For many brands, gauging the return on influence marketing has been one of their sore points in recent years.

While social scoring platforms like Klout, etc, can help identify who could potentially be influential from a brand amplification standpoint, the business return – dollars in the cash register – has been more problematic to solve.

Likes, shares, blog posts and more are discussed abundantly when it comes to reviewing a campaign using social scoring as the lead means of influence identification.

But likes and shares don’t pay the bills.

This was one of the key reasons Sam Fiorella and I wrote Influence Marketing: as marketers and users of influence campaigns ourselves, we knew the real return on influence had to be lead generation, customer acquisition, and moving the customer along the purchase life cycle.

With that approach, brands could better understand where their customers are, and how they could help solve the problems they faced.

Essentially, we take influence away from the superstar bloggers and social media rock stars, and place the emphasis squarely back on the customer, and work back from there.

To give you an idea of how this looks, this second teaser video from our upcoming video series to complement the book looks at what happens when the customer is placed at the centre of the marketing circle, and how that leads to financial and customer return on your brand’s influence campaigns.

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Businesses are now competing with – and often losing to – “the wisdom of crowds” in the branding battle.

Identifying individuals who sway online consumer opinion on specific topics and within specific communities has become critically important to marketers and public relations professionals.

A slew of social scoring platforms have emerged with claims that they can identify who influences who online while providing various tools and scoring systems to rank those who are influential and those who are not on a variety of topics.

However, as with most early adopters, their efforts have been widely criticized. Some say they’re just misunderstood and that the technology is just too new.

Either way, there’s one certainty: Marketers and public relations professionals are taking notice.

We surveyed marketing professionals around the world in our ongoing effort to better understand this growing industry and where businesses stand on the issue.

• Can social influence truly be measured?
• Is anyone using them?
• What’s the future of influence marketing?

Buy the book that offers the methodologies that answer the needs raised in this report: Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing

Book Authors: Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella
Copyright: © 2013 by Que Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-5104-1
ISBN-10: 0-7897-5104-6

 Survey Sponsored by:

In two weeks (or less, depending on shipping), Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing will be released.

The culmination of over three years worth of client research and implementation, discussions with technology vendors, concerns over the impact of scoring on peoples’ livelihoods and more, the fruits of that labour is almost ready to be shared.

I won’t lie – it’s exciting to know that the methodologies Sam Fiorella and myself are presenting in the book will soon be out for all to read and share feedback on.

It’s also a little nervy, since the approach requires a shift in thinking on how we define influence – and, by association, influencers – today.

Thankfully, early feedback so far has been great:

After reading [the free sample Chapter 5], I can tell you it’s a phenomenal chapter that leaves one hungry for the parts on either side of it. Assuming the rest is like Chapter 5, they have certainly written the book that will transform the practice of influence marketing. Evy Wilkins, VP Marketing, Traackr.

Loving the book and its approach – this stuff is incredible. Hessie Jones, CEO, ArCompany.

The sample chapter has certainly made me want to read more; it is thought-provoking. Tema Frank, CEO, Frank Online Marketing.

Brilliant; truly groundbreaking. Tonia Ries, Founder, The Realtime Report.

If we can make people think and reposition how they approach influence marketing today, and see feedback like the early examples above turn itself into business results for readers of the book and the companies they represent, we’ll be happy.

Sales are definitely key (and also help our publisher feel safe that they didn’t sign up a couple of duds when they signed the paperwork with us!) but it’s the transformation in thinking, and shifting influence back to the source – customers – that will really validate the book for Sam and myself.

Which brings me to this special pre-order promotion if you order between now and May 10.

Influence Marketing Book Pre-Order Offers

As part of the launch week, Sam and I have come up with some offers that enable anyone, from solo entrepreneurs and professionals to business owners and executives of organizations, to take advantage of.

Because our goal is to transform the discussion around influence, these offers range from digital to physical and will really complement the book and the methodologies within, and help your business understand and succeed in this important marketing tactic.

So, the offers.

