Posts Tagged ‘influencers’
October 8th, 2010
On a number of occasions recently, I have been asked to define why influencers are important, and why they should be targeted. This question has been posed directly by those with an interest in defining a link between influencers and sales.
Therefore, I’ve developed the following overview to try and answer the query relatively succinctly, as the phrase ‘influencing the influencers’ really isn’t specific enough.
I would welcome additional input; let me know your thoughts.
Who/what are influencers?
Influencers represent a group of individuals/organisations that have influence over potential buyers and the industry as a whole, shaping the customer’s purchasing decision. The Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, but do not need to be. They may be relevant groups/individuals/brands that exist in the buyer’s community such as consultants, journalists, analysts, etc or part of the buying process directly.
Influencers are usually defined as well-connected, having impact, active minds and are trend setters, or influence trends, including:
• Activists: influencers that get involved, with their communities, political movements, charities and so on
• Connected: influencers that have large social networks
• Impact: influencers who are looked up to and are trusted by others
• Active minds: influencers that have multiple and diverse interests
• Trendsetters: influencers that tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets
Why reach influencers?
The focus of reaching these influencers is not to convince them on a particular point of view, but to drive interactions between the brand/individual and its community, making sure these people are aware of the brand, understand what it does, what it believes and where it is going.
We hope to arm these individuals with the knowledge to encourage them to involve the brand in high-level discussions and re-use brand knowledge with-in their own individual communities and spheres of influence.
By targeting influencers we also hope to amplify marketing messages, in other words, reach those individuals with high influence over their peer groups.
In practical terms, the approach to each individual should be tailored. Therefore, we need to take a specific approach to each group, i.e. do they prefer to be approached by email, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc or personally, or even not at all? What is interesting to them? Is it research, comment, networking groups, events or simply connections and conversations?
As a general rule, the fresher and more interesting the content the more parties it will be relevant to.
Potential outcomes
By engaging with these influencers we hope that the brand will be:
- better networked with those people that can influence trends
- involved in the conversations and issues that shape the industry and purchase decisions
This should:
- drive interest in and awareness of the brand
- ultimately, positively affect purchase decisions
Sources:
http://www.influencermarketingbook.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing
Key social media influencers’ word clouds
August 15th, 2008
I have been meaning to try out the “word clouds” tool that has been doing the rounds out for a while now!
The tool is called Wordle and it’s great for getting highly customisable visualisations of keywords.
The below word clouds are from the homepages of key social media influencers.
(click on the images for a larger preview)
No surprises in the word clouds, and the biggest mentions go to Twitter, social media, blogs - SEO is mentioned but not as much as I would have imagined (although these clouds are only from the homepages, they probably give a fairly good indication of keywords within the rest of the site, but others could be more prominant).
This is a great little tool that can be used in many ways such as identifying competitor’s keywords and messaging.
The man behind Wordle is a gent called Jonathan Feinberg - a Senior Software Engineer at IBM Research. Thanks Jonathan for creating a fab tool.