Marketing in times of uncertainty

Someone told me that recessions cycle around roughly every 18 years. What do they know?! It seems just like yesterday when the IT industry was flattened by the post Y2K and post 9/11 gloom. An now here we are again. If you’re in any doubt of what’s coming, read Richard Holway’s pessimistic but usually accurate view of the short term future.

Marketing’s core purpose comes to the fore in times of recession. If it doesn’t impact sales, directly and measurably, then it’s impact is questionable. Demonstrable short term sales impact is the best defence against cuts, because in a recession it’s all about short term sales.

Budget cuts are inevitable. This is good news, if you’re still in a job to be able to spend your diminished funds.

Firstly, it means that you must stop doing things that don’t work, or can’t be measured. What would happen if you didn’t do the next event you’ve got planned? What’s the impact of not doing PR for a quarter? Is that DM campaign really worthwhile? Cut what doesn’t work and invest it activity that truly generates sales. Be bold. Ask tough questions.

Budget reductions also mean that you have to be creative, which is what marketing types should be good at. So try new things. I expect more companies to invest in social networking technologies, as they try to reach their customers in new and innovative (and cheaper) ways. I think word-of-mouth campaigns will grow, looking for referrals and leads from existing customers. And I believe vendors will engage more with partner organisations in structured and sophisticated ways, like SAP’s Industry Value Network approach.

Recession is tough for everyone. But there are opportunities to take, if you’re brave enough to chuck out old and ineffective ways of marketing.

Batten down the hatches. Good luck.

It's ALL to do with alignment

Funny how two unconnected things come together at the same time to contrive an “Aha” moment. Serendipity, synchronicity or spooky co-incidence. Whatever.

Anyway, Christine (Influencer50’s biz development lead in San Francisco) and I are discussing methods of engaging influencers. With over 20 different types of influencer to consider, we need an integrated method for the process, while catering for the wide differences in agendas, personalities and expectations.

Then just yesterday I was re-reading a Hugh post on Digital Nomads, when he uses the word “Alignment” to describe Dell’s blog attempt to sidle up to mobile workers.

Aha!

Influencer engagement is ALL to do with alignment. It’s about finding out what influencers do, when and how they influence, and what their agenda and motivations are. Once you know this you can (and should) align your outreach activities with your influencers on an individual (or at most clustered) basis.

So what? There are two traps to fall into when considering alignment with influencers. The first is that it’s actually quite hard to align yourself with a host of differing types of people. In fact, it’s hard enough aligning with different types of journalist or analyst. What about academics, community leaders, customers, regulators and the other numerous influencer types? Some discipline and structure is require, which is what Christine and I are working on.

The second trap is perhaps less obvious, but it is more commonly encountered. It is that alignment requires you to align with the influencers, not the other way around. Most vendors want to get influencers to agree with them. You should be looking for ways to agree with influencers, even if this means changing fundamental things about your business.

They are the influencers, after all.

Influence as vocabulary for integrated marketing

One of Influencer50’s first clients initially thought that Influencer Marketing could unite the disparate silos that existed in the marketing department. Thanks for the confidence, guys!

Much as we’d like to position Influencer Marketing as a panacea for marketing’s ailments, it doesn’t work quite like that. But strangely, and probably because the client’s expectation was set from the beginning, the outcome was closer to their aspiration than we thought possible.

It works like this.

A major issue in marketing is the silo mentality that divides operations into a wide range of disjointed activities. So we have PR, AR, partner marketing, events (from conferences to podcasts), user groups, collateral development, and so on, as well as a host of telesales/telemarketing and mailings.

Now Influencer Marketing doesn’t promise to unite all of these distinct activities. But what it does do is identify where the influence on decision makers lies. It does ask the question: “How does this activity relate to influence on decision makers?” And it does suggest that if and activity cannot demonstrate an impact on influence then you should stop doing it.

Influencer Marketing applies right across the marketing operational domain. It covers press and analysts, and partner organisations, and end-users, and events and other influence categories. So it offers a vocabulary for discussing the widest range of marketing activities, uniting at least the terminology for discussing and managing marketing.

