needs to be part of an integrated media strategy, using a blend of social and traditional media as appropriate for your brand’s consumers. And as always, remember to keep your message consistent.  A great contest that does not match your brand message is a waste of your resources and does little to add long-term value. Many are using strictly social contests to grow Facebook “likes” and Twitter “followers,” and this is ok if that is your objective, but keep in mind those are very targeted initiatives and offer little value to the brand experience.

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POP psychology of Social Sampling

Recently, I was offered a box of #popchips from a twitter friend of mine who – apparently – was considered a key Toronto influencer according to Klout. At first I actually thought it was a hoax, but much to my surprise I received the box of perfectly “popped” chips and they were, as promised, quite delicious.

Now, I’m not writing this post to describe or define whether or not popchips were a good snack (though they were). No; rather, I’m writing to talk about how the popchips brand easily and smartly tapped into the psychology of status – and it worked!

As I’ve previously mentioned: the psychology of status – a concept originally coined by Herbert Hyman in 1942 – explains that people use groups of reference to determine their rank in status, as well as to determine a point of reference for where they would like to see their status go.

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Quick Tips on How to Get Your Startup Noticed

I had the chance to sit down with Adarsh Pallian, the CEO and Co-Founder of Geotoko, a Vancouver-based startup that measures location based deals, to ask him how startups should begin marketing their new products.  Pallin did not hold back, and left me with some fantastic tips to kick start the marketing engine.

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The Interest Graph on Twitter is Alive: Studying Starbucks Top Followers

Social media is maturing as are the people embracing its most engaging tools and networks. Perhaps most notably, is the maturation of relationships and how we are expanding our horizons when it comes to connecting to one another. What started as the social graph, the network of people we knew and connected to in social networks, is now spawning new branches that resemble how we interact in real life.

This is the era of the interest graph – the expansion and contraction of social networks around common interests and events. Interest graphs represent a potential goldmine for brands seeking insight and inspiration to design more meaningful products and services as well as new marketing campaigns that better target potential stakeholders.

While many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors, many are simply documenting activity and mentions as a reporting function and in some cases, as part of conversational workflow. However, there’s more to Twitter intelligence than tracking conversations.

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@ChrisBrogan to ROCK #MMchat November 22nd!


We’re very pleased to relate to all of you #MMchat tweeps out there that @ChrisBrogan will be our SPECIAL guest on #MMchat on Monday November 22nd at 8:00pm eastern!!


The topic for our chat with Chris is one that continues to grow in both importance and impact and that is The Role of Major Influencers in Cause Marketing. We look forward to Chris’s insights and examples in this regard based on his previous experiences in cause marketing programs.

Hope you’re all as excited as I am to have @ChrisBrogan join us and will all make the time to be with us on November 22nd, for it truly is all of you who make #MarketerMonday Chat matter!

Remember #MMchat makes Mondays MARVELOUS!!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

What type of social network influences behaviour?

Yesterday we looked at the motivations for why people engage in different social venues; this morning I came across an interesting new study looking at what type of social network best influences behaviour.

Because it’s all very well if a network spreads information like wildfire, but if that information doesn’t prompt users to do something – buy the product, sign up for the event, stop smoking, change the way they talk about the brand – it’s all so much worthless WOM.

Didn’t I hear something about this? via Lab2112@Flickr

The study, from MIT assistant professor of system dynamics and economic sociology Damon Centola, looked at the spread of health-related behaviour in two different types of social networks – one based around ‘long ties’, or many distant connections, and one based on denser clusters of more closely connected people.

Sociologists have traditionally believed that long ties are the key to the rapid and broad spread of word of mouth, an insight reinforced by a Guardian study presented at a WOMMA UK briefing last year. However, Centola found that to change behaviour, you’re much better off focusing on clustered networks.

It makes human common sense. It’s easy for us to quickly pass on a piece of content via a loosely connected contact; but to understand something more complex, or change ingrained behaviour, we’ll need exposure more than once, and from trusted and emotionally impactful sources. There is more work to be done, but as Centola says,

“For about 35 years, wisdom in the social sciences has been that the more long ties there are in a network, the faster a thing will spread. It’s startling to see that this is not always the case.”

The study is intended to help improve the design of effective health networks, but it has obvious implications for marketing. We’ve always emphasised the need for multiple entry points with a word of mouth campaign, in order to foster both deep and broad engagement. This ensures rapid visibility but also concrete behaviour change, leading to sales, subscriptions and changing attitudes.

This kind of insight is invaluable in tailoring engagement, according to both the brand’s priority and the nature of the community. Great stuff.

