You should want to build a strong relationship with an individual who has the right followers and the ability to influence others on your behalf; assuming that’s the case, you’ll need to take your time with approaching him or her and developing a genuine connection.

Follow

Once you’ve identified an influencer who is a good fit for your company and goals, your next step isn’t emailing with information about what you want him or her to do for you. At this point, you’ll want to start with following the influencer on the social channels you can find for them: Twitter is an obvious choice, but you may also be able to circle them on Google+ and join any relevant Google+ Communities they are in. You should also check to see whether they’re in your second degree on LinkedIn; if there’s an easy path to an introduction this would be good to know now!

You’ll also want to put their blog into your RSS reader (or subscribe by email) so you can stay up-to-date on the topics they’re thinking about.

This first step isn’t very aggressive, and that is a good thing. Following the individual gets you on the influencer’s radar and may even encourage him or her to check out your content and follow you back.

Listen

It’s highly tempting to skip this step and start engaging right away, but doing so has been the downfall of many outreach campaigns.  Before you start engaging, take the time to really listen to what this person is saying.  Read through the archives of his or her blog and continue to stay up-to-date on what he is currently doing.

Watch this person’s Twitter & LinkedIn streams.  You’ll be surprised at what you will learn about this influencer.  By taking the time to really pay attention to what they are sharing and saying on his or her social networks, you’ll better understand what they’re passionate about.  Even if your company is not their passion (yet!), you’ll be able to find some common ground, which will be critical during the next step.

Engage

Now that you’ve listened for a while, your next move is to engage with this person on a gradual basis. This means commenting on their posts/content in a meaningful way. It’s okay that you are engaging to meet your own goal of developing an influencer relationship, but you can’t accomplish that by appearing self-interested. To get what you want, you will need to give first, and that means starting with posting relevant, valuable comments. The following are some other ways to engage with an influencer, particularly in a B2B space:

• Tweeting with them about non-company topics
• Sharing their content in your personal or company social media channels
• Participating in the same Twitter chats the influencer does
• Commenting on their blog posts
• Becoming an active participant in social media groups in which the influencer is a member (including LinkedIn, Google+ Communities)

Avoid common mistakes of too much interaction. Instead, build the relationship in a slow but steady, natural way instead of in a manner that makes you seem pushy or spammy.

Be Generous

An influencer may have many brands/companies/individuals vying for her attention. You can ensure that you stand out by being generous and helpful.  Of course, to do this you need to be attentive.  For example, if you are paying close attention to an influencer’s LinkedIn or Twitter stream, you may notice that he or she asks for advice.  This is a great opportunity to be generous by offering authentic advice, even if it is slightly off topic from your industry.  If you can’t offer the right advice, try to connect them with someone who can.  This shows that you are genuinely listening and not superficially looking for opportunities to promote your own company.

Keep in mind the idea is to be as helpful as possible.   People remember information that is personally important to them, especially if it helps them solve a problem. Consider issues/situations that the influencer and/or his audience face and be generous in providing insight into tackling them.

The key to influencer engagement is to build a connection based on common interests.  Remember, online connections are much like offline connections; deep relationships are built on shared experiences and history. When you are approaching an influencer as a company or an individual representing a company, it’s important to engage authentically and allow the proper amount of time for the relationship to develop before popping the question.

Image credit: Moyan Brenn

We believe that content generated by influencers can, and should, be a big part of those online search results, helping to build search engine optimization (SEO) for your company.

Influencers Provide Third-Party Endorsements

In our eBook, Marketing Through Trust, we discuss why third-party endorsements are important:

● 93 percent of potential customers use searches in deciding what to buy and from which company to purchase
● More than 90 percent of the click-throughs from search engines are via organic results
● Only 8 percent of the click-throughs from search engines come from paid advertising

Enter your brand influencers. They can impact the organic search results your audience sees, and ultimately, your chances for converting your audience to customers.

Influencer-Generated Content in Search Results

Brand influencers will create content (via their websites and blogs, social media platforms, videos, forums, and groups) to ensure that when your audience searches, they are most likely to find information that encourages them to buy from you. Since consumers tend to trust peer content more than brand advertising, your brand will benefit from influencer-generated reviews, endorsements, guides, how-tos and even personal anecdotes that describe your products and services in the best possible light.

In fact, this type of influencer content can help you dominate in the area of non-branded search results – those with generic keywords, like “nonstick 12-inch frying pan.” And since the majority of consumers only read the first page of search results, influencer-generated content which ranks well may be crucial to your buyers’ purchasing decision.

