Book web page launched

The web site for the book is now live. Check it out at the imaginatively-titled http://www.influencermarketingbook.com/. The cover design is a draft, but we didn't want to wait.

The site contains the table of contents and information on the case studies. It will shortly also list some further reading (or pre-reading, depending on how keen you are), which we'll keep up to date.

I'll continue to announce the case study participants here but the book site will also be updated.

More book-related news to follow...

Influencers are people, not groups

At Influencer50 we always (with one exception) talk about influencers as individuals, not firms or groups. To me this is intuitive, but clearly not to others. I’ve now come across several clients and prospects of ours that think of influencers as groups, usually trade bodies or user groups, but also firms as a whole. Surely Gartner is an influencer, they say.

I’ve found two arguments to support the influencers-as-groups idea. The first is that scale businesses (those trading in volume products) need “scale” influencers. Trade bodies, such as the Institute of Directors and the Confederation of British Industry in the UK, are membership organisations. If we build a relationship with them, we can use their influence to establish a relationship with their members. Thus these groups are a shortcut route to market.

The second argument is that some groups or firms hold such influence in the market that we have to include them in an influencer programme. Quote something (anything) from McKinsey or Gartner and see the heads nod in agreement.

There is some truth in each of these arguments, and in general I guess I agree with the theory. The practice, however, is different. Influencer Marketing is about building relationships with people. You can’t build a relationship with a firm or a group or firms, or a membership organisation. You end up floundering around, influencing no-one, or (worse) trying to influence the wrong person.

Importantly, the influence of a group of firm is determined not by its membership or its client base, but by the individuals within the executive of the group or firm.

The mindset of marketers trying to influence a group determines the types of activities that are most likely to be pursued. Because you haven’t identified the key person or people with real influence, you are limited to buying your way into the consciousness of the group as a whole. Inevitably, activity becomes centred on sponsorship and events.

Unfortunately, buyers are rarely influenced by events, and even less by sponsorships.
When you try to influence a group or a firm you end up building a relationship with the events director, or the PR manager, or a sales rep at that group or firm. I know plenty of vendors that have a great relationship with their account manager at IDC, but who have a lousy relationship with the influential analyst covering their space. The events manager at Gartner is really well-known to vendors, but influential she is not.

The pursuit of scale is your enemy. I know a firm who is targeting the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW), in order to influence the finance director community. Fair enough - lots of FDs belong to the ICAEW. Except that the ICA is only one of three professional bodies to which FDs may belong – CIMA and ACCA are the others. By focusing on the ICA this firm is missing out on two thirds of the potential influential associations in the influencer ecosystem.

Attempting to influence a group consumes a lot of resources. Instead, why not identify the one or two key people in each group, and focus on them? By identifying and targeting the key people you focus your resources narrowly for maximum effect. Why put your eggs in one basket?

The essence of Influencer Marketing is that you market to influencers with the intended outcome that they then influence your prospects. In other words, it’s not enough to identify an organisation that might have influence, and pay them to host an event for you. You have to identify the people within that organisation that carry the majority of influence, and market to that person specifically. In that way, you can manage the outcomes in a direction that will influence your market. A word in the ear of a prospect by an influencer is worth 1000 event attendees.

The other flaw in the “groups” theory is that not all people in that group are influential. This may seem obvious, except that the tech industry is full of sweeping generalisations about the influence of Gartner (and, increasingly, Forrester). Firstly, not all Gartner analysts are influential – it depends hugely on their levels of interactions with end-user organisations. I know this because I’ve seen it first hand at IDC and Ovum. Secondly, not all influential Gartner analysts are influential in the same degree. We know markets where three of the top ten influencers are Gartner people. We also know of markets where the top-ranked Gartner chap is 25th on the list, with four non-Gartners ahead of him. Influencers are specific to a market segment, and you need to know who’s influential in your segment.

Group influencers are usually a cop-out – they’re for the lazy. It’s easy to say Accenture is an influencer on IT architecture and design. It’s much harder to identify the partner within the UK that has the real influence on your customers.

(The exception to the “influencers are individuals” rule are events (conferences, trade shows, etc) that are influential by virtue of the quality of the speakers and the decision-making profile of the audience/attendees. Suffice it to say that very few events are influential these days – decision-makers don’t often attend events. As an order of magnitude, if you have one influential event in your market you’re lucky. If you’re sponsoring more than two I pretty much guarantee you’re wasting money.)