1. Pre-order one copy of the book and, as readers of this blog, you will receive a free copy of the first two videos in the video series we’ve created to partner the book.

2. Pre-order 5 copies, and receive a guest byline for your blog or publication from either myself or Sam, between now and the end of 2013.

3. Pre-order 20 copies, and receive a free, business-specific webinar presentation for your employees and/or clients.

4. Pre-order 50 copies and receive 3 hours of digital or influence marketing consulting. This will include an overview of your business’s target audience, their purchase cycles, and how to filter who influences them directly based on our Customer Centric Influence Model.

5. Pre-order 100 copies, and receive free, on-site presentation to your employees/executives, and/or clients. This also includes identifying your influence marketing goals and providing a framework for your business to follow, based on audience and our Customer Centric Influence Model. You simply cover flights and accommodation for either Sam or myself.

Note: These offers apply to both the digital as well as print versions.

Why You Should Buy Influence Marketing

Prior to the launch of the book, the companies Sam and I work at carried out a survey of over 1,300 professionals, PR consultants, marketers and executives around the topic of influence. The results were clear.

Influence marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of the marketing landscape, and businesses and organizations are looking to allocate more time and budget to the space in the next 12 months and beyond.

However, they’re looking for true business results and moving beyond social scoring and into a more detailed, targeted and measurable methodology. The Influence Marketing book provides that and more.

We present detailed breakdowns of successful influencer campaigns, both by us and from brands, where identification of true influencers and who impacts their purchase decisions at any given time led to both top line and bottom line results.

We present a blueprint for your business to use – which technologies meet your needs, how to create influence paths (the glue that holds all influence marketing tactics together), and how to not only address the influence question strategically but, more importantly, make it a long-term part of your business’s success and less of a short term hit.

We’re biased, obviously, but we do firmly believe we’ve written a book that will change the influence conversation forever. By writing a business book in the truest sense, we’ve also laid the foundations for your business to be successful and do things the right way in this space for all your influence marketing campaigns.

But we’ll leave it with the words of Evy Wilkins, VP Marketing of Traackr, one of the influence platforms leading the charge in the next wave of influence.

Sometimes a book changes the way we do business. Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing will be one of those books.

The first step is almost here – let’s get started. You can pre-order either print or digital versions from your preferred bookstore below.

Note – to take advantage of the various pre-orders here, simply forward a copy of your sales order receipt to info@influencemarketingbook.com with the message header Pre-Order Promo – X Books Ordered, provide your preferred contact details, and we’ll be in touch to arrange.

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Last week, Forbes published an article entitled Who Are the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers, 2013? by Haydn Shaughnessy. It followed similar posts by Shaughnessy on The Top 20 Women Social Media Influencers, also on Forbes, and a similar Top 50 list 12 months earlier.

The article soon came under fire from certain areas of the web, including Mark Schaefer’s Grow blog and Jure Klepic of the Huffington Post. Additionally, there were numerous conversations across Facebook on the Forbes article, with the majority of people discounting its validation.

So why did a publication like Forbes receive such criticism, and what does the discounting of influencer results like the one on Forbes mean for influence marketing in general?

Popularity is Not Influence

This is beginning to sound like a broken record, but popularity does not equal influence. While having 100,000 followers on Twitter might be a nice statement of your social proof (hint: it’s not really), does that make you influential (another hint: no)?

This is where the majority of the criticism of the Forbes article comes into play.

In his preamble to the list, Shaughnessy shares the “algorithm” behind identifying the influencers, and that he uses Twitter measurement platform Peek Analytics. That should raise the first red flag – Shaughnessy is only defining influence from a single platform.

However, it’s Peek Analytics’ own description that devalues Shaughnessy’s article even more. From the Peek Analytics website:

Social Pull is not a measure of a single individual’s “influence;” rather, it is an audience-based metric that is a direct reflection of the quality and size of the Twitter audience that has been “pulled” into following an account or mentioning a keyword @name, hashtag, or URL on Twitter.

