Tag Archives: social media

Thoughts on Influencer Strategies in Social Media

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Just as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are famous for being… well… famous, so an increasing number of people are becoming influential today because they continually discuss being influential. Set aside the irony of a space where simply talking about influence can lead to you being labelled influential. The term ‘influence’, as used in today’s discussion of social media, is too generalized in my opinion.

Is conversation, sharing and retweeting a measure of influence? Sometimes.
If a blogger puts out an opinion that is well received and results in numerous retweets and shares, does it mean this blogger has influenced all those retweeters?

By today’s measurement methodology the assumption is yes, but I’m not so sure.

In the world of editorial, someone who agrees with your post enough to retweet it immediately is most likely to have already been in your camp to begin with. The political gridlock in our nation demonstrates this well. Democrats rarely influence Republicans and vice versa. Yet all of the candidates, when they publish perspectives, see them shared rampantly. That’s because the vast majority of this sharing happens among their pre-existing supporters. In this sense, what we today call ‘influence’ may in some instances be more a measure of the general acceptability level of an idea rather than of the influence of the blogger. It’s important to remember that social media networks tend to connect us by commonalities not differences.

Leveraging networks organized by commonality is very powerful for certain strategies like rallying a support base or solidifying brand loyalty. There are more challenges, however, when approaching new markets as one would with a growth strategy.

Influence and Growth Strategies
When it comes down to actually influencing people to the point of persuasion, where they change brands, opinions, preferences, etc. leveraging an influencer is trickier. True influence between people sits squarely in the domain of those qualitative human dynamics that semantic keyword analysis is still not very good at accurately recording.

There is more at play when influencers are seeking to succeed at persuasion. Two additional factors, beyond the influencer, play an equal if not greater role. They are the influencee (person being influenced) and the product or idea being decided upon.

For example, if you aspire to be like Katy Perry and Katy Perry drinks fruit juice X, you can probably afford to indulge your desire to be like Katy and buy that fruit juice. Here Katy Perry is very influential on your choice because the barrier to adopting Katy’s preference is low. The same holds true for bloggers who vouch for low-cost, impulse item type purchases.

But if Katy Perry drives a Porsche and you want to be like Katy it’s harder to realize your dream. You can’t necessarily go out and buy a Porsche right? True, Katy is still influential on your desire to have a Porsche but her value as an influencer is compromised by the socio-economic situation of the fan and the high-price of the product.

If you’re targeting people who can afford Porsche’s and those people are not generally influenced by the likes of Katy Perry, well then she’s not the right influencer. Conversely, if you’re targeting people who like Katy Perry and trying to sell them a Porsche but as a group they can’t afford a Porsche (or aren’t old enough to drive yet!), then your strategy (and target) are misaligned with your influencer.

Anyone in marketing will recognize this as the exact same dynamics that play out in traditional celebrity endorsement strategies, which is of course what social media influencers are within their circles of influence.

Higher involvement decisions bring challenges to influencer strategies.
Generally speaking, as products become more expensive they become a higher-involvement choice. Higher involvement decisions tend to mean that the ability of any single influencer is mitigated by the alignment of the influencee and the nature of the product. Other factors come into play beyond simply being influenced.

  • Can I afford the product? Are there sacrifices involved in purchasing it?
  • Does purchasing it lock me into a platform or brand at the expense of others?
  • What is the cost of ownership?
  • Is it compatible with other interacting devices?

These types of questions come up when you buy things like cars, electronics or appliances.

I explored this in a prior post called the Persuasion Paradox.

The original info graphic from The Persuasion Paradox. Click to enlarge.

Of course, this is a moving measure which is dependent upon the community being targeted: A $600 iPad might be an impulse item to some people and a very special treat requiring disciplined saving for others. The person you’d choose as an influencer for the former might be very different than the one chosen for the latter. Especially since the authenticity of the influencer is so important to their influence on a community or group. Someone who can easily drop $600 on an iPad probably is not an authentic voice to the disciplined saver.

Getting down to brass tacs.
Because of the importance of these nuances on the topic of ‘influence’, generalized definitions without context are insufficient for strategic planning purposes. In fact generalized thinking can lead to assumptions that waste resources (say, like signing a Katy Perry as a spokesperson to blog on behalf of an $85K sports car). An influencer’s impact should be considered against at least two factors.

  1. Does the strategy seek to communicate with an existing community who have already accepted the general premise or ideas the influencer will put forth. If so, traditional quantitative measures of influence are a decent starting point for identifying an influencer.
  2. For growth strategies that seek to infiltrate a new constituency, care must be taken to ensure the sponsoring entity/brand, desired influencee and the prospective influencer are aligned to meet the overall strategic goal. This is easier with low-involvement decisions than it is with high involvement decisions.

