Analysts influence, as measured by HP

HP's AR blog announces its research findings of its survey of what influences customers’ decisions to place a vendor on the short-list. Interesting stuff.

But note that while 55% of respondents say analysts do influence the decision, this doesn't not equate to share of influence. It might be that 80% of respondents think peer customers have influence, or that 100% think consulting firms have influence, or that journalists have no influence at all.

Unfortunately, they don't say who else also influences customers, or where in the ranking analysts come. I assume it wasn't top...

The only tidbit they offer is that bloggers and social network sites rank 11th of the 14 types. Go on, HP. Tell us the order of influencers. We'd all love to know.

Influencing competitors

I'm reminded by Josh Bernoff at Forrester about the influence of competitors. Josh asks, should you talk about your competitors? Absolutely, and I'd suggest that you should hope they talk about you.

In every market there are competitors (otherwise it isn't really a market), and there will be some influencers working for those competitors. So first, a reality check. It's unlikely that competitors will become your advocates (unless you can convince them into a partnership, for example). But remember that the influential competitors are influential on your prospects - that's the definition of an influencer. So you can't ignore them either.

Trashing a competitor publicly will be counter-productive, but neither are you going to endorse them. So what to do?

Josh suggests a middle ground. Talk about your competitors. Give credit where credit's due. Understand where your points of differentiation are, and emphasise them.

What is the point of this? The point is, you want competitors to talk about you. Given that they are just as unlikely to trash you, they will try to ignore you. They’d rather not talk about you.
Engaging with other non-competitor influencers has the effect of raising your profile in the industry, including your competitors. Because influencers are talking about you, your competitors will be forced to follow. Otherwise, their influence is diminished, because they are not seen as being in touch, or truthful.

This is particularly true for players trying to break into a market. It’s easy for the more established players to dismiss such competition. But they can’t do this if industry influencers are paying you attention. Importantly, talking about your competitors to influencers is very effective, because it aligns you with your competitors. What you are doing by engaging with influencers is creating a program to influence your competitors.

Your measure of success is simple. Do your competitors see you as a competitor? If yes, then that’s all you can do. If no, then you need to start influencing them.

Influencers don't buy stuff - the point is...

After Nick's debate with Paul Gillin at the New Comms Forum last week, Katie and others have fastened onto Nick's quote that "Influencers don't buy stuff." It seems that some have taken this to mean that influencers don't matter because they are not buyers. This is not the point.

The point is, firstly, that influencers are influencers, and are therefore important - by definition. They can't both be influencers and not matter - that's an oxymoron. So engagement with influencers is mandatory.

The second, and more important point, is that you need to talk to influencers in a different way that you might to customers. To put it crudely, you can't pitch to influencers.

It's not enough to "join the conversation" with influencers. You've got to know what to say, and how to say it. Saying the wrong thing is worse than saying nothing.

I think the missing link here is the identity of influencers. There may be "new influencers" such as bloggers, but they are not the totality of the influencer ecosystem. In any market the ecosystem will be heterogenous: in most markets we see a dozen or more influencer types.

So, step one is always to identify the individual influencers in your market. Only then can you think about what to say to them.

Tekrati interviews Nick

In advance of Nick's appearance at the New Communications Forum this week, he was interviewed by Barbara French at Tekrati on the subject of his debate with Paul Gillin. The link is here.

Nick at the New Communications Forum

Paul Gillin wrote a great review of the book, but noted that we were a tad critical of the role of bloggers in the world of influence. This is somewhat at odds with Paul’s stance in his book on The New Influencers.

Paul got in touch and invited us to debate the issue with him at the New Communications Forum
in Sonoma next week. Nick is representing us – should be a thought-provoking event for all involved.

Markee seminar

I was in Ghent, Belgium, last week presenting on the future of advertising. Shock: there is one.

Koen at Markee, who organised the event, has posted a video of the presentations. Koen’s is in Flemish, but the slides are English and worth a read. Jimmy Maymann from GoViral also presented and played some cool videos on how viral films can create social objects. My pres is on there too. The link is here.

I was introduced to some quirky Belgian humour. Markee had, for instance, arranged to have traditional advertising icons (Duracell’s bunny, Captain Birdseye) standing in glass specimen cases for the duration of the seminar. The stamina of Belgian actors is commendable…

Here’s the proof.

End notes:
Thanks to Koen, Selma and the team for organising a great event.
Visit Ghent for the most restful weekend in Europe, and only 2.5 hours from London on the train.

Reaching out to influencers

There are two major dangers making contact with influencers. One stems from ignorance, the other from deep understanding.

Firstly, ignorance. We had an experience where we identified the key influencers on a market segment to a client. As part of the service we provide contact details. The client then wants to make contact with those influencers. It sends out emails to every influencer on the list, telling them how important they are. Saying how much attention they will be paid.

The typical response: “Please remove me from your mailing list “

I used to get this fairly frequently as an analyst. In my coaching workshops I still use examples of emails sent to me by vendor marketing or PR folks, inviting me to events or meetings. If the offenders were lucky, I’d politely decline their approaches. Usually it was easier to hit the “Send to spam” button.

Bang. There goes your opportunity to engage an influencer. You really didn’t understand the value of the information you had. The 50 most important people on your market, and you spammed them.

The second danger is that you understand only too well how important these influencers are. Which makes approaching them scary. What if you upset them? Or they’re hostile to your firm?

There are some basic rules of engagement. The first is to pick up the phone. Most busy people these days get over a hundred emails a day, most of which go unread. A colleague of mine just received a reply to an email he sent 300 days ago! I told him he was lucky to get any response.

The phone, on the other hand, is direct, allows synchronous conversation, and demonstrates your commitment and approachability, and you can immediately address any questions or negativity in real time. Importantly, the phone is now not the norm, which is why it works.

The other key rule is that any phone conversation must be a peer-level discussion. You can’t contact influencers through a call centre, or use junior executives. They’re too important for that.

Only when you really know your influencers well can you send them email, to confirm discussion points or to arrange meeting logistics. Sometimes, the old fashioned ways of contact still work best.

How important are blogs? To me? To decision makers?

I’ve been busy. Really busy. Too busy to blog.

Is this true, though? How important is blogging to you? How important should it be to me?

The truth is, if you’re going to blog you should commit time and resource to it. I haven’t, lately. My bad (as they say). As luck would have it the projects we’ve been working on recently both had interesting perspectives on blogging.

The projects show that bloggers are now emerging as influencers in specific niche areas. A year ago it’s doubtful that any bloggers would have appeared on our top 50 list of influencers. Senior decision makers, in general, didn’t read blogs. This has changed, not in a big way, but blogs are now firmly on the list of decision maker reading. There are some infrastructure reasons for this. The adoption of RSS makes reading blogs easy nowadays, even for busy technology buyers. More likely, the adoption of blogging as a communications mechanism by already well-established influencers encourages adoption of the medium, which then prompts wider exploration of the blogosphere.

The main reason, we think, for growth in blogger influence is that the influential bloggers are getting out more. They attend conferences, they write articles in mainstream media, they consult and advise. In short, they engage in more ways than just on their blog. This, we think, is the primary reason why bloggers are increasingly influential.

What’s also interesting is that, in general, bloggers refer to other bloggers in a self-referencing cluster. This is why bloggers appear to be highly influential – they increase the number of links and references from blogs by increasing links and references to other blogs. For most, though, their influence is restricted to the blogosphere and few have escaped into influencing the real world, and real decision makers.