Our client runs marketing operational management meetings, at which all representatives report on their activities. The reports are provided in terms of their impact on the identified influencers relevant to the activity. So PR reports on progress in engaging with the most influential journalists. Events are scheduled to leverage the most influential conferences (a diminishing category), and influencers are solicited to speak at client-arranged seminars. Partnership strategy is oriented around the most influential people in third-party organisations, even if formal partnerships don’t already exist.

Thus influencers have become a way of everybody reporting back using the same terms, and with the same degree of focus on who really carries influential with decision-making prospects.

We, and our client, are smart enough to recognise that this isn’t truly integrated marketing. But it’s a useful start, easy to implement, and aids management. It also helps to present marketing in a more organised and professional light to the rest of the organisation. This is important, especially with a recession looming and the budgetary axe being lifted.

Influence in SMBs

Barbara has picked up on the new CMB Sage Market Pulse study, which shows who SMBs use in making IT decisions. A high dependence on independent consultants and peers, followed by (whisper it) vendors' sales reps.

The influence of vendors on their own markets is typically understated. A typical buying pattern of an SMB is: get quotes from three vendors. A consultant or systems integrator or VAR may provide this quote gathering and assessment service by proxy. But that's pretty much all there is to it in the supply chain.

Little analyst penetration at this price point. But what's stranger is the absence of journalists and bloggers, much of whose information and opinion is widely available and free. And where are the other sources of advice, such as industry associations, government agencies and other influencers not in the supply chain. Was this an omission in the survey?

Anyway, the survey supports Forrester's own study last year, which found similar sources of influence, though in a slightly different order.

The main point is that SMBs are influenced by different folk than larger organisations. Indeed, SMBs are not a contiguous group, and there are many variations in influence dynamics within segments of the broad SMB space. So watch out if you're targeting firms other than enterprise size - you may be surprised who pop up in the influence ecosystem.

How to use ‘super-influencers’

Sometimes we come across super-influencers. We define these people as having a high and broad level of influence across a wide variety of decision types. Most often, upper-influencers hold the most senior positions in business and government. Think Davos or TED, and you’re close to defining a commuity of super-influencers.

The problem with super-influencers is that they are too high-level and too hard to reach that, unless you are trying to influence other super-influencers, the effort required to engage with them is disproportionate to the likely benefits. The entry price for a corporate executive to Davos is something like $250,000 and even then there’s no guarantee of sitting next to the person you really want to meet.

The truth is, most decisions affecting your corporate health are made in a much more mundane, but reachable, community. Which is why most influencers on an Influencer50 list are grounded in practical, though deep, influence on decision makers.

Still, when a super-influencer drops in your lap, you should feel obliged to use them well. So the next time your CEO announces a visit, what should you do?

Super-influencers are so-called because they influencer other influencers. So get your super-influencer in front of as many other influencers as possible. Attract other super-influencers and make an occasion of it. Get influencers talking to each other. Why? Because influencers get a lot of their influence from networking with other influencers. Make this happen, be seen as the facilitator, and your influencers will thank you for it.

Idea diffusion and influence

I was prompted to think more about Duncan Watts’s ideas by Sarah Fraser’s comment on my post on influencer communities, and by her post on professor Watt’s theories.

In fact, I’ve just finished reading Watts’s Six Degrees, which was excellent and more accessible (I found) than Barabasi’s Linked. So Professor Watts is top of mind right now.

Here’s where I think the key difference between what Watts says and my practical experience. Watts talks about the role of influencers in the diffusion of ideas. As Seth says, use ‘sneezers’ with influence if you want to crack a market. Watts disagrees that you can predict what ideas diffuse, or even whether you can identify influencers that might make diffusion easier or more likely. It’s pretty much random, according to Watts.

I agree. If you’re trying to use influencers to spread ideas and concepts, then good luck but don’t bet the firm.

My own view is that influencers can be identified, and can assist greatly, in the decision-making process. That is, not whether an idea is spread or not, but whether an idea is adopted in the end. Idea diffusion is part of the process, but it’s just the start. A decision-making process is often a long and time-consuming activity. In the B2B world especially, a decision may take years to emerge. Idea diffusion is necessary, but not sufficient.

