Is this true for your organisation?

A key part of Influencer Marketing (hint: it should be part of all marketing) is the connection with sales. This is typically manifested in marketing collateral, and I’ve enforced the mantra at Influencer50 that Influencer Marketing should be, first and foremost, a sales enabler.

Marketing and sales and so often disconnected. But how bad is the divide? It turns out, very bad. Two figures emerged from a discussion I had with a team of sales consultants:

• 40% of a sales person’s time is spent developing their own marketing messages and collateral. Sales people don’t use the marketing department’s output.
• 90% of marketing collateral never gets used by sales.

Remember we’re talking about collateral that is designed (allegedly) to support sales. It’s criminal.

Does it happen in your organisation? How do you know? What can you do to improve marketing’s usefulness to the sales team?

We’ve recently introduced a new standard component to our client engagements, called a sales perception audit. We survey the sale team’s view of marketing effectiveness, and then survey it again after our client has implemented an Influencer Marketing programme. The idea is to prove that sales is getting something more from marketing than before.

It doesn’t (yet) measure actual sales uplift, but we’re hoping to demonstrate a correlation between happy sales people (with useful collateral) and sales performance. Sounds a reasonable hypothesis.

Measuring the influence of social media users

You may have detected from this blog that I’m less than convinced by the hype over Web 2.o and it’s impact on influence. Certainly, from our research work for clients, blogs rarely feature as a key influencer.

Part of my problem is that the degree of influence is asserted, measured by the number of links or some other dubious metric. So I’m intrigued by an emerging method of determining the influence of blogs and other social media such as FaceBook and LinkedIn. Hat tip to James Governor who linked to David Brain’s sixtysecondview blog. David runs Edelman PR in the UK, but otherwise seems a good chap…

David’s idea is to measure not only the links that one gets on a blog, but also the links on LinkedIn, friends in FaceBook, Twitter friends, Flickr photo uploads, Diggs and other social media activities. The concept is premised on the trend for people to have more than one social tool in use. Sheesh – I can barely keep up with blogging.

I can’t help thinking that for all its diligence in tracking the various media it’s still measuring links, and links don’t necessarily imply influence. My beef with the links=influence assertion is that it’s easy to fake links, and that links are only a measure of one dimension of influence – connectedness. There are other dimensions, such as expertise, that are much harder to measure. And what about the value of particular connections? Connections are not equal – I know who matters more to me in my LinkedIn network.

But David’s composite score does help because it evens out some of the biases that would be present in just one social tool. By measuring half a dozen or so, an average score emerges.

What I find worrying is that in order to demonstrate and exert influence through social media one has to use multiple formats. I could spend all my time doing just that, but I have a proper job as well. Those that have time to keep up with the social media demands of influence run the risk of ignoring the other dimensions of influence. Plus the most important risk of all, which is forgetting who, why and how they are trying to influence in the first place.

Today’s state-of-the-art influence modus operanda is one-to-one communication, by meeting people face-to-face, telephone conversations and email. In that order. Social media is a distant fourth at the moment.

Book case studies - announcing soon...

The easy part in writing a book is writing the book. The hard part is citing examples to illustrate the theory. So we've poured a fair amount of time and energy into tracking down cases studies, both from our own Influencer50 client base and beyond.

It turns out we've struck gold. We now expect to include twelve (count 'em) case studies, most of which will be fully identified and attributed. The one or two shy firms are sensitive to the competitve advantage they are achieving. The others see the opportunity to demonstrate their leadership in the emerging Influencer Marketing discipline, and to be associated with the book. We're humbled by their eagerness to be involved.

As case studies (usually) take ages to get approval we'll be announcing them as we get sign-off. They'll be released on this blog and the soon-to-be launched book web site.

CMOs have zero impact on sales - official

Sometimes marketing shoots itself in the foot (example: voting to carry on lying). Other times, research does the dirty work. So it is this week. Ad Age reports a new study that demonstrates no impact from marketing on sales. None, nyada, zilch.

The study, to be published in January 2008 in the Journal of Marketing, analysed the performance of 168 firms and concluded that CMOs have zero effect on their company’s financial performance. The firms surveyed include IBM, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and Apple.

What’s more worrying, though, is Ad Age’s analysis, questioning whether CMOs should be measured in financial terms, or in such “amorphous concepts” like brand equity or awareness. It’s questions like these that get marketing into trouble in the first place.

Why would a firm reward a CMO for awareness? Awareness of the BBC has just shot up, but for all the wrong reasons. Kwiksave has high awareness – so what?

Brand equity is a great response by marketers to weasel its way out of an awkward situation. “Look at the value our brand creates,” they say, citing the latest study from Millward Brown. But brand value is an outcome of sales, not marketing. It’s a proportion of the market value of the firm less tangible assets. Market value is driven largely by financial results, not by marketing campaigns.

Ad Age also contrasts the short term financial targets with longer term marketing goals. I agree that the impact of marketing programs can take some time to emerge, but we should be able to measure some impact in the course of a financial year. Perhaps not the quarter, but within two-to-three quarters. Otherwise, why are we doing it? The study cited by Ad Age tracked performance over five years. How long does marketing expect to take before it affects financial performance?

As long as the marketing community continues to debate whether it should be measured in financial terms, it will be subject to regular criticism by those that wield the real power in firms: the finance director and the sales director.

End of rant…

A long tail of authority?

James at Redmonk posts on Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s point is, in a nutshell, that user-generated content is inferior to that of professionals. So we take risks by using social media sources as reference points – Wikipedia and its (allegedly) dodgy content is the oft-cited example.

James contrasts Keen’s theory with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and suggests that a “long tail of authority” will emerge as the credibility of professional authorities diminishes.

Hmmm. A “long tail of authority” sounds like an oxymoron to me. We use third parties to replace experience we ourselves don’t have. For trivial needs (which toothpaste to buy) we defer to just about anyone (spouse, sales assistant, person also browsing for toothpaste, etc). But for more important decisions we tend to use more verifiable sources. It’s not just authority that’s important – accountability is also vital is such decisions. Which is why we pay professionals, and why professional need indemnity cover.

By definition (I think), authority in any market is concentrated in the “short head.” It’s a scarce resource. Social media helps to distribute authority but doesn’t help create it.

As always, the truth is in the middle somewhere. There’s no doubt that social media has enabled some new authorities to emerge (James is a good example, top rated analyst blog). But there’s also a huge amount of dross being generated. Telling the two apart can be difficult for the uninitiated.

(As an aside, the analyst industry is professional nowadays but wasn’t always so. In my early years at Ovum (mid 90s) we often referred to ourselves as enthusiastic amateurs writing on subjects we (at first) knew little about. Specialisation and professionalism have changed this – I wonder if we’re heading towards full circle…)