So, Peek Analytics doesn’t measure influence; they measure data based on interactions. So why does Shaughnessy use a tracking platform that doesn’t measure influence to create an influencer list?

It’s this flawed approach that the majority of the criticism around the web has picked up on.

…this is a suspicious methodology to define social media influence, and that is about as charitable as I can be. – Mark Schaefer

With their tired standard of measuring Twitter followers, PeekAnalytics adds nothing to the conversation of influence measurement. Similar to every other list that has been made based solely on Twitter followers, there is no attention paid to the metrics of comments on their blogs, content quality and other social networks. - Jure Klepic

…the thing that bothered me about the Forbes list is they clearly did it based on Twitter followers alone. There are two people on there I know, for a fact, they paid for their followers and don’t interact, engage, or build community. – Gini Dietrich

These criticisms, and others like them, clearly show that the social web has moved way beyond just numbers and a platform where spam bots are plentiful when it comes to defining influence in the truest sense.

Influence is Multi-Layered

The other core issue with the Forbes article is the very fact Shaughnessy limits measurement to a single platform. This is lazy analytics at best, allowing for flawed metrics to be used as a source of influence identification.

It’s also one of the reasons that a recent influence marketing survey of over 1,300 professionals highlighted the need for more accurate and informed data analysis, versus the approach currently taken by social scoring platforms.

For example, Klout’s algorithm only measures your public Twitter data – they need you to connect your other social accounts to offer any true accuracy. From a recent TechCrunch article:

Before we are able to incorporate any data into a person’s score, we need users to connect the network to Klout so we can begin to process the influence data.

So, much like Peek Analytics, they’re using a single platform to measure influence, as opposed to all the other social footprints you may have elsewhere. Klout competitor Kred is in the same boat:

To calculate your Kred, we analyze billions of tweets from the last 1,000 days. We add your Facebook actions when you connect your account.

While there’s no doubt Twitter is an important part of the social media ecosystem, it’s just one piece in a very large puzzle. And it’s this reliance on Twitter data only that dilutes the effectiveness of social scoring when it comes to identifying true influence based on behavioural change, as opposed to reactions to a tweet.

Influence is much more than the sum of Twitter’s parts. If we, as marketers and brands, are looking to truly understand what drives actions in people – the definition of influencing someone – then we need to understand much more than a tweet or social network update.

• Situational factors – what’s affecting someone’s decision-making at any given time?
• Peer factors – who offers the most influence based on where you are in that decision-making process?
• Financial – can you afford to buy, or are you more logical and prudent with your money?
• Emotional – tied into the financial factor, does emotion for a product override common sense, logic and lack of funds?
• Familial factors – who’s the decision-maker in the family and how does this impact a brand message being accepted?

These are just a few of the factors involved into identifying where influence may play a part, and who the influencer would be to instill the next part of the equation and, by association, action.

Is Influence Marketing Losing Its Clout?

So what does this mean for influence and influence marketing moving forward? Has the potential of influence already been nixed before it’s even had a chance to reach maturity?

After all, the criticism of a respected media publication like Forbes, as well as questions being raised on current social influence outreach and its effectiveness at ROI, would suggest influence is becoming a tainted topic.

And, to a degree, it is. Lack of results (shared or perceived) harm the medium, as brands (rightly so) look for return on their investments, beyond simple retweets and blog posts that add nothing to the bottom line.

However, as the results of the recent influence marketing survey we shared here show, it’s not influence itself that’s broken, but the definition of how we identify who influencers are today, and what they mean for a brand. Brands are still looking to use influence marketing as a key part of their tactics; but they do expect more.

The problem is we’re still placing “influencers” – whoever they may be – at the heart of the marketing circle, and not always defining what the context is when it comes to filtering them for a brand.

A simple example – Lifestyle Blogger A has a well-read blog, and primarily attracts an audience of women between the age of 25-44. So it makes sense that a brand whose demographics are made up of this audience should work with that blogger.

