New podcast featuring Nick Hayes

Nick, the founder of Influencer50, appears on the latest podcast from David Campbell at Love Digital in Australia. This is particularly significant for us because it’s the first ‘above the radar’ event we’ve done since opening the office in Sydney.

The podcast’s subject is word-of-mouth marketing but Nick does a good job of redirecting the conversation around to influencers. The links to the podcast are via David’s Love Digital page, or via Marketing magazine in Australia. It’s a short piece, just over 10 minutes, so well worth a listen. Nick packs as many anecdotes and experiences in as possible, so there should be something for everyone.

A mobile device influencer ecosystem

Just bought my new Blackberry last week.

Blackberry Curve

The influencers on my decision include (in no particular order):

Scott (Influencer50 sales director and Nokia fan);

Nick (Apple fan);

my brother-in law (gadget freak);

various salespeople in Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse and O2;

Stephen Fry;

GSMArena;

my previous experience with two previous Blackberries;

Google (provider of two essential applications: search and maps); The Geek Squad (BlackBerry technical support); random people using Blackberries and other devices on the train; ease of migration from my current phone; Carphone Warehouse sending me a text with a heads-up on the fact that my current contract was expiring; my son’s desire to have a cool dad with the latest phone; and probably others I’ve forgotten.

Not all influencers point in the same direction, and some are plainly opposed. Hence, not all influencers were successful in persuading me to their opinion. Such is the way of influence.

Interestingly, not on the list are Apple and Nokia, who didn’t get my business, and Blackberry, who did. Indeed, I’m not sure RIM even know who I am or that I’ve been a customer for four years.

I don’t mind RIM not knowing me. But I think they should know what and who influenced me.

Other notable non-influencers are price (they all cost roughly the same), and features (they all do roughly the same things that I deem necessary).

Global Multipliers

Ian McKee at Vocanic points to a survey in the New York Times which looks at the role of ‘Global Multipliers’ – consumer influencers in other parlance. It’s a really interesting piece from Ian if you’re remotely interested in how consumer influencers work, word of mouth, and that kind of thing.

A couple of observations/questions/things to consider however:

• Consumer influencers are not the same as B2B influencers. They are hard to identify, difficult (impossible?) to manage, and fragmented as an ecosystem. B2B influencers are more (but not necessary completely) homogenised. So don’t draw too many parallels between this B2C study and B2B influencers.
• Within the B2C sector, influencers are not limited to consumers. There are numerous types of influencers in a B2C transactions that sit within the supply chain or along side it (think professional advisers, customer service reps, lawyers, hairdressers, taxi drivers, concierge staff, etc).
• The study estimates that there are 19 million Global Multiplier influencers worldwide. If that’s truly representative of all markets, it means that these most influential consumers account for roughly one third of a percent of all consumers: the words ‘needle’ and ‘haystack’ immediately spring to mind.

The other thing that worries me about such studies* is the apparent behaviour of these consumer influencers. For example, the survey says that in the UK these Global Multipliers make on average 19 product recommendations in a week. I’d reckon that, in the UK, people who are making product recommendations 3 times a day will lucky to escape a punch on the nose. How tedious to listen to someone chirping on about what they bought or are planning to buy.

Just because someone makes many recommendations does not make them an influencer. It might make them an insufferable bore. We need to be careful about how we define influence before deploying it widely.

*Read The Influentials for the definitive work on consumer influencers. If you do, please search it for the evidence that one in ten people really do influence the other nine. I’ve read in three time and still can’t find the data that supports the assertion.

Two decisions to influence

In the book we talked about two key decisions to influence. The first is deciding to decide – whether to act or not. The second is the actual decision – what to buy. They are quite separate decisions often involving different decision makers and (of course) influenced by different people.

We mapped the various influence roles against these two discrete decisions thus:

It is just so important to understand where you are in the decision process, so that you focus on the right types of influencer.

Seth reminds us all of this here.

Influencer Marketing is no substitute for good account management

I get asked more often than I’d like if Influencer50 can identify the key influencers in named customer organisations. Who is it that influences the buying decisions at BT? Who within Barclays Bank influences whether to outsource the HR function? Who are the internal influencers in the government’s computer literacy programmes?

Questions like these are symptomatic of the focus on the term ‘Influencer’ and ignoring the ‘Marketing’ part.

Influencer Marketing is about identifying and reaching influencers in a marketplace, however generic or precise one defines that market to be. You effectively place bets with a group of people who, as a group, hold the largest share of influence on that market. Not all influencers will have influence over all of the market. But most influencers will have influence over many decision makers in the market, which is the best you can hope for (and it’s a damn sight better than guesswork or mass marketing).

Influencer Marketing cannot identify the decision making unit (DMU) for a specific decision in a specific organisation with a well-defined decision making timescale in place. That’s the role of account management.