Influencers Can Contribute to Link Building

One of the key components of successful SEO is linkbuilding: developing links back to your site from other respected sites that have content which Google deems relatable to yours. Clearly, generating links from influencers’ sites back to yours could be one of the major benefits of an influence marketing campaign. Some of the ways influencers may link to your site include:

● Influencers tweet, Facebook, and pin sponsored content from your site
● Some influencers may allow you to write guest posts on their sites and link back to your own site
● Some may write unpaid (unsponsored) posts and link back to your site

However, keep in mind that any paid/sponsored links from an influencer’s site back to yours would be considered a “paid link” by Google, and therefore should be marked (on the influencer’s site side) as a “no follow” link. Google considers paid links a no-no and only wants to count “organic” links as part of your Google rank. Kelby Carr explains the concept of “no follow” links really well on a recent post on her Type A Parent blog, and I encourage you to read it if you’re unclear. This is really important, because Google will come to you, the company/brand, if they feel paid links are increasing your search ranking – as they did with J. C. Penney a couple of years ago.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no value in reaching out to influencers to ask them to write about you, even if you pay them. Those links will generate traffic back to your site, will enable new people to learn about your company/brand, and will provide content that others may share in social media.

The many ways you may engage with influencers can each have an effect on your search rankings and SEO. Be sure to track your rankings on your key keywords so you can measure the results!

 Image credit: SEOPlanter

Our new eBook, Executive Influence: Transforming Your Top Team Into Powerful Influencers, provides a structure and process to help your execs go beyond thought leadership and become true influencers.

Our eBook covers:

• The role of executives in influence marketing
• The three pillars of Executive Influence
• How executive communications and marketing are being transformed by influence
• Our three-phase process for developing executive influence
• Three scenarios for executive influence

Download our free eBook today – and feel free to share with your executives and colleagues.

Here’s what we’re reading this week: It’s all about not getting mired in the traditional, worn-out, or free-falling methods of reaching customers. It’s time to take influence marketing to the next level.

Influence Marketing: What’s Next
As Influence Marketing: What’s Next points out, the traditional pipelines for marketing messages just aren’t yielding the results they used to. TV, radio, newspaper, and online ads aren’t the reliable standbys we used to trust. With these pipelines virtually defunct, reaching your customers means taking the social media influencer route and using a few powerful voices to grab the attention of the masses. The challenge for brands today is making the transformation from traditional advertising efforts to holistic strategies for reaching customers through genuine, lasting relationships with advocates.

Read the Full Post Here: Influence Marketing: What’s Next

Influencer Marketing Is the New Eldorado: Who Will Lead the Gold Rush?
Influence marketing has taken on a new dimension, a new importance for brands that want the best chance of influencing their market’s purchasing decisions. Yet there is a disparity between the impact of influence marketing and spending on it. With consumers trusting social content far more than many other types of marketing communication, it will be the bold brands and the creative approaches that reap the benefits of this marketing strategy. This includes branching out from Facebook and Twitter, which currently garner about three-fourths of spending on social media marketing.

Read the Full Post Here: Influencer Marketing Is the New Eldorado: Who Will Lead the Gold Rush?

A New Approach to Social Influencers
Are brands placing too much emphasis on social influencers? That’s the question raised in A New Approach to Social Influencers. Mark Evans refers to Influencer Marketing, a new book by Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella, which explores how customers often get lost in the shuffle or overlooked in the influencer rush. It discusses toning down the spotlight on the influencer in favor of strategies that balance critical relationship building with more attention to the actual customer.

Read the Full Post Here: A New Approach to Social Influencers

Breaking From Tradition: The Four Ms of Influence Marketing
Successful influence marketing doesn’t mean entirely scrapping the old in favor of the new. In fact, blending traditional marketing ideas with the evolving world of social influence can yield real and lasting results. According to Danny Brown, incorporating the Four Ms into your influence marketing plans means going beyond mere posts and shares, focusing on the customer, and getting to the heart of what really drives purchase decisions.

Read the Full Post Here: Breaking from Tradition: The Four Ms of Influence Marketing

Image credit: Chris Chappelear

The waters are further muddied by the tendency of certain types of bloggers to be open to payment while others are typically more reluctant. At the risk of stereotyping, we’ve found that bloggers in the mom, parenting, lifestyle, and food arenas are often open to or even expecting payment. In contrast, bloggers in the tech, financial services, gadget and entertainment sectors seem much less likely to accept or require payment. It seems that these bloggers are frequently concerned about payment ruining their objectivity. However, even those types of bloggers will often accept press junkets, dinners with brands, and invitations to company events.