But the audience has a very different make-up. Blog Reader A is a single mom with two young kids under three; Blog Reader B is a married mom with one kid aged ten and one teenager; and Blog Reader C is a mom who has a child of college age, who’s no longer living at home.

All three of these reader segments fall within the broad category of “women between the age of 25-44″ – but that’s where the similarities end.

Let’s say the brand sells toddler toys. Using a generic influence outreach campaign, the blogger might be successful at putting the brand in front of the Blog Reader A segment, but the message will be completely off-point for the other two, just-as-important segments.

This is the where the flaws of putting today’s definition of an influencer at the heart of the marketing circle appear; and why we need to move beyond this, and start putting the actual customer at the heart of the circle, and work back from there.

By taking this approach, we understand who the true influencers are – customers – and what they’re looking for, as well as who’s influencing their decisions at a specific point in time.

And if we can redefine influence to the people brands should really be taking notice of, and how to meet their needs and help with their decisions, we can reposition influence back to its true meaning and dispel its lack of effectiveness (perceived or real) currently “enjoyed” today.

In less than three weeks, that repositioning of influence will be ready to take the first steps…

Read Chapter 5 of Influence Marketing, “Situational Influence”, today – click here to download your free copy.

With less than four weeks until Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing is released, it’s time to offer a little taste of what you can expect when you buy it.

So we’re delighted to have Chapter 5, “Situational Influence: A New Model for a New Era” available for you to download for free today. It offers a pretty good idea of the approach we’re taking with the book – we want it to be a thought-provoking business book and one that makes you look at how we define influence marketing today.

It’s also a nice introduction to what’s to come, as it’s the bridging chapter between where we’ve come with regards influence marketing today, and where we feel the market needs to evolve to tomorrow and beyond.

You’ll also find the detailed Table of Contents, which will give you an idea of the discussions and premises we present in the book proper.

We hope you enjoy the chapter, and we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below, so please do jump back over and leave your feedback once you’ve read this chapter.

And, of course, if you did enjoy the chapter, then the book is available for pre-order today. Enjoy!

Click the book image to download the sample chapter.

The issue of marketing accountability and social media return on investment (ROI) continues to make “front page” news at marketing conferences and across  the blogosphere.

ROI is the herpes of social media; just when you thought you got it cured, it boils up to the surface again.

In my last post for Sensei Blogs, I highlighted this ongoing feud between proponents of brand marketing and performance marketing, which seems like a never-ending story.

The debate festers because most marketers claim that you can’t measure the ROI of social media marketing or that ROI should never be the goal in the first place.  Marketing is a business function and as such, must support the business’s goal of generating a profit.

However, marketing efforts developed with a focus on generating profits often fails to consider the customer experience and ends up negatively impacting the generation of revenue and/or profit.   And so you end up back at square one.

There’s growing evidence that executives continue to think of the marketing function as an expense rather than a profit center. When revenue dips and economies suffer – just as the businesses need to drive more lead generation and conversion – marketing budgets get cut. In fact, marketing is often the first budget to get cut in tough economic times.

The only way to reverse this trend is to prove that marketing efforts offer a return on investment.

Influence Marketing Will Be the Tipping Point in Social Media ROI

In our upcoming book, Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Influence Marketing in Social Media Marketing, Danny Brown and I put forth a model that demonstrates how the growing practice of influence marketing can measurably impact purchase decisions instead of simply driving brand awareness.

Based on the interviews we’ve conducted with brand executives, there seems to be a growing sentiment that influence marketing might be the tipping point where marketers and business leaders finally connect the dots between social media engagement and that elusive return on investment.

Instead of identifying influencers with the biggest reach and activity on specific themes, imagine an influence marketing model that identifies how consumers make purchase decisions and then reacts in such a way as to favorably impact those decisions.

Properly executed, our influence marketing strategy supports both brand marketing and performance marketing by monitoring and measuring both social media engagement and the resulting activity to a single customer profile, which, when mapped to the lifetime value of a customer, highlights the overall impact on the business’s bottom line.