There’s no doubt that Influencer Marketing helps to influence DMUs, and targeting influencers can increase the likelihood that people in a DMU will hear about you and consider you seriously. But it can’t guarantee that in a specific organisation the internal DMU members will be influenced by any external group of influencers.

Influencer Marketing works best in tandem with good account management, especially Key Account Management principles and Account-based marketing. It’s a killer combination of approaches that is most effective.

Join the Influencer Marketing LinkedIn group

I mentioned this in passing before, but here’s a formal invite to the Influencer Marketing and Influencer Relations group on LinkedIn. To encourage discussion and to keep the group focused and manageable the membership is currently restricted to practitioners in the IT and telecoms industries.

The link to the group is here.

What’s the role of professional networking organisations?

I recently met up with CIO Connect, a networking organisation for (surprise) CIOs in the UK. Its value proposition is that it connects the most senior IT people in the land. It enables information sharing, the raising of individual profiles, professional development opportunities and other benefits.

I also attended a session run by the BCS on enhancing professionalism in the IT industry. The BCS is attempting to (and I’m paraphrasing liberally here) make IT practitioners as highly regarded as lawyers, accountants and other professionals (but not, one hopes, bankers…).

Both meetings left me wondering about the longevity of such professional networking organisations. Whether they are commercial businesses like CIO Connect or trade bodies like the BCS (a registered charity), I wonder at the degree of influence such organisations have, in the era of ad hoc social networking. If I can connect with a CIO directly, via LinkedIn for example, do I need CIO Connect? If I can prove my credentials because of the recommendations I have on my LinkedIn profile do I need CITP* accreditation from the BCS?

I think CIO Connect, TIF and such organisations can still add value, but increasingly this will be value to the vendor community, in brokering relationships with potential CIO-level customers. For example, CIO Connect now offers a vendor-sponsored CIOnet community in the UK, in addition to the core CIO-only service.

The BCS is struggling to introduce professionalism into businesses, yet other trades have managed this successfully. Trivial example: if you want a wood-burning stove installed in your house in the UK you should get a HETAS-accredited installer, otherwise you’ll fail building regulations (you read it here first). Yet getting my PC fixed is a lottery, with no accreditation scheme from the BCS or anyone else**. Are chimney sweeps really more of a profession than IT?

Some degree of regulatory compulsion is usually required to underwrite professionalism, but this buys trust from the public – essential in any professional body. The BCS is reluctant to go down the statutary route, and (I think) will suffer for it. At the moment it’s too easy to ignore the BCS.

How can networking organisations increase their influence and resist the diminishment of their proposition? Firstly they need to embrace the opposition – social networking. The BCS has various groups within LinkedIn that are to some degree active communities of networkers. Similarly, CIO Connect and other similar organisations have online capabilities to enable networking.

More importantly, they need to influence at a professional level. When was the last time a BCS representative appeared on the Today programme? Tony Collins, the editor at Computer Weekly, is a more regular guest commentator.

Influence often starts at home, so they need to get out more and start influencing their agenda. The secret to influencing is to deploy individuals capable of influencing. Organisations do not influence – it happens on a person-to-person basis.

This individual influencing approach is something that social media networking approaches like LinkedIn will find hard to deliver, because it’s one dimensional (ie online only). Individuals can influence online, but the most influential people influence in both online and real world situations.

And that’s the key to success, and longevity, for networking organisations.

Social real-world engagement

Bit of a continuation from my earlier post on Marketing Obsolescence. It continually bothers me that so much emphasis is being placed on engagement via social media technology, to the exclusion of debate and discussion on engagement in the real world.

Now, there’s no doubt that social media (such as this blog) provide a means to engage to a wide audience, and for some it has made all the difference (Seth, Hugh, James Governor, etc). I like to think that the successful bloggers would have been successful consultants or journalists or artists or whatever. In other words, social media happens to the media of choice for talented people. (It’s also the media of choice for untalented people, which is why the majority of blogs are lousy…)

Successful bloggers are successful because they say intelligent, insightful or sensible things. Their ability to communicate effectively is the core competence. The medium is blogging, but it needn’t be.

I guess I get concerned when social media gets colonised by those seeking shortcuts to a mass audience. Seth blogged on this very subject recently. It’s the very lack of friction that makes email and twitter so usable, and so quick to be colonised by spammers.

Forrester raves about the growth in social media marketing, yet I think marketers are missing a trick by not focusing on social real world engagement in parallel. Often the attraction is scale – you can certainly contact many more people by email than you can talk to face-to-face. But ask any sales person if they’d rather sell by email or by looking in their prospect’s eye, and there’s no competition. Face-to-face contact will always win.

Similarly, professional advisers are most effective (ie most influential) when they deliver their advice face-to-face. Importantly, this means actually looking into the eyes of the adviser, not just seeing their face on stage or a projected screen.

I’m absolutely in favour of social media, as this blog, our email newsletter and the new LinkedIn group testifies. But let’s not let the pendulum swing too far away from real world engagement.