In social media, finding influencers, getting them talking about your brand, and mobilizing their social networks are critical for successful marketing strategy. Yesterday, I attended a webinar where Brian Solis presented results of a survey of marketing and advertising executives to identify characteristics of influencers and develop strategies for harnessing their power to promote your brand in social media.
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Surprising Results
One aspect I found interesting is the overwhelming belief that popularity does not necessarily translate into influence. Respondents equated influence with the ability to direct action among followers. Respondents specifically cited Lady Gaga as having popularity, while Bono has influence.
However, what the results seemed to be saying is that popularity is potential power.
What respondents seemed to be overlooking is the tacit influence of popular individuals. While Lady Gaga doesn’t often use her popularity to drive action because she doesn’t advocate specific actions, she still has a major influence of fashion, music, and other experiential behaviors due to her popularity.
Lady Gaga’s fans try to emulate what she wears, where she shops, what she eats, the brands she prefers … This tacit influence is very powerful and somewhat insidious since consumers don’t really feel manipulated — they think their consumption decisions are their own and a reflection of their own style. Using tacit influence, thus, is more sustainable as it gets incorporated into the everyday culture of consumers.
Identify Influencers
Another surprise is that traditional measures of influence might not be effective in identifying influencers. For instance, easily measured behaviors such as number of re-tweets and size of social network, may have little impact on true influence.
Instead, factors impacting a person’s social influence are more likely a function of the quality of content they produce, the relevance of that content to their social network, and the quality of their network. Relationships are important and so is online reputation for individuals and brands to be influential. Thus, just talking a lot may not translate into having a lot of influence.
Advice for Successful Marketing Strategy
Here are some strategies for finding influencers.
- People who post interesting content
- People who are thought leaders
- People who are authentic
- People who are deep conversations rather than just lots of conversations
But, identifying influencers is not enough. You must invite to engage with your brand. Harnessing them to talk about your brand with their network will create positive associations and support your brand strategy.
Influencers expect to be compensated for their engagement with your brand. Influencers have spent time and effort to build their social network and they need something in return for spending social capital to promote your brand. This may mean paying them, but it may be as simple as just being grateful for their willingness to talk about your brand.
Hence, part of your marketing strategy must involve monitoring social networks to detect people who provide positive reviews of your product to tell them you appreciate them.
About Angela Hausman, Ph. D.
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I found the Lady Gaga example an fascinating unfolding story of a popular figure wanting to turn that popularity into the power of influence. While she may indeed have tacit influence regarding fashions, what folks are humming and brand preferences, there is no evidence yet that supports that she has groomed her followers to respond to calls of action.
It is what people or the members of a community *do* that makes the difference, singling out the true influencer from the popular icon.
Thanks for capturing so many key points from this webinar for future reference.
I do think we saw some of the “Lady Gaga” effect in the last presidential election. You had a number of celebrities weighing in on the candidates, but I’m not sure how much influence they had. It seems to me the social media aspects of the campaign had a greater effect — conversations between “friends” on Facebook and Tweets. Also, folks like the late senator Kennedy had a significant impact on the election, it seems to me.
Brian mentioned this “The Last Mile: The Socialization of Business” http://bit.ly/cDu1dJ in the webinar. It is worth a read. It is kind of ironic we were just speaking about influencers on Sunday
Thanks so much for engaging on this. I really liked the webinar and I like Mr. Solis. I like this dialogue on influence, but I just got an advance copy of a Sloan Management Review article on ROI for social media. Its really provocative. Stay tuned until tomorrow for a review of the article.
My question for the ‘Ask a Marketing Expert’ revolves around the topic of Influencers. What are some best practices if you have a growing community and want to groom them to action?
Thanks for the question. Do you want me to move it to Facebook or would you prefer to do that yourself — since you are one of my facebook friends as well as being a real friend (I hope)?