Marketing As A Sales Function

Influence marketing for general branding and product awareness to large masses of people can be helpful as a supporting strategy, but without a sales acquisition and conversion effort, results are hard to measure.

Just as the practice of influence marketing must shift towards measurable lead acquisition, nurturing and conversion, the entire practice of social media marketing must integrate with other business functions such as sales, customer service, and so on.

It’s a basic idea but one that seems to have eluded businesses and marketers that still gravitate towards social media networks, tools and strategies that isolate online engagements from business goals.

Ultimately, the true measurement for marketing is its contribution to the CLV or Customer Lifetime Value. In isolation, marketing departments will struggle to connect the dots from effort expended to bottom line results generated., and will continue to be the first on the chopping block when budgets are cut.

My next post in this series will delve further into CLV and why we must re-connect sales & marketing into a cohesive business function instead of standalone operations.

And if you’re ready to take the jump into the next wave of influence marketing and where it sits in the ROI and CLV funnel, make sure you pre-order the book using the details in the box below this post.

In the meantime, join the discussion: What are your thoughts on influence marketing as a sales tool vs. a marketing tool?

Image Credit: Pixabay, Licensed via Creative Commons

Since announcing our book at the tail end of last year, both Sam and myself have been asked why write a book on influence marketing.

Additionally, some people have said they’re looking forward to the book because “it will put social scoring [Klout] in its place” (paraphrased).

The answers to both points are simple.

For the first question, while there have been books written about social scoring and growing your own influence, we wanted to write a true business book on how influence marketing can be used for that most important element of business longevity – lead generation, sales, and the customer life cycle.

For the second question, this is definitely not an anti-social scoring or an anti-Klout book.

Instead, we offer our methodology (and the platforms that can use this framework), to truly understand what influence marketing is, why it’s important to business, and how to use it as a lead generation tactic with true measurable results and clear strategies to build advocacy, profits and customer engagement.

It’s what Sam and I call The Business of Influence, and for us it’s where the third wave of influence comes into play and will move the space forward.

Beyond Social Scoring

As I mentioned at the start of this post, we don’t discount social scoring platforms, contrary to the popular belief of some people.

We see where they offer value (initial identification of groups and conversations), but we also understand where their limitations lie. PeerIndex in particular are open about who they cater to – the mass information and data regarding  the 70,000 people relevant to a topic versus the truly influential seven who can drive real actions and contextual reactions.

For businesses, however, social scoring currently doesn’t dive deeply enough into moving the customer along the purchase life cycle; nor does it offer the kind of in-depth analysis and the way an influence campaign can be disrupted via several situational factors.

It’s this kind of data – how a message is disrupted, how it can be put back on track, who are the secondary and tertiary influencers that can step up to redirect a disrupted message, etc, – that brands are clamouring for, and which we provide the framework for in the book.

The Influencer of Tomorrow

Another reason we wrote the book is because, as marketers ourselves, we saw a core area that the popular definition of an influencer was missing.

Whereas the route for an influence campaign on scoring platforms may be built around identifying mass numbers and attracting with brand perks or similar, to entice conversations around a product, this was still placing the influencer themselves at the heart of the marketing circle.

But, as we’ve seen countless times before from brand campaigns and case studies, if the influencer is either generic or one built on amplification and sponsored by a brand, does their trust factor get diluted? And, if it does, where does this leave brands looking to actually drive sales from these campaigns?

What was needed was a clearly defined path to where influence tips – that moment a decision moves from interest, to intent, to action (ideally, a purchase), and beyond.

By identifying this tipping point, brands could clearly identify who the true influencer is – and, as we share in the book, it’s not the usual suspects of today’s influence model, and is one of the key reasons influence marketing as it stands today is still seen as something of an enigma.

Brands know getting influencers to promote their product or service can be beneficial – but, much like celebrity endorsements, can be rife with risk as well, if the influencer isn’t chosen wisely.

This is where we felt a new methodology had to come into play.