Top 50 Influencers in VoIP – Not!

There are two ways to identify influencers. You can guess, or you can conduct a thorough market research exercise. No prizes for spotting the one with credibility and accuracy.

The trouble with market research is that everyone thinks they can do it. There’s scant attention paid to sample sizes and confidence intervals. (There’s a funny example of this on The World’s Leading… ). But it’s better than guessing.

The result of guessing will look something like that which VoIP-News has developed – there’s a copy here.

Some fundamental mistakes are made – I thought use VoIP-News as an example to explain why guessing misses the mark.

There is no sense of how the ranking has been arrived at. In fact, it’s not really a ranking at all. Instead, groups of influencer types are listed, with important (but obvious) firms or individuals within each grouping. So if you wanted to prioritise an influencer outreach program, where would you start? This list gives you no clues.

The list contains firms and people that influence the VoIP industry. It is a supply-side list. So what? The people that influence a market most are buyers – they fund everything else. Where is the buyer orientation in the list? It’s completely absent. There are no end-user firms represented, or user groups.

What’s the subject of the study, anyway? Is it enterprise-strength VoIP or consumer focused? They are two different markets, with different technologies and different customers. Cisco would blanch at being compared with Skype.

Who would buyers buy from? Big companies buy direct, but most buyers buy through channel – which are not represented in the list. Channel players are often huge influencers in technology markets.

There are no independent trusted advisers. Where are the analyst firms? Where are the management consulting firms and niche consultants?

There’s no representation from academia – I’d have thought VoIP would be under study, to research its productivity and low-cost claims.

When the list reaches number 40, desperation creeps in. Wikipedia as an influencer? Oh please.

Finally, there are no surprises. Research usually springs a couple of outlyers that are counter-intuitive (at least on first analysis). VoIP-News's list is predictable, which means it's incomplete.

This kind of list can be positioned as a bit of fun – fair enough. Or it could be used to inform a marketing and channel strategy, in which case it’s dangerous.

More case studies - and an update on the book

Further to my initial announcement on case studies for the forthcoming book, I can reveal two more case study subjects. These are Wipro and Yahoo!, thus adding to Adobe and Palm (and more coming soon).

What is interesting about both Wipro and Yahoo (without giving too much away) is that they have established Influencer Relations departments or functions within their marketing operations. This trend is growing.

The book is complete in draft proof format, and is out for review by a select group of experts - I hope they like it. We also have a natty cover design. The book web site is under construction and should be up and running shortly. It's all coming together (finally).

Review of H+K's Influencing Technology Decision Makers research

There’s a really interesting video and white paper produced by Hill and Knowlton, the PR/AR firm. The title is Influencing Technology Decision Makers (sounds relevant!) and the work is based on a research project carried out on behalf of H+K.

On the whole it is a really thought-provoking piece of research. The interesting bits, for me, are (in italics, with my comments):

• Previous experience is the primary driver for decision making. I agree, and where a decision maker doesn’t have this experience they have to borrow it from another source – influencers.
• Decision makers are cynical towards sales collateral and marketing messages. Yep.
• There is increasing influence of blogs, even in the C-suite. I disagree – we’ve completed a round of research for a client which shows that, except in France, blogs have little influence at the C-level. Blogs do tend to influence more technical audiences, and where blogs are part of the cultural make-up of the market under investigation (i.e. predominately online markets).
• Gartner and Forrester are the leading analysts, and there is not much between them. Gartner has greater influence on the IT managers, while Forrester is more widely read in the boardroom. Interesting. This indicates that Forrester has caught up with Gartner, and has more credibility with senior decision makers. We certainly see these two far and away the biggest influential analysts.
• Events are not that influential. I think this referred to analyst events, but I find it’s true in general. Gartner Symposium is the only analyst event that occurs in our research on a regular basis.
• The Financial Times is the most influential non-IT publication. The Wall Street Journal leads in the US but trails the FT in other countries. In the UK, the Sunday Times, Telegraph and The Economist ran highest. No real surprises here, except perhaps for the poor showing of the Journal outside the US.
• Print media is more widely read than online media. I agree, though the boundaries are often being blurred. As far as I know, the study didn’t track whether a respondent that read the FT did so in print or online format.
• Analysts are important throughout the decision making process. Absolutely. In the book we’ve mapped various influencer types to the decision making process, and analysts play more roles than any other type. It’s important to understand, though, that although analyst firms play various roles, it’s not the same analysts that play all roles.
• Use the media and analysts to influence decision makers, not to please your CEO on tour. Hoorah! If vendors take a decision maker focus, rather than creating noise to satisfy their own internal ends, then they might not annoy their customers and prospects so much. It is refreshing to hear this from a PR/AR firm.