Molly Flatt

The Great Influence Debate

It seems every so often a major debate arises because someone uses some math to redefine an accepted belief. Not a bad thing to happen as long as it is to improve mankind and not just to make a name for yourself. In fact, challenging current beliefs should be a regular occurrence.

This time it is about influence and I must say I’m concerned.

The Grudge Match

In the blue trunks we have the challenger, Duncan Watts, proclaiming the super influencer dead and raising the common man up on the pedestal as the new super being – power to the people! “Nobodies are the new somebodies” his sycophants scream from their blogs and Twitter accounts. Witness this interesting transcript where @GuyKawasaki (a super influencer under Gladwell’s model) echoes Duncan’s musings to the mesmerized crowd. (Warning! The transcript is long and chaotic, but worth the read just to see comments from everyone)

Quick question, if @GuyKawasaki was a nobody, would anyone have come to #techchat or RTed his comments? Irony? Maybe.

And in the red trunks we have the current champion, Malcom Gladwell, the godfather of the super influencer via The Tipping Point and champion to the elitist perspective of the power of the few. In his corner are the thousands upon thousands of marketers and companies who based their marketing strategies on reaching specific individuals to spread the good word.

Now the problem here is our champ is fighting with one hand behind his back because of his own views on using Social Media, opting instead for more traditional means such as speaking, his books and PR. With Malcolm’s absence from Twitter – does the champ stand a chance while every minute his idea empire is being besieged by Duncan’s minions?

If you believe, like I do, that ideas struggle for existence; rising and falling as they gain strength or weaken to competing ideas then this could be an interesting fight indeed. Natural Selection at work.

But before we get into the color commentary of our title fight, let’s first understand what the fight is about.

Somebodies, Nobodies and the Nature of Influence

So is there room for a third idea here on influence? One that lands squarely in the great gray area in between these two polar opposites. After all, how can a complex human condition such as influence be explained in such a black and white perspective? How can math or even Chaos and Complexity Theory, for all its power, truly understand a highly evolved and mostly subconscious powerful emotional layer such as how we influence each other?

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The Magic Middle and the Rise of the Curator

Last week, I was fortunate enough to get a walk-through of the Sponsored Tweets offering that is in beta with Twitter. It has obvious value for brands and is a sure money-maker for Twitter who is already making smart moves in monetizing their corner of the social web.

Dick Costolo explained the system’s impressive method for determining and managing relevancy of a sponsored tweet in matching it to viewers. Adding relevancy factors to Twitter will not only make it much more attractive for me as a brand but also more intuitive and meaningful as a user. This also opens up the possibility of Twitter embedding features for curating into their service.

I am a big believer in the concept of curating (which I’ll explain in more detail in a later post) as being a key part of the future of online influence because a curator can fill a role across the social web that will be needed as social graphs become more relevant/widespread and the overall sources of content continue to grow, fragment and specialize.

To play Karnak for a moment, as everyone’s streams of news and social content grow to become torrential rivers, managing them will become exceedingly difficult. Additionally, as bloggers and their readers develop longer term relationships it will become less important to keep up with their blogs and twitter feeds on a day to day basis to stay connected. That is where curators come in. They will act as the much needed funnels between the river and the reader.

This is not really revolutionary thinking here. Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop is already doing this in a certain way by aggregating top news and blogs around specific sources into customizable pages. My guy Len Kendall does this with great effect as well using his Twitter feed as one of the best sources of trends, info, random facts and fun oddities.

Which leads to the idea I’m calling the “Magic Middle.” Think of the social news cycle in three parts. Twitter is what is happening now. It is so instantaneous in nature that six to twelve hour-old tweets are about as useful as day-old bubbles. On the other end you have Google. The Internet’s elephant that never forgets. Between instant and permanent lies that Magic Middle. Part of the reason I consider it magic is that it is very rapid, but is built with the expectation of time for influencers, curators and other thoughtful folks to review, analyze and build upon the ideas in that river.

In this Magic Middle, you will be able to both combine and divide sources of information from your social graph. For example, several bloggers that I follow for social media and tech info are also fans of craft beer. How cool would it be to have a curated stream setup of “craft beer reviews and info from tech folks”? This would draw in relevant blog posts, digg’ed articles, tweets, Facebook likes, posterous comments and online reviews from across the web into a single stream. Many people feeding many sources funneled and refined into one manageable stream. That stream would also have buttons to rewind, fast forward and play.

Who will own this space? Only time will tell. Alltop certainly has a foothold there already. Digg also has track record and scalable audience that help dominate. In the meantime, I can’t wait to play in this middle ground.