The Path of True Influence

By implementing our methodology with our own clients, and the feedback we’ve received about our framework from leading influence technology vendors like Appinions, Traackr and Tellagence, as well as Social CRM vendors like Nimble and oneQube, we’re confident we’ve created an influence marketing blueprint that will redefine how the medium is used today.

It reduces risk, grows sales, increases leads, builds influence paths and follows the customer at every touchpoint in the decision-making process.

In the next few weeks, we’ll find out whether others agree when our book is released.

If you’re ready to be part of this new method of influence identification and nurturing, and truly take influence beyond awareness and into measured business results, you can preorder now via Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Chapters Indigo.

We look forward to moving the next wave of influence marketing forward with you.

Influence marketing is at a crossroads. As we know it today, influence marketing is primarily defined by social scoring platforms like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

However, while these platforms are decent starting points for brands looking to identify influencers, they don’t really go deep enough into contextual and situational human relationships to offer a true metric of influence.

What’s needed is a bigger understanding of how the human psyche works; what makes us tick as people; what impacts our decision process; and where we can predict paths of influence based on transactional relationships, where historic interactions can be merged with current knowledge and the likelihood of a future action based on that knowledge.

To get to that level, though, we need to move to the Third Wave of Influence Marketing.

The First Wave of Influence: Celebrity Endorsements

While Dale Carnegie can arguably be called the Grandfather of Influence as we knew it before social scoring entered the fray, it was the late Dan Edelman and his championing of celebrity endorsements that ushered in the First Wave of Influence.

Edelman saw the value in connecting celebrities with brands to share that brand’s message. The middle of the last century saw Edelman employ people like movie star Vincent Price to be the voice of the California wine industry, and people like baseball legend Nolan Ryan and activist Gloria Steinem.

This type of brand recommendation resulted in several successful campaigns, and turned Edelman’s fledgling self-named company into a global public relations powerhouse.

However, in recent years, the sheen has started to dull with celebrity endorsements. In 2008, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published an excellent article on the dangers of celebrity endorsement, which included (lack of) relevance of the celebrity to the brand.

On her agency blog, Margie Clayman took it one step further and highlighted the worst case scenario for brands when using celebrity endorsements – that of the celebrity “going rogue”.

Tiger Woods and his infidelity; Lance Armstrong and his doping scandal; Oscar Pistorius and the killing of his girlfriend (drawing comparisons to the OJ Simpson murder trial).

The combination of dangers associated to celebrity endorsement, as well as consumers becoming smarter when connecting the dots between endorsement and context, paved the way for the next wave of influence.

The Second Wave of Influence: Social Scoring

The social web has opened up a veritable treasure trove of opportunities for individuals to become the “new celebrity”, or influencer. By having access to social networks, blogging and more, everyday web users can grow a sizable audience and loyal following.

Brands began to take notice of this and naturally wanted to connect. There was just one problem – old school broadcast messaging didn’t quite work on the new web. Instead of connecting with influencers, brands came across as spammy. They needed a conduit.

Enter social scoring.

Early movers in the social influence space like Klout, Kred and PeerIndex saw the opportunity to create a platform that could connect these social influencers to brands looking to use them to promote their goods.

Soon, public scores were attached to individuals, with the higher scoring ones being invited to accept free products from brands, in the hope of exposure to that influencer’s audience.

This was all well and good, until the cracks started to appear.

Questions arose over the validity of the data being used, since it was just based on publicly available information versus more in-depth conversations happening behind closed networks and privacy settings.

People also questioned the right of these platforms to create a public profile and attach a score to you, without your specific content.

Privacy violation was also a hot topic, as well as the creation of profiles of minors – a big no-no for the social networks where the scoring platforms were scraping information from.

Perhaps the biggest crack was the resulting shift in how influence was perceived. Instead of context and micro relationships, influence was now judged by a score and how well a user played into the algorithm of the scoring platforms.

Even today, after improvements to the data, people with Klout profiles see their scores drop if they stay away from the likes of Twitter and Facebook for a few days. This “you’re only influential if you’re online” approach has left people questioning the validity of scoring as a method of influence.

