CrapHammer

I am not an influencer and we are not friends (try 2)

 

I would think that writing an article titled "F*ck Influencers..." would have halted some of the SPAM PR email I receive every day, but alas, just last week I received yet another in a steady stream of such emails.  This one stood out as it actually referenced the "F*ck Influencers..." post. 

All of these emails tend to follow a very simple format.

Dear Mr. Howard,

[Introduction on how they love and follow my blog.]  [Crafty little segue into their new product and service they are launching.]

[Calling out a post they liked by its title] [Some reference about how their service may be of interest to me (call to action)]

[One or more paragraphs on their service/offering that appears to be cut and pasted from a press release.]

Signed,

Name, Phone, Email, etc.

The email I received last week actually appeared to be written by hand and not by a PR firm.  I can only assume this individual had been told "how" to email blog owners, had paid someone to do this on his behalf, or is perfectly harmless and just stepped into a hornets nest.  So in an effort to help this individual out...

I AM NOT AN "INFLUENCER" AND WE ARE NOT FRIENDS.

That's not to say I don't have influence.  And that's not to say we couldn't one day be friends.  It simply means I am not a vehicle sitting around idly waiting to SPAM my friends no matter how "awesome" this piece of PR news is. 

Let's talk about what influence I have and how to get me to one day care enough about your service to potentially share it within my circles of influence.

It's amazingly simple.

1. Have a conversation with me.

Don't call me and don't email me.  So where can you have a conversation with me?  Well, here's a crazy idea, how about on the very blog that brought me to your attention?

2. Have a conversation with ME about what matters to ME. 

Every article on my blog has a wonderful little comment feature.  Here's an "out of the box" thought.  What about leaving a comment on the very post you were about to say your really liked in the spam email?

But there's a catch, you have bring some value to the conversation or I'm going to assume you are a spammer and press "mark as spam."

But that's a lot of comments you have to leave and monitor.  What is a PR lackey tasked to incent and measure massive viral reach via SPAM emails to do??? 

Die, hopefully.

3. Create a Relationship

Relationships are two way streets. They are touch and go.  They take lots of time and enormous amounts of effort. Which may be why everyone, including PR firms and agencies who should know better, spam everyone by email.

But it's only when we have a relationship that you are then able to leverage my influence. It's only when we have a relationship that we are able to determine what is of value to each other.  The relationships that bring value to each of us as well as our extended circles of influence become stronger and open up new opportunities.

4. Relationships are complex

Here is the good news about relationships: they are not an on/off switch.  There are more contexts for relationships than I think can be defined or addressed.  I may think you are cute.  You may think I'm nice but too big for my boots.  I may disagree with everything you say but admire your transparency and openness. We might see the world the same way or from radically different perspectives.

Or we may only have a relationship built around a topic or area of interest.  Something I'm interested in and you are able to provide insight or access to.

I am 100% in the Herd camp.  Influencers don't exist, only influence.  Step 1 is to have a relationship.  I'd go so far as to say that the person with the most relationships wins.

[Image Source: Xurble ]

F*ck Influencers (or Influencing Conversations)

I've recently been asked to work on an Influencer strategy.

I have to admit that I had a bit of a negative initial reaction to the task.  So much of what I read online about "influencers" seems to assume that people live to spread messages.  While there is some "status" truth to being the source or the first to report something, this rings naive and hollow as a prime motivator to me.  My personal sense of my own motivations is not that I desire to spread messages, but rather that I want to be part of a larger conversation or participate in something meaningful.

My first thought on how to approach this task was to expand influencers beyond a select group of "key" people.

In today's world everyone is a publisher, everyone has some level of influence, and everyone has a network of influence that is difficult to define let alone measure.  So to focus on just "A listers" or big names is to severely limit the potential for what can be achieved.    That's not to say I don't want "A listers" (if they even exist) to join in the conversation, rather it says that I always prefer to not put all my eggs in one basket.

My next step was to redefine influencers from people to nodes of influence. 