As social media continue to mature it is time to take a more nuanced look at how we approach and measure the worth of these new tools and the new generation of celebrities/influencers they are creating.

Water cooler 2.0: Why, one day, content will crush channel.

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I read recently the analogy that social media had brought back the proverbial water cooler. The original water cooler (v1.0) was defined by mass media. With limited channels we all saw shades of the same programming thereby having something in common to talk about at the office water cooler the next day. Then came the media fragmentation. While the number of hours we spent watching TV programs didn’t decrease (it continues to increase actually) we were all watching different channels (and more recently, different screens). On Monday morning, fewer and fewer people saw the same program and those water cooler chats were among smaller and smaller groups. It’s been a slippery slope ever since.

Along comes social media. Today our social graphs in many ways curate our programming. We see things our friends recommend to us – the breadth of our serendipitous discovery is very directly connected to the variety of people our social graph (which is why it can be limiting to surround ourselves with people who are like us). We can also share information both ways now. We can recommend content to each other, increasingly view that content on demand, and then talk with each other about it in the moment. This is water cooler 2.0. Like everything Internet it has no geographic boundaries. Instead its organized around the topics that connect us to our friends. That could be a sense of humor, an appreciation for sci-fi, or a mutual hobby like pastry making.

You’re probably nodding your head here – what I’m saying is nothing new, right? There is, however, a profound (to me, anyhow) realization that came with this water cooler analogy. Water cooler 1.0 was an asset to advertisers. It made the distribution channels valuable. It’s what ensured superbowl spots would sell for insane amounts of money. The advertiser wanted their ad to be talked about at the water cooler, so they hitched their message to the distribution system – the TV channel with the rights to air the Superbowl. The Superbowl itself was what drew the audience, true, but because of an essential monopoly on the distribution of that program – you couldn’t watch it live any other way – the channel commanded the high prices.

That’s all disappearing now. Now the content  – be it news, an MP3, or the next Subserviant Chicken – increasingly travels across media jumping from a blog post to a Facebook wall to a Twitter link to a Tosh.O clip (back on TV) to the Nightly News. While the content ricochets through these channels it also replicates, cloning itself along the way so that it can exist in multiple media at the same time.

The point is this: The distribution channel matters less and less because the information lives in multiple media simultaneously and our seeing it is more a function of our social graph than our tuning into any particular distribution channel. In fact, most of us are probably used to getting the same piece of content multiple times due to overlap in our media usage and social graphs.

What am I getting at?

If I were an advertiser looking to be talked about at water cooler 2.0 – absent real-world practicality for a moment – I would be less interested in sponsoring a particular channel or network. Instead I’d want to sponsor a piece of content itself. I’d want my message to travel with that content. On a basic level that’s what viral videos try to do, but they’re usually either shallow product shills or they leverage so much borrowed interest to be entertaining as to be forgettable (or irrelevant) as advertising.

What if instead of AMC selling the advertising space during Breaking Bad, the producers of Breaking Bad sold those rights and they traveled with the show and its video clips – on TV, across the internet, onto Facebook, through Twitter, etc.? It’s a little like the 360 contracts labels are offering their artists in the music business.

(And yes, I know, what I just stated would turn the entire entertainment industry upside down. That’s sort of happening anyway right? What I’m articulating may be wholly distasteful today but Spotify also would’ve been despised ten years ago too. Now the music industry is hailing it as a savior. Desperation has that effect.)

Dream with me now because I’m going into La La Land… What if a company could sponsor a piece of news or information? What if every time someone broadcast, tweeted, posted or shared a piece of information (e.g. “Emergency Session Held to Rescue Greece” – the top news item on CNN as I type this) a brand’s message rode along (e.g. “Having financial troubles, talk to Chuck!”). By hitching the message to the news, you’d get the highest possible exposure to the aggregate audience during that piece of information’s lifetime across all the media channels people carried it through. And because that piece of information is curated by social graphs, the advertiser would have an incentive to ensure their message was relevant to that news item and the people who would be tuned into it (otherwise they’d reduce the likelihood of it being further shared).

In a way, it’s almost like watermarking a piece of content metaphysically.

I understand that this is entirely impossible right now. But at one point a lot of science fiction and pie-in-the-sky thinking was dismissed as impossible and later became possible by wholly unforeseen technologies. Who knows what opportunities will be afforded down the line?

My point is this  – content is becoming more valuable because ultimately it is what is shared. The channel is less valuable because increasingly people have access to multiple channels which have redundancy of content built in due to their social graph curation and inevitable overlap.

That’s the opposite of the way the media industry views its value and organizes its revenue models right now. Even today, every social network start-up seeks members first as a way to legitimize itself as a business. With so many social media systems in play and with the content so easily transmittable between them, the channels themselves become less important with every new competitive network. The boundaries between media channels is porous and the distribution of content absolutely fluid. Exclusivity, the basic selling proposition of all media, is more or less unsustainable today with very few exceptions. The content, meanwhile, is much more valuable because it is ultimately what most people will seek out through whatever channel is most convenient at that moment.

