The most powerful influence in the world is one person REALY listening to another person.This is word of mouth right, the back bone of marketing. When a company is doing things amazingly well, hitting on all cylinders, word of mouth movements happen on their own. Today, when I talk about influence the goal is to get you to do things this way, to reinvest in the customer, to run your business in a way and primes it for influencers to spread the news.
Influencer cannot cure a bad product or solve a horrible customer service system.
That you admit to…Mom, dad, brother, coworker, expertsWhat is not on this list?Celebrities, pundits, advertisements,
As a consumer we don’t think about these things, we just naturally trust them more. A consumer is not looking for influence, they are looking for trusted information.We instead create personal experts from these building blocks. We talk to suzy about healthy food and todd about workouts and jeremy about politics. We build trust experts according to these building blocks. And these people have larger influence than others. The same thing happens online.
Authority (respect, experience, social proof)Relevance (proximity, topic, culture)Audience (size, scope, reach, commitment)Frequency (quantity, consistency, creativity)Emotion (story telling, close relationship, common bond)The more of these items you can check off the better. Some people trust their neighbors, many don’t. Some people trust their family, but still know they can’t really give them advice on what the latest digital camera to buy is. We instead create personal experts from these building blocks. We talk to suzy about healthy food and todd about workouts and jeremy about politics. We build trust experts according to these building blocks. And these people have larger influence than others. The same thing happens online.
Authority (respect, experience, social proof)Relevance (proximity, topic, culture)Audience (size, scope, reach, commitment)Frequency (quantity, consistency, creativity)Emotion (story telling, close relationship, common bond)The more of these items you can check off the better. Some people trust their neighbors, many don’t. Some people trust their family, but still know they can’t really give them advice on what the latest digital camera to buy is. We instead create personal experts from these building blocks. We talk to suzy about healthy food and todd about workouts and jeremy about politics. We build trust experts according to these building blocks. And these people have larger influence than others. One of the most targeted types of influencers most businesses will target and come into contact with is a topic influencer. For the consumers this comes into play as a trust expert. Someone we, as individuals, listen to about specific topics. With this comes relevance. A cornerstone of the influencer equation.The same thing happens online.
What can influencers do for our businesses?
I the fight against skeptical consumers, the best weapon is skeptical consumers.We are skeptics. We have been blanketed with ads and news stories filled with PR pitches and amazing copywriting making us feel good about ourselves and spending money, since birth. We know the game, we see through the marketing. We want real information from trusted sources.
Would you rather have passion on your side or advertisements and press releases?
bloggers help explain why Cirque du Soleil is so unique.Jessica Berlin, Cirque’s Social Media Manager, invited 250 bloggers to attend a show of their choice and share their genuine feedback on their respective blogs. This resulted in significant chatter on blogs and twitter about the “Cirque Experience.” By simply engaging members of the blogger community, Jessica was able to convert them into brand ambassadors. This served as a great case study of a brand leveraging blogger outreach to establish a community.They target who they invite to experience every show. Each of their 20+ shows is different. The audience is different. The outreach is different.
One of the leading social media invested companies period. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, outreach, etc. Built close personal relationships with the entire social media industry.Daily twitter users are up to 400% more likely to blog, upload videos, or write reviews online. So if you have an army of these content creators, you are pretty well poised to fight off a potential crisis. As we said before, influence does not fix bad products or bad service, but it can push out the right information and quickly.
Viral video campaigns of the past worked, but nothing on this scale. Facebook fans grew by 118%YouTube subscribers grew 227%Twitter followers saw the biggest bump at 2,800% growth
Look close – exporty, flowtown, rapportive, your own followers, who you email, crm, new customers, employees, loud customers, grieving customersResearch communities – blogdash, technorati, rowfeeder on a hashtag, forumsAsk for help – twitter, quora, employees, hire someone (investinsocial.com)
Read their blog, subscribe to RSS and Youtube, sign up for a newsletterLeave comments, retweet, ask questions, promotePay attention to any current partnerships they have, if they specify what they create content on, how they prefer to be contactedEmail them to introduce yourself without asking for somethingProvide content, guest blog, create content, Learning the ecosystem is probably the most valuable point here. Shift communications did a big blogger outreach campaign last year for Slydial, a new app that let you leave a voicemail for someone without calling them. Every single pitch of their By hitting online consumers from all angles (both blogs and mainstream media), the PR program helped boost slydial’s 5,000 private alpha users to more than 200,000 beta users in less than two weeks. We were able to directly correlate the new-user spikes to the coverage. 381 blog posts in one month
Culture – events, name champions, community, traditions, your own vernacularValue – give them insights into the company, assets, special treatment, meet celebrities, test products, free stuff, moneyHelp them – teach them something, solve their problems