Presentations at the IDM

A few weeks back I spoke at the IDM’s seminar on Influencer Marketing, along with Lisa Hutt from salesforce.com. The lovely and efficient people at IDM has posted both presentations on their site. The links are:

http://www.silverstream.tv/istream_idm/ecampaign/DuncanBrown.html

http://www.silverstream.tv/istream_idm/ecampaign/lisahutt.html

Thanks to Joanna, Lucy, Caroline at the IDM for organising a really well-run evening, and to Debbie Williams, Chair of the Institute of Direct Marketing B2B Industry Advisory Council, for hosting and chairing the event.

Influencer Marketing – it’s all about engagement

So you use one of the 70 online influence measurement firms to compose a list of your top influencers (= those people that influence decision makers). How do you make this information executable?

The whole point of understanding who your influencers are is that you engage with those influencers in order to influence them, making them more favourable (or less unfavourable) towards you.

The RoI is all in the engagement. You can use influencers to attract prospects to seminars. You can use influencers to create marketing content. You can embed pre-existing influencer-led content in your sales messages. You can tap influencers’ networks for lead generation. You can position influencers to overcome sales objections and close deals. And so on.

That’s what Influencer Marketing is all about.

Everybody who matters

Do you know your influencers – the people that matter in your market?

If you want a shorthand description of Influencer Marketing try this cartoon…

The long hand version is here.

Make sure you know who matters, and then engage with them. Simple, really.

(Warning: there may be more than twenty in your market….)

Influencer Marketing is “the next big thing in B2B Marketing”

… according to Joel Harrison, the editor of B2B Marketing magazine. Read his blog post (and my comment) here.

B2B Marketing feature on Influencer Marketing

Meg de Jong writes a nice piece on Influencer Marketing in this month’s B2B Marketing magazine. It’s available online here.

B2BM is the only mag in the UK that focuses on the B2B sector and is worth subscribing to – online membership is free. The print version of the article has some graphics and my photo – surely a disincentive to subscribe…

Share and enjoy.

Marketing has changed – have you noticed?

Ian at Vocanic points me to Tom Fishburne’s latest cartoon, reproduced here:

I talked about this in the Insanity of Marketing paper, which is still one of the most read of our writings. It’s pointless to do marketing in the old way because there’s too much marketing out there – your customers are just tuning it all out. Insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. The game has changed.

Influencers help cut through the noise and get your message heard. Only, of course, if you know who your influencers are and are successful at engaging with them.

An interview with Nick Hayes

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!

WOMMA launches Influencer Marketing handbook

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.

Influence as vocabulary for integrated marketing

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.

Idea diffusion and influence

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.