Influence, politicians and payment

The headline this morning is that senior politicians and former ministers were prepared to take money to lobby on government policy. Watch the Dispatches Channel4 programme here.

What are the learnings for vendors trying to influence decision-makers? What’s so wrong about paying for lobbyists (other than being found out, of course)? It’s all perfectly legal after all. Aren’t lobbyists professional influencers, and don’t we have other such professionals in our industry (analysts, sourcing advisers, etc)?

There are two main points here.

Firstly, the moment you pay someone their independence is reduced, thus diminishing their influence. I remember, as an analyst, agreeing to speak at the launch of an industry body, for which I (or rather, my employer) was paid a fee. It’s standard practice. But there was a furore when my talk slides were reviewed by the body, as they were less than complementary towards the prospects of the industry (and hence the industry body). The conflict was clear – I wanted to say what I thought, and the body wanted me to say something more positive. Some compromise was reached, but I often think that I should have just declined the opportunity, or done it for free. This kind of conflict always exists in such situations – the usual compromise is for the influencer not to say the whole of what he/she thinks, but some (often self-censored) edited version of it.

The second point is more subtle. It is that once you’ve paid an influencer you set a precedent. They’ll expect that your relationship with them is purely commercial. This substantially affects the ability to build a mutual relationship with an influencer. It’s particularly an issue for those vendors with a deep reliance on channel partners. It’s not unusual to find several partner representatives on a list of top influencers. But most relationships with partners exist on commercial grounds, and it’s often hard to unpick these and build value propositions for influencers based on non-commercial terms.

Influencer marketing is about reaching out to the holistic influencer ecosystem, and spreading your engagement activities across many influencers (and many types of influencer). You want to get to a point where you’re so interesting and useful to the influencer community that they’ll talk about you anyway, whether you pay them or not.

As Hugh says, “The Trick to Marketing is to have something so cool, you’d want to talk about it EVEN if you weren’t in the business”.

The trick to influencer marketing is to get your influencers talking about you, even though you haven’t paid them to say so.

Advertisement