The big criticism: where are the other influencers? This study only looks at the media, analysts and blogs. What about consultants, resellers, peers, user groups, academics, procurement experts, gurus and thought leaders, or the vendors themselves? I’d love to see the research run next year with this broader remit.


(A few words on the methodology. The research involved 420 interviews, across the UK, US Canada and China, and were conducted using a mix of online, face-to-face and telephone interviews. Interviews were also split by C-Suite and IT managers, and by large enterprises and SMEs. The sample looks a bit thin, when spread across all of these splits. But good food for thought.)

Improving the influence of your blog...?

You may have detected from previous posts here, here and here that I'm doubtful of the influence of blogs. There are influential blogs, for sure, but finding them amongst the mountain of drivel is hard. And blog links are a crude and inaccurate mechanism for determining influence.

So I'm intrigued to see the emergence of a comment rating utility, SezWho. Basically, it's the same facility that allows readers to score the usefulness of a review on Amazon. "Was this review helpful to you, Yes or No?" In the same way, blog readers will be able to rae comments - "Was this comment helpful to you, Yes or No?" In that way, readers will be able to see who posts the most valuable comments.

I also think that commenters will think twice about what they say before commenting, thus improving the overall standard of comments. And thus the usefulness, and therefore the influence, of the blog should increase (all other things being equal).

Marketers - please read this!

If you're a marketer, or ask the marketing department to do things for you, then read this.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/08/is-good-enough-.html

Then think, and act, differently.

Evolving social media

I'm getting into the evolution of social media and its influence, driven partly by research for the book, and partly through trying to understand what (if any) social media I should be using to engage Influencer50's market.

Following on from emerging measurement criteria, Eric Kintz points us to Peter Kim at Forrester, who has suggested a model of personas that we adopt when using various social media. I don't think the model s complete or static but it's a good start to understanding how folk use social media, now and in the future.

What's interesting is that much of the debate seems to exist in a post-LinkedIn world. Am I right in sensing that the social media gurus see LinkedIn as passe? Is FaceBook its successor?

It's always refreshing to talk to "real" people doing what I'd call proper jobs. Selling stuff, making stuff, marketing stuff*, etc. They use LinkedIn all the time, and will continue to use it because of the investment they put into it. They are not nearly as fashion-conscious when it comes to social media as social media commentators are. As always, the "gurus" have to show the way, but the majority is just fine with the status quo.


*Disclaimer: describing marketing as a proper job is highly subjective. Read this to see whether your marketing career qualifies as "proper" (registration required).

Is this blog influential to AR professionals?

I'm intrigued to find this blog mentioned on ARmageddon, the Analyst Relations blog, in the context of Forrester's research into the blogs that AR pros read. Apparently (though I can't trace the source email) Forrester sent a list of blogs to its AR program subscribers asking which one they read. Tacked on at the end of the list is my humble offering.

I'm intrigued because I wouldn't position Infuse as an AR blog, though I do have some strong views on the analyst industry (having been an analyst for 12 years). This is a blog on Influencer Marketing (and I trust this isn't news to you).

Have I been included by mistake? Or by misunderstanding? Or by the interest from AR in Influencer Relations? I don't know.

Perhaps Forrester will let me know when they complete their research. Ta.

Announcing our first case studies

Our book, Influencer Marketing: influencing business decision-maker ecosystems, will feature a dozen state-of-the-art influencer marketing case studies. We’re proud and excited about these, since (a) there aren’t many around and (b) we worked bloody hard to find them all.

I’m delighted to reveal that Adobe and Palm will be case studies in the book, courtesy of our friends at Rubicon Consulting (thanks Nilofer).

More announcements coming soon. The book is due out in November.