What we do with that realization I’m unsure. We’re a long way from being able to act on it for technical, political and business reasons. But it feels like its going to be important to grapple with somewhere down the line.

Mis-engagement and social media

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I was struck by the graphic above. It comes from the back page of Fast Company. It’s a stat dump on Facebook with the type of big ‘population of China’ numbers that the media loves but which, when you think about how Facebook organizes people, aren’t really all that useful.

This one stuck out though:

It says that we people spend 12 minutes each day, and upload ’90 pieces of content’ each month, via Facebook. You can almost hear marketer’s lean closer. Ooh do tell!

Knowing how stats-for-dramatic-effect works, I assume this is the broadest use of the word ‘content’ and in addition to pictures and notes, it includes wall posts, status updates, comments, simple link sharing, etc.

Keep in mind, no one considered letter writing between friends to be ‘content’ 10 years ago – even if it was via email. Now though, because personal and commercial communication are being mashed together via digital technology, it’s all fair game when it comes to pushing out those attention-grabbing, headline-calibre stats.

12 minutes on Facebook each day. 3 pieces of ‘content’ created or uploaded each day. Over 600 million people worldwide.

That sounds like an army of engaged people just waiting to be sold to, right?

A low bar for ‘engagement’.
By Web standards a 12-minute session time is considered incredibly long. Many sites are thrilled to get 2 minutes of someone’s time. However, by cognitive standards, Facebook (and the greater Web experience) is extremely fragmented and broken up. When compared to the rest of our lives, those 15- and 30-second bursts of time are so small one has to wonder what value is really in them. Consider this:

  • Getting ready for work in the morning takes more than 12 minutes.
  • Grabbing a cup of coffee with a friend takes more than 12 minutes.
  • Going into a store to pick up a few things takes more than 12 minutes.
  • Cooking dinner takes more than 12 minutes.
  • Reading a bedtime story to a child takes more than 12 minutes.

The above blocks of time are common and largely forgettable in the course of daily life. Do you remember what was on your mind while picking up groceries yesterday? How about getting dressed this morning? The reality is you spent more than 12 minutes on doing these things. Yet online that same 12 minutes – often broken out of numerous mini-sessions spent flitting between pages – is bestowed with this aura of concentration and focus; as if people sponge up everything they see online because its an interactive medium.

I think there is ground to argue that online, flitting between Facebook profiles or Web pages or apps, that we’re less engaged, not more. Yet we continually try to monetize this time spent online. We believe it to be this precious moment when sellers have clear access to the holy consumer in this pristine state of perfect solicitation-readiness.

Re-engaging with engagement.
There is such a low bar for ‘engagement’ online today that simply clicking a ‘like’ button is credited with some sort of marketing success.

Media don’t create engagement. They never have. Media at their best cut through the noise to serve up a topic or issue we’re interested in at a time and place where we’re ready to consider it. They are distribution systems with differing feature sets and benefits. Increasingly they are a series of varying-sized screens all fed from the same spigot of digital information.

We engage with the issue though, not the medium.

That’s because we go about our lives not thinking about this or that medium. We lead an integrated existence where we hop fluidly from media to get what we need, when we need  it. Our level of engagement varies not because of the tool, but the topic. One only gets so excited about deodorant. Animal rights though, some people get passionate about that. (They may also get passionate about deodorant because of their interest in Animal Rights, depending on the company’s animal testing practices.)

The quantitative world of digital technologies has us all focused on looking for big numbers. We salivate at 12-minute session times glossing over the reality that they’re really twenty-four 30-second sessions where our brains are largely in skimming modes – and that’s being generous. We define someone uploading their own personal pictures as ‘content creation’ forgetting the caveat that the ‘content’ being ‘created’ is highly personal and has little value to anyone but the creator and their friends. We associate someone clicking ‘friend’ or ‘fan’ or ‘like’ with the real emotions these words used to mean.

The act of clicking – often the be-all measure of online activity – is really a poor choice as spokesman for engagement. Clicking takes such little effort. It’s a low-stakes action which doesn’t say very much about anyone. It costs someone little to do yet immense value is attributed to the act.

It’s not always this way of course. There are certainly instances where when someone clicks ‘share’ or ‘like’ they honestly mean it. Often though, and especially with brands trying so hard to be friends with their prospects, the relationship uses all the right words but has none of the emotional connection.

In my mind social media’s lexicon and measurement practices do a great disservice to our understanding of human social dynamics and especially to what really constitutes an engaged person.

I believe we need to set aside the quantitative information that is so easy to access because computers are good at counting and instead look at the qualitative aspects of what makes a person (or a community) tick.