A node can be a major platform or property such as Twitter, Facebook or MTV.  A node can also be a community of interest that has gathered around a topic.  I spent some time defining all the different areas of influence (around the topic at hand) and then narrowing down into the nodes that make up each ecosystem or circle of influence.  These grew into some rather intricate maps that opened up all kinds of new opportunities I had not considered when I first approached this task, and it shifted quickly from finding a handful of influencers to looking at how to reach hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Next I pulled back to revisit the purpose of any influencer strategy, which I am currently defining as "to encourage conversations around the brand that are shared by individuals across their networks of influence."

Key stress is placed on individuals and the fact that each has unique networks but with lots of duplication between these networks. 

All of this thinking led me to some key questions.

Why do people share links or retweet on platforms like Twitter?
What types of things do people share and for what benefit?
How does how people see their networks affect their decisions on what to share?

I don't have any solid answers yet but I was brought to some wonderful resources by some great people within my network.  I look forward to other thoughts on this matter.

Dana Boyd's Analysis of ReTweeting activity on Twitter (h/t to Karen Quinn Fung via Twitter)

Segmenting and Targeting Users by Their Level of Interaction

Behavior First, Design Second (attention, to collect, status and vanity)

Image Source: FAS.research

Every Website Should be Social

Found this presentation over on the Frith'sters rantbase.  ;)

View more documents from shivsingh.

To date, most Facebook Connect sites make very limited us of the Social Graph information available.  So in the presentation above, the authors ask if the real value of something like FB Connect is in its being the window into things like collaborative commerce.

What if we logged into a retailer and reviews from our friends or our friends' friends were listed at the top?  It's one of the reasons I love services like GigPark because I'm able to get reviews from people I trust.  I'm quite fed up with reading highly emotional reviews that turn out to be bogus or misleading. Something tells me I'm not alone.

We are all building trusted networks online.  The question is how to tap into these.  Perhaps its less about how many clicks a person takes to get to a product and rather how many clicks it takes them to find out from THEIR network just how good or bad a product is.

I've long been interested in social shopping and while there have been a few attempts by some retailers to move into this area, they were hindered by the fact that your friends were likely not participating in the site.  So adoption became a significant barrier to entry.

As we move down the road of Facebook Connect microsites and promotions, it would do us all good to start thinking of this as a new opportunity for connecting everyday tasks with the uniqueness of our social connections.  In other words, to make the sites we visit far more relevant, helpful and of use.

Leaving the Path

I was going to talk about "fans" of brands today.  The theme of my comments was going to be that fans have their place, but a "fan economy" misses the mark when it comes to the opportunities presented by the most passionate.  Fans are about the brand in the centre.  It is about people attaching themselves to a brand. 

The opportunity is in the reverse:  brands supporting peoples' pursuit of the things they are most passionate about.

Mike Arauz saves us all by presenting a beautifully reasoned argument for the person at the centre.  He calls this method "Desire Paths".  I think he is on the right path, indeed.

Enjoy.

Desire Paths: Branding for Digital Lives

View more presentations from Mike Arauz. (tags: internet marketing)

Eat. Sleep. Blog. episode 9.

Lord help us all, we have a Facebook page.  Though I should point out we haven't figured out how to feature any of our videos there yet. ESB #9 is Paul, Gavin and myself talking about a variety of trends and emerging platforms.

Eat, Sleep, Blog #09 from paulmcenany on Vimeo.

Thanks to Gavin for the recap.  I quote.