Much like celebrity endorsements before them, social scoring platforms are being questioned over the context of how their influence is measured, and where the true transactional influence – that where trust, relationship and more comes into play – sits in their algorithm.

Which leads us to the next wave.

The Third Wave of Influence: The Business of Influence

The biggest problem facing brands today when it comes to influence marketing is the actions and end result that come from their campaigns, and did they result in leads and customers.

While there are various aspects to an influence campaign – short term buzz, new product awareness, donation run for non-profits, etc – the long tail aspect is often forgotten: customer acquisition and loyalty.

The reason for this can be attributed to many things, but the biggest overriding factor is clear – brands are still using influence marketing campaigns as one-offs, and with a campaign mindset.

This means they find their influencers, agree on the promotion, let the influencer do his or her thing, and then analyze how successful that campaign was.

However, this misses a huge opportunity – to turn influence into true advocacy, and build a loyal and engaged army of fans that are also customers. To do this, brands need to start looking beyond the short-term (potential) viral effect of an influencer, and instead address the need of the customer via the influencer.

A CRM platform like Nimble can help in this process, and taking influence beyond buzz and into true actionable business return is the natural next step.

Otherwise, the current direction of influence may erode brand trust. The recent indifference to the Kred and LinkedIn Top 1% emails showed early signs that perhaps consumers are getting tired of where we are today.

Instead of generic, we need to address complexity.

• We need to decipher opinions of those that matter and how they impact us;
• We need to adapt to fluid influence and how it continuously changes;
• We need to move beyond public personas and into micro influencers;
• And we need to stop confusing popularity and amplification for influence.

The stage is set for The Third Wave of Influence Marketing, and we look forward to continuing to move the discussion forward when the book is released in the next few weeks.

If you thought influence marketing was a hot topic at the moment for marketers and brands, it’s only just beginning to really take shape.

While much of the conversation both here on this blog and across various networks has concentrated on where social influence is today, this is a just the prelude to where influence marketing will be tomorrow and beyond.

In the next few weeks, our book will be released and we’re excited to share the concepts and methodologies that we’ve come up with in both our research for the book as well as real-life case studies we’re documenting with our clients, using our framework.

Our goal with the book is simple – while early movers in the social influence space have provided a starting point for brands to understand this tactic, the real business value requires actions and solutions that go deeper than a score and an “influencer” based on amplification and popularity.

Additionally, online influence is just one component of a very large picture, and only paints a small part of that same picture. Let’s talk about that a little more today.

Decisions Based on Limited Information

Social influence data as it stands today is based primarily on one core metric: public social profiles and footprints. So if you have your Twitter account set to public, then companies like Klout and Kred will create you a “profile” and allocate you a score, based on their algorithm.

If you sign up and connect your other accounts, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, the score will change, since these companies now have more information about you. So far, so good.

The problem comes when the accounts aren’t set to public, or you have different privacy settings for different accounts. So, Twitter and Google+ may be public, but Facebook may be primarily for friends, so your sharing method on that network is very different.

But let’s say it’s these private conversations where the decisions on the majority of the choices you make are made, when it comes to making a purchase.

These choices are the ones that are defining the influence factor at that time:

• Is it situational, where your current situation (financial, need for a product or service, etc) comes into play?
• Is it emotional, where the desire for something outweighs the logic of not actually needing it?
• Is it personal, where your partner/wife/husband puts the foot down and says no?

These are three simple factors that can’t be measured directly – and yet they have a direct impact on you as a person, because they influence your decision.

Because this process isn’t measured by public scoring algorithms, it can lead to distortion of data when measuring a brand influencer program.

You may have initially shown positive signs of interest in a new product launch, as featured on an influential blog, and that would go down as a success metric. But the truth is, the real influence was exerted when the situation came into play in your private conversation(s).

It’s this missed data that (currently) limits the reporting metrics on some of today’s platforms.

The Offline Influence Equation

Another part of this equation is the fact that most influence platforms don’t take into account what happens offline – they simply measure online noise and conversations.