This is messier, more manual work to be sure – which is probably why it never enjoys the popularity of easy, automated, stat-happy digital data accrual.

However, understanding the context of someone’s life, and what motivates them to care is where the clues to achieving real engagement can be found.

Of Communities and Customers

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I own a Jeep. To some marketing guy, I'm part of the Jeep community. And while some few Jeep freaks will buy Jeep-branded anything, most Jeep drivers don't. They don't see Jeep as a community or lifestyle, they see it as a product that fits into a lifestyle which includes many products.

Today every company is in the throes of putting together a ‘social media strategy.’ Per usual, the promises of marketing gold lie over the rainbow. And as with the dotcom bubble, new job titles like Community Manager or Curator are being minted alongside vague responsibilities whose performance metrics are rooted at the far-squishy end of qualitative measures. The lexicon of social media is changing the vernacular of marketing in other ways too. Advertising and marketing used to be about ‘targeting’ customers through ‘campaigns’. Military metaphors were plentiful. Today ‘customers’ are so 20th century. What companies need today – or so the thinking goes – is a community. Communities sound like everything customers rarely were – caring, committed, friendly, and most of all loyal. The language of marketing has changed too. We’ve moved away from military terms to softer, gentler, flower-power terms like sharing, communal knowledge, and crowdsourcing. Tune in, turn on, drop out dude, it’s the age of Aquarius 2.0. It all feels so good, so new, so different.

Here’s the headline: For 99.9% of companies out there; if the only thing the people you’re courting have in common is your product, they’re your customers not your community.

Sure, there are the very, very rare but very, very hyped exceptions – Apple comes to mind. Everyone being like Apple is like every actor in L.A. being a star. While you’re waiting for your audition make me a latte.

In most categories  - from fashion to food – people don’t consider themselves part of a product-based community. Do you really belong to the DKNY community? Do you belong the the Whole Foods community? Are you a member of the GAP community? The Sony or Netflix community?

Just because people post comments on your products or pass coupons around or give you four-stars… that doesn’t make them a community advocate. It makes them an opinionated customer with friends. The kind companies had back in 1980 too – only now said customer has a soapbox to stand on and friends are a click away. Sure people will ‘fan’ a Facebook page or follow your Twitter feed. That’s one lazy, easy click. The barrier is low. The cost is free. And for the marketer counting these people as their community, the same rule applies – you get what you pay for.

‘Liking’ something isn’t the basis for a community. Customers have talked about what they liked – from Levis to Duran Duran to the Rubik’s Cube – for decades. Again, now they have a soapbox. This isn’t to say there’s no utility to the marketer among these outspoken customers, there is. Its just that someone rating a few stars on your product page is not the same as a frothing brand evangelist at the pulpit of an engaged, evangelical, branded community.

So if communities form the core of the social web concept (we can’t be social without some mechanism in place), shouldn’t we have a better definition of an online ‘community’ than ‘users of product X who have participated in a blog/forum/Facebook page/retweet/insert-whatever-social-media-metric here’?

I would offer that communities online are linked by passionate interests. That might be music or art or clothing or movies or baking. It might be a fascination with astronomy or gardening. It may even be political. The show-up-at-rallies Republicans and Democrats certainly could be characterized as communities. The thing is, most products just don’t create that kind of passion for most people. They can’t, they’re products.

The goal of a social media strategy for most companies should not  be to create, manage or curate a community. What companies need to do is consider the types of passions around which their products might fit into existing communities. That might be mothers-to-be or CPAs, pet owners or online gamers.

Some members of these communities you’ll want to make into your customers.

Most of these communities are… and read this carefully… BRAND AGNOSTIC. The brands don’t make the communities. Foodies existed before Whole Foods came along. Foodies will live on long after Whole Foods is gone. People loved exercise and fitness long before Under Armor. When Under Armor is gone, people will still love fitness. If one brand goes away or loses touch with a community another can fill its spot.

What today’s Internet-based communities bring to the table is something marketers have wanted for decades… a concentrated potential customer base to reach out too. Sure, the tactics have changed for all the well-known reasons having to do with social technology and consumer-control, but the strategy isn’t that different from what hucksters have been doing since the days of Mad Men. Marketers must still insert themselves into the lives of their customers. Now, though, those customers can be identified by their passion-based communities and not the media they use at a particular time of day.

That’s the real big difference. Yet the marketing industry ruminates and pontificates and invents new names for age old problems.New generations try to assert themselves among their older peers as some ‘new school’ disrupting the old. The dotcom kids did it back in 1999 too (I know, I was one of them.) So much of it is rhetoric and I have to believe a lot of executives see through it. (I hope so anyhow.)

At the end of the day, companies have customers and customers are now reachable through self-organizing communities because new technologies allow it. So communities matter. Social media matters. But a little level setting is in order if we’re to succeed in the world as it really is.