I explored this relationship between influence and the decision-making process in the book, and also posted on it (in summary form) here. Idea planting (as I called it) is right at the start of the process, but is relatively low down in the awareness of senior decision makers. Thus idea diffusers (connectors, sneezers, etc) may not be that influential in affecting the ultimate decision. There are a whole bunch of other influencers that intervene after ideas are sown.

Idea diffusion is also important in the process of deciding whether to do something. Do I adopt SOA? Do I need a Web2.0 strategy? Do I need a new car? But it plays less of a role in the subsequent decision of what to buy. Different influencers are in play at this more practical stage, like product reviewers or case studies or implementers.

The only problem I have with Professor Watts’s arguments is that when he doubts the role of influencers in any aspect of life, it doesn’t fit with real world experience and intuition. My guess is that we can all think of people who are influential in certain areas of life. Fitting this experience and intuition into a practical marketing approach is what Influencer Marketing is all about.

Evolving PR towards influencers

Seth reminds me that PR is a diminishing activity, in terms of its importance. The more enlightened PR firms accept that their business has been commoditised, with minimal opportunities for differentiation and fierce price competition. The question is, what do you do about it?

As ever, it’s a mindset change that’s required. Most start-up firms I know begin their marketing activities by recruiting a PR agency. Why? Because that’s what everyone else does.

Why not try to engage with the 50 most important people in your target market? Sure, some of these will be journalists, and you should definitely reach out to them. But you’ll probably find there are only a relative handful of them, which means you can treat them differently. Find out what they want to hear, what they’d find useful, what they’re interested in. Concentrate on being a resource for these most important journalists.

It means you don’t have to go chasing after the hundred other hacks that cover your space. Then use the time saved to focus on other influencer types, such as analysts, academics, consultants, bloggers, standards bodies and regulators.

The catch? It’s hard to determine which of the hundred journalists are really influential, by which I mean influential on decision makers. And it’s even harder to determine who else is influential, beyond journalists. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, or can’t, do it

Influencing outsourcing

Barbara points to a new study by Global Services and AMR on the role of outsource advisory firms. Interesting stuff, and good insight into an often under-the-radar group of influencers.

In the book's case study on Wipro, sourcing advisers played the central role in their influencer outreach strategy, more important than analysts and business consultants. So their role is well understood by at least some services firms. But how many have pro-active and funded programmes to engage with sourcing advisers?

More lists of influencers

You know how I like lists of influencers. Or rather, how I like to rant at their general pointlessness.

So I got all excited about another list source, called Most Public. It’s an index of the most influential public figures in some predefined news community. Like New York.

I'm troubled by any information source that claims "a teenage Twitterer may have as powerful a voice as the New York Times editorial board". What nonsense, at least without qualification (such as, influential on whom?).

Oh, and it has to be online influence. The measurement criteria, which are published, make it clear that it’s the online world that is being indexed.

In fact, I actually quite like the idea of this type of list, especially when there’s an obvious methodology in play. Disagree with the method, but you can’t claim that the list is made up randomly (unlike most compilations of influencers).

Still I can’t help wondering, who are these people influential on? My first guess is, other people on the list. There’s a tendency in the online blogosphere twitterverse web2.0 world to refer to other people in the same community. This is, of course, natural since we gravitate to others like us. Fair enough. Except don’t assume that the online community is a proxy for the rest of the world. It isn't. In a recent survey we conducted for a client, the most popular answer to "Which blogs do you read?" was "What's a blog?"

I’m left with the impression that the New York Most Public list is interesting, like a top ten list of marching band music is interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. From a practical point of view, I’d rather see a top 50 list of the most influential restaurant critics in NY. Or who’s influencing advertising trends in print media. Or who’s influencing the economy. Or who’s influencing voting intentions.

Lists are all very well, but they beg the question, what are they for. Too often, this question is left unasked.

A reminder

When considering influence, please remember to pose the question: influential on whom?

It saves a lot of bother if you have this question in mind before embarking on any Influencer program, or start composing a list of “influencers”, or even dismissing the concept of influencers.

It also helps if you have a decent understanding of the answer. Hopefully it will be something useful like “Influential on our customers and prospects”.