Now the FTC investigates paid advocacy

I wrote last month on the perils of sponsoring conversations on blogs and Twitter. How prescient was I?! The FTC in the US is investigating the use of such tactics as potential deception. Good thing too.

There are two reasons not to engage in this kind of paid advocacy ploy:

1. The lack of authenticity in the advocacy undermines the very point of doing it. It’s only useful if it’s genuine (or if an interest is declared).
2. Users don’t want to receive it. Spam is spam, irrespective of whether it’s delivered by SMS, email, Twitter or blog comments.

The secret to advocacy is quite simple, as Hugh McLeod explains:

Marketing starts with the product, and the product starts with marketing. If your product sucks then no amount of marketing will fix it. If your product is remarkable then people will talk about it anyway. Marketing is only really necessary when your product is like everybody else’s.

Sponsored conversations are the price of being boring

As Andy Sernovitz says in his book, advertising is the price of being boring. I was reminded by this by Ruth at Brand Strategy, who cites Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saying basically the same thing.

It’s the way of the world that not everybody can have an interesting product – there’s only so much enthusiasm one can muster for the mundane (mobile phones, batteries, pencils, etc). But it is often possible to wrap an interesting story around a mundane product. A man eating pies may sound mundane, but if there are 92 pies and they are consumed in every football ground in England, then you have a sporting travelogue that is much more interesting (to footie aficionados at least).

The point is, marketers need to work at the story that sets the context of their product. Give the market something interesting to talk about and talk about it they will.

So I’m troubled by the Sponsored Conversation idea being talked up by Forrester. Essentially this is paying people to talk about your product. It’s happening on blogs and Twitter, as well as in the real world. We talked in the book about ‘Brand Advocates’ – consumers paid to recommend products to their friends and acquaintances.

Personally, I can’t imagine much worse than being pitched to by a friend. They wouldn’t be a friend for long, is my guess, especially if they made a habit of it. Yet this is the kind of thing we’re talking about, migrated to an online platform.

The key concept here, of course, is disclosure. It’s mandatory that anyone being paid to advocate discloses this fact.

Disclosure is fine for transparency but taking payment undermines influence, the likelihood that someone will make a buying decision based on what an advocate says. My suspicion is that sponsored conversations – aka paid advocacy – simply won’t be effective because they won’t be believed.

Which kind of makes the exercise pointless.

Much better to get free advocacy by creating remarkable products and services.

Research of WOM and influence – a warning

Guy Kawasaki points to an important article published in the December issue of the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR). The article is entitled Reconsidering Models of Influence: The Relationship between Consumer Social Networks and Word-of-Mouth Effectiveness. It looks at how influence works in wom, and whether common preconceptions of influence are valid.

Spookily, I gave a talk at the London WOM Forum yesterday, which was organised by WARC, the publisher of JAR. Copies of the journal containing the article were handed out to delegates.

The research suggests that a pyramidal model of influence, where the majority of influence is concentrated amongst relatively few, highly connected people, is incorrect. Instead, the paper says that “it is the moderately connected majority, not the much smaller number of highly connected people, who hold the greatest potential for influence.

It also says that, “contrary to conventional wisdom that points to … blogging as indicators of influence,” more altruistic behaviour, like product rating, carries more weight. The research concludes that influence is not an exclusive, top-down model. Instead influence is something we all share.

This article is important because it identifies some key assumptions being made in the market about influence and the way it works. Some of these assumptions are identified and challenged by the article: others are not.

Here are the assumptions I detected in the article, and thus probably quite common in the market. My list may not be exhaustive…

Assumption 1. We know what an influencer is. The paper cites ‘ influence’ (or derivatives) 52 times but nowhere does it define it. This is really important, as the scope of influence frames all further discussion. It’s difficult to recognise or measure influence if you don’t know what you’re looking for. At Influencer50 we restrict influence to those effects that impact on a purchase decision.

Assumption 2. Influence is concentrated amongst an elite highly connect few. In fact there is a non sequeter here – that connectedness is somehow related to influence. The article challenges the view that influence is restricted to a small group, but it reinforces the view that influence is somehow correlated with connectedness. This is unproven (and I have big doubts, based on Influencer50 research).

Assumption 3. Influence is unidirectional. In fact, influence flows in all directions. You can observe this the next time you have a conversation, debate or argument.

Assumption 4. Influence online is a proxy for influence in the real world. The article is based on research sources from web site users.

Assumption 5. WOM happens just between consumers. It clearly doesn’t – wom, and influence, occur throughout the supply chain, and outside it too. This has huge implications for the structure and measurement of word of mouth campaigns. It’s much easier (and more effective) if such campaigns are grounded within the supply chain.