The Argument for Payment
Many brands ask the question, why pay influencers? The argument for paying influencers is that some influencers, particularly the parenting, food and lifestyle bloggers noted above, are in business for themselves and the time they spend on researching, creating content, building readership, and engaging their followers is worth something and should be compensated. Brands pay for advertisements, and influencer marketing can be considered a form of advertising. As such, proponents of payment argue, influencers deserve to be compensated not with tokens like gift cards or free products but with payment appropriate for the value they offer.

Some bloggers are very clear on the point that they will not work for free. They express disbelief and sometimes frustration with the idea that some brands/companies expect to benefit for free from their hard work, such as the time and effort put into building up a following and earning its trust; creating compelling content; tweeting, posting, pinning, and Facebooking; and hosting events. If brands recognize that bloggers/influencers have something of value to offer, why, many question, shouldn’t they be willing to pay for it?

Brands may assert that bloggers shouldn’t expect to be paid if they’re journalists, but many influential bloggers don’t call themselves journalists. Instead, they state often that they share their opinions, produce creative content, and help build awareness of and excitement about the brands they represent.

The Argument Against Payment
Often, the argument brands make against paying influencers is that they want authenticity for their brands. The idea here is that if a brand is paying an influencer, what the influencer has to say about the brand cannot possibly be authentic. Likewise, they worry that consumers won’t trust the content. Some influencers worry about payment as well; they don’t want to be seen as selling as out.

Those opposed to paying influencers also often question whether brands can expect reasonable ROI from influencer relationships. For example, some fashion bloggers earn between $5,000 and $50,000 for the effort they put in on behalf of designers and brands. However, many bloggers claim to provide significant ROI in the form of hundreds/thousands/millions of visitors to a brand’s website as well as the potential for substantial increases in sales.

Types of Paid Influencer Engagement
When brands do decide to compensate influencers, they could do so for any of the following:

• Blog posts, Facebook content, tweets, Pinterest content, Instagram photos, etc.
• Video creation and sharing
• Sponsored content creation and sharing
• Event planning/hosting/attendance
• Promotional interviews or a “spokesblogger” role
• Appearance in brand videos
• Creation of brand-specific videos

Some brands and bloggers develop long-running relationships, often called Ambassador Programs, when a blogger is involved with more than one tactic and over an extended period of time. Those relationships may be compensated on a retainer basis, which can be good both for the brand (to keep budget under control) and the blogger (to ensure ongoing compensation).

Full Disclosure
If brands do pay influencers, monitoring their disclosure is key. Whenever a blogger receives payment for his or her reviews, claims, or endorsements, he or she must disclose this fact in a manner that is both clear and obvious.

The purpose of this is to prevent consumers for being mislead by content they think is coming from a blogger without a relationship with a brand when, in fact, the blogger has been paid to create and share it. All bloggers/influencers have to comply with FTC regulations, and it is the brand’s/company’s responsibility to insure that he or she does.

Does your company compensate influencers for any part of your work with them? What types of influencers and when? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Click for Image Credit

Emotional Versus Traditional Marketing

As Danny Brown states in The Law of Emotional Connection, the traditional methods of advertising and marketing are all about attracting customers with an attractive product and an attractive message. Emotional connections, however, mean you should be (or are) tuning in to your prospects, listening to what they like and dislike, and learning what it is they really want and need. And on top of all that, it involves learning what triggers purchases and using what you learn to connect with your prospects and influence them to buy. This is an important part of what influence marketing accomplishes.

From Brand to Influencer to Customer

With influence marketing, your brand connects with influencers. Then, your influencers promote your brand to their audiences. As such, it is your influencers who make the emotional connection on behalf of your brand. For example, having your influencer answer semi-personal questions as they relate to your products and services can emotionally engage your audience.

As with most any other type of marketing, the story creates the emotional connection. Some stories simply set a familiar scene, something customers can relate to, and then share a familiar emotion, such as anxiety over making the right choice. These stories then drive home that a product is the right choice by sharing the transition from anxiety over choosing to confidence in having made the right choice. And influencers can often tell these stories far better than a brand can directly.

Influencers also establish emotional connections by showing how a product or service meets a basic human need. For example, an influencer may create content that demonstrates how a product will help make their life easier, make the buyer feel younger at heart, or make them feel more attractive and desirable. An influencer promoting a child safety product, for example, could encourage an emotional connection by demonstrating how the product meets the parent’s need to feel useful and capable of protecting his or her family.