• The sudden appearance of Friend Connect on blogs such as Armando Alves’ A Source of Inspiration and Paul’s Hee-Haw Marketing (1:46)
• Google needing to accelerate their partner network to catch up with Facebook (2:20)
• Is the future of websites “social” and do these services change what we consider a “destination site”? (4:00)
• Will the benefits of “group sourcing” rather than “crowdsourcing” transform “influence networks”? (6:00)
• What is the power of “where our friends are and where they choose to respond”? (7:30)
• Sean explains the value of services like Gigpark (8:10)
• Recommendation engines and influence segmentation (10:00)
• Where is the point of monetisation and how does aggregate data work for marketers? (12:00)
• Why semantic evaluation will not deliver the answers that marketers want (but think they can extract) (14:00)
• The need for human interpretation of data to extract insight (20:00)
• Will social media, influence networks and reputation engines scale in a useful way? (21:00)
• Can we predict who we trust? (23:30)
• What happens when the Internet REALLY explodes as a network with the mass adoption of technology across the world – and what does this mean for “scale”? (25:30)
• Is the semantic web a survival mechanism for the Internet? (28:00)
• Will the web simply become another form of TV measurement? (30:30)
• We send a shout out to our #1 fan, Mack Collier (33:00)
• A new world of privacy (36:00)
• The uselessness of website T&Cs (40:00)
• The attractions of the Dallas Waffle House (47:00) – yes, it goes downhill quickly!

Connecting more than information...

Brilliant video: an anthopological introduction to YouTube.

For anyone looking to understand the growth and role of YouTube (and other social media technologies) in our world today.  From the guy who brought us "The machine is using us" video and one of the earliest to run a digital ethnography study of YouTube.

"I think of [media] as mediating human relationships... when media changed, human relationships changed..."

Hat Tip: Johnnie Moore

Day of Cross-Post-Itis

Two of my articles were launched on two other blogs today.

• Part 1 of Prototyping on the Cheap on the Critical Mass Experience Matters blog
• The Why and How of Engaging Bloggers at Your Event on Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog

Thanks to both David Armano and Ann Handley for giving me the opportunity to write for both publications.

MTV as an educator.

I just stumbled across MTV Asia's "Being Young" presentation on slideshare. It is an informed and insightful presentation on the social and media shifts afoot with asian youth.

TV is no longer relevant.  Spending time online, listening to music and communicating are.  I wish I could just repeat that over and over as a mantra.

Every week I have a client wanting to launch a micro-site to "engage" people with some new aspect of their brand or offering.  To what purpose?

MTV shows that youth spend more time online but on "Fewer sites".  If a person only visits 7-11 sites in a day, what are the odds that some new micro-site is going to push its way into the mix?  And what kind of investment is required to bump something like Facebook off their radar?

 

"we have to learn how to earn prime time now that we can't buy it."
      - James Chadwick, Head of Strategy at Mindshare Asia

 

The full MTV Asia "Being Young" presentation is embedded for your viewing below.

| View | Upload your own

This is it, everyone.  The real deal.  If we want to be "360", we have to think "360" which means we have to develop cohesive views of our audiences that incorporate media, social behaviors, digital channels, devices and what matters to them.

Our view and use of media has to change.  David Armano (or was it Dennis?) just posted a call for engagement  and used real world examples on how Southwest Airlines and Zappos are effectively using twitter to earn time with customers.   

 

"Social Networks are all about facilitating human connections, and instead of talking about how we can do this—I hear marketers asking "how do we monetize" and "how do we advertise" on them."
     - David Armano

 

David gets it.  MTV gets it.  Even Mindshare, one of the largest media buyers on the planet, is getting it.

So why are brands still trying to advertise on social networks?

Water so ubiquitous you can brand it.

[embedded Aquafina affirmations campaign below]

EDIT:  Sadly, the plugin doesn't FIT on my blog.  lol.  Christ.  Maybe a temporary early gotcha?  Not sure how long this has been running.  I doubt this thing would fit on anyone's blog.  You may want to view it here.

What I love most about this campaign is that, for the first time, someone is actually going out of their way to promote sharing.

As the image above shows, they actively support you posting this to the following sites/tools: Typepad, myspace, facebook, myyearbook, dashboard, google, live, netvibes, hi5, freewebs, xanga, friendster, tagged, blackplanet, blogger, livejournal, wordpress, multiply, eons, pageflakes, webwag, orkut, vox, and piczo.  And they also support email and a general embed in the crazy case your platform online is not supported.