We have never thought that influence lies with a few people. But it does cluster and there are certainly those with more influence than others. But who are those people? The only way I know is to research the market thoroughly and with a rigorous methodology and rationale – anything else is just guessing.

Guy Kawasaki seems to equate ‘elite’ with celebrity. In the book we say that celebrity is very unlikely to influence buying decisions, and there’s plenty of research to back this up. In the markets Influencer50 tracks – predominantly B2B markets – the closest we come to including celebrities is when notable management gurus or authors exert influence on purchase decision-makers. People like Geoffrey Moore or (ironically) Guy Kawasaki.

It’s good that influence is being researched, but we do need to be careful about exactly what we’re researching.

WOM conference speaking gig

I’m presenting at the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) Word-of-Mouth conference on 16th January. Looks to be a good line-up, with Emanuel Rosen (The Anatomy of Buzz) as the headliner. Paul Marsden (Collaborative Marketing and Net Promoter Score fan) and Ivan Palmer (WOM advocate at Wildfire) are also there, together with a bunch of wom experts. Looking forward to meeting the crowd.

I’m talking on “Working with Influencers – Connecting with the Customers that Count.”

If you can’t make it to the conference to hear the presentation, here’s the short version:

• All customers count.
• Find out who influences them.
• Market through influencers to customers.

Simple, really – you should try it.

Influencer Marketing Primer 5 – Marketing through influencers

Marketing through influencers is where Influencer Marketing gets really interesting. The first thing to say is that I am NOT talking about paying stooges to say what you tell them to say. Any idiot can do that, it carries no influence, and usually is counter-productive.

Marketing through influencers is about enabling influencers to talk about you to prospects. Immediately the affinity with WOMM should be apparent. Obvious tasks include delivering content to influencers, so they have sufficient information to digest and pass on. We covered much of this in Marketing to influencers.

So what about the less obvious stuff? This is where Influencer Marketing departs from traditional command-and-control marketing. I’m asking you to deviate from the textbooks and accept that you’re going to have to let someone else take control.

You must add value to the influencer’s agenda. Here’s what you have to do :

Firstly create a series of marketing messages that align with the influencers’ agenda. That is, messages that they will want to pass on, not those that you want communicated. Influencers don’t care about you – they care about themselves. So make it easy for them. Warning: it may not come easy to you! For starters, you’ll have to know what influencers are interested in.

Secondly, create support material for influencers. Example: recently I was trying to get access to a specific firm, with little success. I found an influencer with a great relationship with the firm, and with a scheduled meeting. I found out what the influencer was planning to tell them. I then created one chart which drove home a key point the influencer wanted to make. It so happened that the one chart also reinforced Influencer50’s proposition. Result: we win a deal based on one chart that someone else presented (enabled, of course, by a load of work in identifying and marketing to the right influencer).

Thirdly, align your existing collateral with your influencers’ agenda. This may just be a mapping of your existing collateral to their propositions. Or you may have to redraft your collateral. But realise that it’s they that have the influence, and for good reason. Listen to influencers – they want to influence you too.

Marketing through influencers is all about giving them something to say that they want to say. Providing a story isn’t enough – it’s got to be part of their story too.

Paying for endorsements is an oxymoron

Last Wednesday I ran a webinar on Influencer Marketing. During the Q&A one attendee asked me if he could “enhance” the positive effect of influencers by paying them to say nice things. My answer was unequivocal – Don’t do it!

There are many reasons why you shouldn’t pay for influence, but I think the best one is common sense. If you pay an influencer to say something, their influence diminishes immediately because they are no longer independent.

It turns out that synchronicity was at work, because the FTC in the US just ruled that word-of-mouth marketers must reveal if they’ve paid an endorser (as reported in The Washington Post).

It’s important to distinguish between paying an Influencer to say something (invalid), and paying them to state their opinion (valid). Otherwise the business models for consulting, industry analysis and many other activities would fall apart.

Unfortunately, there are those firms and individuals that do take money specifically to present vendors in a positive light. But these tend to be the less influential players in the market.

Better to try to influence influencers through relationship building and persuasion, rather than by paying to put words in their mouth.

Turn up the volume on WOM & Blogs

Influencer Marketing is part of a marketing revolution that embraces word-of-mouth, conversational marketing and social networking tools. By targeting influencers, you can amplify the effect of these techniques. As Seth Godin says, if you want ideas to spread you need sneezers (talkers) with influence. Otherwise your messages either won’t spread, or they’ll die because they don’t have the support of influencers.