The Relationship Era

Your influencers don’t just tell your story; they also stimulate discussion that produces valuable feedback from your customers. And this feedback helps you improve your offerings and your service, further encouraging customer loyalty. Because as we’re all rapidly learning, this is the new “relationship era.” Authentic relationships have become more critical than traditional advertising. In working with influencers who trust and feel loyalty to your brand, you fulfill your customers’ desire to feel important, listened to, and connected to your brand.

Because we’ve been thinking about trust a lot around here, we’ve been looking at how much Gen Z trusts various types of marketing. Here’s what we’ve learned.

Brand Social Media

In general, consumers don’t trust brand advertising or brand social media very much. But the picture is much rosier when it comes to Generation Z. Of the Generation Z consumers included in a Forrester Research survey, 22 percent indicated that they trust the posts brands and companies make via social media. That represents a significant difference when it comes to the level of trust other generations say they have for such posts. In fact, it is 49 percent higher than non-Generation Z trust levels.

Online Reviews Versus Brand-Created Content

Though Generation Z consumers are more likely to trust brand-generated texts, emails, and posts than other consumers, they are still more heavily influenced by content produced by other consumers and non-brand sources. While 13 percent trust company/brand-generated texts and 22 percent trust emails from brands and companies, a whopping 53 percent trust consumer-generated online reviews. Professionally written online reviews score high with this generation as well: 59 percent trust reviews provided on sites like CNET and Consumer Reports.

Search

Search is an important part of the consumer decision-making process overall, and 50 percent of Gen Zers trust natural search engine results. This is in contrast to the 29 percent that put their faith in sponsored search engine results.

Mobile

As far as mobile applications are concerned, 18 percent of Gen Zers trust the information they provide. And this number is 48 percent higher than that of other generations overall.

Developing the Plan

It’s clear that the two-way conversations Generation Z enjoys with brands makes them much more comfortable with social and digital advertising. However, the same digital savvy that makes them amenable to trusting brand content may likely translate into higher expectations. Brands who wish to earn the attention of Generation Z should do so authentically, on the platforms they care about and trust most.

Image credit: flickr – wwworks

Angelina has quickly risen to the top of the list for influencers on “Breast Cancer,” according to our scientific influence marketing platform.

Angelina’s admission on Tuesday, via an op-ed in the New York Times, that she’s had a preventative double mastectomy in order to lower her odds of developing breast cancer, which she has a strong genetic predisposition for, has instantly changed the conversation on breast cancer.

Breast Cancer Influence Measures

On May 13, before Angelina’s op-ed appeared, the volume of opinions (we use opinions, not mentions, to measure influence) was an average of 39 per day. On May 14, the day of the op-ed, the total opinions rose to 642. The net influence score (NIS), which is how we measure the overall influence of a topic, jumped from 123 on May 13 to 171 on May 14.  The huge jump in the number of opinions, plus the rise in NIS, indicates that not only did Angelina engage in the conversation about breast cancer, but others must have too.

And our data bears that out pretty easily.  In the days before the op-ed, the most influential people in the breast cancer conversation were Kathleen Hammett, a runner with Race for the Cure, and Megan Charles, a writer for The Inquisitr, who writes about health topics.

Influencers in the Breast Cancer Conversation

Since Tuesday, Angelina Jolie has become the most influential person in the breast cancer conversation. Also new to the list is Alice Park, a writer for Time who covered the news extensively this week and has written a cover article for Time which will launch on Thursday.

Three other top influencers now engaged in the conversation include: Sheryl Crow, another celebrity breast cancer survivor; Bonnie Fuller, Editor in Chief of HollywoodLife.com; and Maria Eugenia Alcon, Deputy Editor for NBC Latino, who wrote on Tuesday about breast cancer and Hispanic women.

We’ve seen Angelina’s effect on humanitarian and social causes before: her work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is well-documented and has raised awareness for those missions overall, and she’s supported numerous other causes, primarily children- and health-related.

It’s illustrative to see how one highly visible, and already influential, person, without any link to a specific charity or brand, could so quickly become the face of a cause.  For brands engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, understanding the effect a celebrity has on a cause could help frame future efforts.

The Time article announcing the Angelina cover begins, “Angelina Jolie has never lacked for influence.” We can emphatically, and scientifically, agree.

image: Time Magazine

At first, it is easy to confuse the two; thought leadership is a component of executive influence, so you might see them used interchangeably. But executive influence is a broader concept, and is measurable, while thought leadership may be somewhat less tangible.

Here is what you need to know to understand what each term means and how to tell the difference between the thought leadership and executive influence.

What is thought leadership?

Michael Brenner, writing at Forbes, defines thought leadership as “becoming an authority on relevant topics by delivering the answers to the biggest questions on the minds of your target audience.”