What is amazing is the depth of support for these platforms.  They actually do the work for you.  I clicked on Typepad and it asked me for my username and password.  Then it asked me to select the blog account, create a subject and even fill out the body text.  And then it built the post for me.  Wow.

I went looking for the commercial, seeing if they allowed the pieces to be broken apart.  Yup.  Found it on YouTube.

But does the campaign work?  Love to know what you think.

Meet My Social Network In Action

As you may know, I am going to cover Ad:Tech San Francisco.

They are asking all the bloggers attending to answer some questions and I think many of my readers will find both the questions and even my answers of interest.  I'm going to summarize some of the questions as they were a bit long.

1. New Tech Tools: New tech tools like Twitter and Seesmic are making major changes in how people communicate on a personal level and are expected to do so like so many other next gen technologies that make it easy to shoot short text messages or videos in easily digestible forms. Have you joined the Twitter brigade?  If so what's been the main benefit? If not, what do you need to know to make a decision whether to join the club

2. Business Faces Facebook:  Are platforms like Facebook good as internal applications to help run a company?  Once you strip the platform of silly apps, some top execs are coming around to the idea that it's better than sales force or outlook-based tools given the friendlier interface for as it relates to events, identifying groups, business content and ways to chat with their customers. Do you agree?

3. SEO & Blogging:  A majority of purchasers use the internet for research before a purchase is made. Blogging gives a company a lot of content containing a lot of keywords, and, with a lot of incoming and outbound links, that's SEO gold. Will this trend continue in an evolutionary process or do you think it will be leapfrogged by another format which will increase a shopper's research patterns?

Image Source: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

The ultimate answer to most of the above is nothing I need ponder or write.  Paul Isakson and David Armano have done that for us this very morning.

I stayed home today because I was still under the weather from being sick this weekend.  At around 11, I managed to make my way to my computer with a cup of some steaming foul "flu" tea.  I was working through a never ending backlog of email when a tweet appeared, hovering in the air for 30 seconds before disappearing.  A tweet is a message from someone I have chosen to follow on the twitter service.

I've highlighted the tweet from David in the screenshot below.  Click to enlarge.

David is telling all of the people that follow him on twitter of something amazing he had just seen on Slideshare from Paul Isakson.  Slideshare is a tool for sharing presentations digitally.  You can upload powerpoints and then embed them on blogs or other social media spaces.  Paul had done just that.  He had uploaded his latest presentation on "What's Next in Marketing and Advertising."

So I clicked through and watched his presentation.  I've embedded the presentation below.  For those of you who enjoyed "The Brand Gap", you are in for a treat. 

| View | Upload your own

Let's review those questions, just to pound the message home.

1. Twitter is overrated, sure. I'm on record calling it "instant messaging for 40 year olds" as it lacks granularity of control over segmenting your "followers".  But like any service in this space, it's value is in three thigns: the scale of the network using the service (how many people in the world), who is in your personal network, and how these "friends" in your personal network use the tool.  To not participate is to ensure you are even further out of touch in 2-3 years when there is a more complex series of tools that allow you to control and manage your social connections to a finer degree.

2. Facebook as an internal tool for companies.  No, I don't agree.  It's not about using any technology.  It's about creating value for our customers.  It's about content and services that provide utility in their lives.  "The conversation age" is more than just communicating with people - it is a metaphor for two parties each taking value from a situation, each providing input and currency back to the other in different forms.  If using facebook by your company brings value to both parties, then go for it.

3. Search Engine Optimization and blogging.  There are a number of convoluted questions embedded in this one and I'm unsure how familiar everyone is with all the issues involved.  Search Engine Optimization is generally a hoax.  There are a few firms that do a reputable job, but most just charge outrageous sums of money and build fake pages with lots of links back to your site.  This answer also comes back to utility and value.  If we create something of value to our audiences, there will be links aplenty.  Not from jus blogs, but from everything our audience has access to: journals, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, twitters, SMS messages, etc.