Word of mouth marketing needs influencers

Influencer Marketing and word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) are inter-related. I’m a big fan of WOMM, Influencer50 is a member of WOMMA, and I’ve just read Andy Sernowitz’s book on WOM. Andy is the CEO of WOMMA.

But WOMM by itself lacks a key ingredient. As Seth Godin says in Purple Cow, it is useless to advertise to anyone except sneezers (i.e. talkers) with influence. I’d go further by extending advertising to all forms of marketing. People rarely buy just because they experience marketing. The marketing message is corroborated, enhanced and personalised through WOMM. And WOMM needs sneezers with influence.

In a B2C context, WOMM happens primarily at a peer level. That is, consumers talk to other consumers, and the message spreads.

In the B2B environment, things work differently. There are good reasons for this. There are competitive issues: if we are in the same field, passing on recommendations may erode the competitive advantage my firm has over yours. There are community issues: companies tend to be insular and don’t often communicate with other firms.

Instead, WOMM is mediated (often informally) by influencers. Recommendations, experiences, gossip and stories from the field are all related by various influencer types. Some of this communication is overt, published in analyst reports, journalistic articles and blogs. But much of it, up to 80% we estimate, happens in closed circles. These can be private meetings, invitation-only events, on the golf course, in lifts, over lunch, and so on.

Influencers are influencers because they have expertise and because they like to influence. So they are more than willing to pass on messages that reinforce their influence.

The crux of Influencer Marketing is to communicate your messages to influencers, such that those messages are then communicated by influencers to your customers and prospects.

Remember, though, that your product or service will only be talked about if it is worth being talked about.

On Blogger relations and Influencer relations

There’s a really interesting discussion on the emergence of Blogger Relations and so-called Influencer Relations at the ARmageddon blog. It’s based on the idea that, as existing analysts increase their use of blogs and new analysts gain prominence through blogs, traditional analyst relations (AR) must evolve.

AR professionals are clearly unsettled by this move. Analysts have typically dealt in secrets, based on private briefings under NDA. Blogs, on the other hand, trade in openness. There’s obvious conflict here. How blogs impact the analyst community is uncertain, hence the discussion.

There’s an important shift happening in marketing generally (and I include corporate communications in this category). The shift is towards two-way communications with the market, sometimes called conversational marketing, or Marketing 2.0 (yeuch!). Blogging is an online version of this, but it’s happening offline in a big way, often as part of a Word of Mouth marketing strategy. Good sources of info for this move include Naked Conversations, Seth Godin and Andy Sernowitz.

A few thoughts on the debate:

- Blogger Relations and Influencer Relations are functions of marketing, as are Analyst relations and PR. It’s all marketing, just perhaps not direct marketing. So all of these “Relations” branches are subject to the big shift towards two-way communications.

- The term “Relations” is missing the point. In my 12 years working in analyst firms, vendors always think of analysts in marketing terms. Vendors understand the influence analysts have over prospects, and they market to analysts in order to affect that influence. So rather than “relations” (which sounds friendly and cosy) we should really call it marketing. That’s why we’re open about our use of the Influencer Marketing term – it is what it says.

- We should treat all influencers with the respect they deserve. This may mean adjusting our perceptions of who is important. Blogging is enabling the small guys (eg Redmonk, MWD) to compete with Gartner, Forrester et al. Ranking and prioritisation of analysts is more important nowadays.

- We mustn’t forget the non-analyst influencers. They’re just as important as analysts, and need to be marketed to (though in different ways).