Great thought leaders have an ear for their audience’s questions and concerns and can eloquently speak to the most important of those topics. Their audience determines what their agenda will be, but each executive answers questions with their own unique point of view, enabling them to have an individual voice and, ideally, stand out amongst their peers.

Thought leadership is, unquestionably, important for your brand, as it provides your customers with a level of trust that the leaders of your company, and therefore your company, have the answers and solutions they seek. For your brand, thought leadership provides a way to become a part of your audience’s thought processes very early in the buying/decision-making cycle. Thought leadership also allows you to put personal faces to your business, and enables your business to become more social.

What is executive influence?

Executive influence encompasses thought leadership and then goes beyond it. Executive influence involves leveraging the talents of your executives to influence other individuals across your industry and within your marketplace to take actions which benefit your brand: talk about your company, your executives or your products or services; or amplify the content or messages your executive or your brand creates.

What does it take to engage other individuals? We think of it in three pillars:

1. Thought Leadership

If your executive is an expert on a topic and can create compelling content on that topic – in the form of written content, video or appearances at events, for example – those are the messages that influencers in your industry may discuss, dissect or amplify.

2. Traditional Media

Is your executive a go-to person for industry press when they have a question or they’re looking for a statement on something relevant to your brand?  When your executive’s opinions are made known through traditional media, their overall influence is raised, in part because most traditional media outlets are considered influential in their own right.

3. Social Media

Executives with their own social presences can use those networks to amplify their content (and other brand content) as well as engage and network with other influencers in their industry sphere. This social piece of influence is often underutilized (or not used at all) by executives; however, as it can have a considerable impact on an exec’s overall measure of influence, it may be worth considering if you’re looking to raise your their influence.

Measuring executive influence

At Appinions, we measure executive influence by understanding where an executive’s opinion has been published, and whether or not others took action on that opinion. To us, nothing is more powerful than action: social media followers are good to have, but engagement with an executive’s social media is far more important. Ditto for thought leadership – it’s one thing to publish something smart, but entirely another to know that that piece was quoted or amplified by other key voices in the conversation.

Executive influence has been known to increase employee loyalty and customer trust.  Greater executive influence can also lead to increased brand awareness, enabling customer movement along the purchasing journey, and sales.

Both thought leadership and executive influence could raise visibility of your executives and brand. But executive influence, if done well, can provide a deeper connection with customers and your marketplace and can become a measurable metric of success for your company.

image source: flickr (usembassykyiv)

This week’s round up of top influence marketing news from around the web focuses on understanding what it means to be an influencer and what it takes to become one.

Here’s what we’re reading this week.  What’s in your reader? Leave us a note in the comments section at the end of this post.

The State of Play for Influence Marketing in 2013 – Infographic
Before purposing yourself to become an influencer, take a peek at what the future looks like for marketers and influencers.  Sam Fiorella and Danny Brown, who literally wrote the book on Influence Marketing, published an infographic with some tasty morsels of knowledge. For example, 50% of survey respondents indicated they will be allocating budgets for “influence marketing” strategies.

Read the full post here: The State of Play for Influence Marketing in 2013 – Infographic

The Influence Hierarchy
Jason Keath tells us, “Influence marketing is cool.  It is fun.  It is sexy.”  Why yes, it is.  That’s why you want to be an influencer, right?  We particularly like this post because Jason explains all the basics and helps everyone understand the difference between being a Bieber and a Blogger.  He also uses a lot of visual aids, which makes Friday reading even that much more enjoyable.

Read the full post here: The Influence Hierarchy

The State of Influence Marketing and Scoring Platforms
One thing a potential influencer should understand is that there is a big difference between the various social scoring systems.  Some are more weighted towards a particular platform and most don’t take into account offline influence.  Except, of course, here at Appinions where we take all channels into consideration, as well as topical context.

As a potential influencer, it’s important to realize that brands and companies don’t take many of these platforms as gospel.  In fact, over 68% think it’s only a starting point, as Francisco Rosales shares in this post at Social Mouths.

Read the full post here: The State of Influence Marketing and Scoring Platforms

Content isn’t King.  Trust is King.
Last, but not least, is this piece of advice that is practical for both brands and bloggers wanting to position themselves as influencers and the title of this post says it all, “Trust is King.”  Yes, content is important, very important, to build your readership, but if you don’t have trust, you’ll never have influence.  This post from SEOMoz shares 10 pieces of wisdom on how to develop trust.

Read the full post here: Content isn’t Kind.  Trust is King.