While this approach still allows for a lot of data to be collated about someone and their influence, as well as who and what influences them in return, it’s still only half the big picture.

As Pierre-Loic Assayag mentioned when we interviewed him about the approach his Traackr platform takes, imagine trying to decide a large bank loan with only half the financial information about a person available to you – you just wouldn’t make that call.

In fairness, this limitation is being recognized by the influence platform developers. Kred, for example, allows you to upload your offline achievements (although they don’t validate them so you could still upload false information), while Appinions measures reactions and opinions from traditional media as well as online publications.

However, as much as we try and measure how offline decisions impact measurable public conversations online, there’s still the question of what truly impacted the decision to take an action or decide to pass at this moment in time?

To get to that stage, we need to move beyond just public personas when it comes to influence, and begin to look at the macro and micro influencer level, and where they sit in the influence circle around each of us.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be doing just that. We look forward to sharing with you.

Yesterday, influence marketing company Traackr unveiled its re-architected solution that better addresses the needs of marketing and public relations professionals seeking to identify and engage brand influencers online.

I was fortunate to get a sneak peak at the upgraded offering and must admit that the improvements are noticeable and powerful.  Traackr has developed a service that combines social media monitoring and influence measurement, adding a unique and actionable software to this increasingly competitive space.

Prior to this latest upgrade, Traackr’s solution was already taking steps in the right direction by offering marketers advanced user-defined and managed query tools to more accurately identify the context of conversations between people in specific communities.

The upgraded platform continues in that theme with built-in Twitter integration, instant search, real-time data and inline content access, enhanced data filtering, and revamped live support.

Overall, the new solution addresses the evolving demands of marketers, pushing beyond social scoring to meaningful relationship and data analysis.

You can read Traackr’s new release summary here so I’ll not regurgitate a detailed list of upgraded features in this post. Rather, I’ll share my thoughts on how Traackr is evolving to match the shifts occurring in this space.

Danny  and I will soon release our book called Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing in which we explore the evolution of this industry and where it’s going.

Our experiences and research show market demand pushing the industry away from general branding and amplification to niche customer relationship-based lead generation and nurturing practices.  Influence marketing will become more action-oriented and better integrated with – and measured against – campaign workflows and business goals.

Traackr’s latest updates are a step in that direction.

1. In-line Content Views

One of the key areas of change in influence marketing will be the ability to better define the relationship between people and the context of their conversations in different situations.

The advanced data filtering in Traackr’s updated platform facilitates this progression by offering in-line expanded views of prospective influencers.  This is handy feature for actively managing campaigns and focusing on the context of the conversations.

2. Real-time Searches

A new quick-search feature provides a real-time list of potential influencers based on a test set of queries. Often, a set of keywords used to identify influencers misses the mark because they are too broad or the context is incorrect for the targeted niche audience.

This tool, along with its geo-tagging option, allows campaign managers to view the effectiveness of their search parameters before creating formal lists, saving time and improving the quality of the search.

3. Relationship Focused

Marketers have begun to understand that the size of an audience – or the frequency of engagement with that audience – is not a true indication of a person’s influence.

Traackr’s advanced filtering offers greater control over the resonance and relevance of conversations between influencers and their audiences. Influencer lists can be re-filtered based on different sub-texts and themes for deeper insights into community engagement.

4. Action Oriented

One of the most important trends in influence marketing will be the “actionability” of the data and platform. Traackr is evolving to meet this challenge with real-time active searches of the content produced by selected influencers. This allows campaign managers to proactively monitor the interactions between selected influencers and their target audience to identify trends, opportunities and risks.

Further, it allows them to identify the best time and place to enter the discussion, which results in better conversions. The platform also allows for tagging of influencers and select conversations by internal user, theme or campaign names for reporting and integration with campaign workf

The one change I’m glad to see Taackr not make is a move towards publishing public influence scores.  “We wouldn’t have a way to show a public score, even if we wanted to,” states Evy Wilkins, VP Marketing at Traackr.

For example, a person who scored highly on “personal finance” based on their reach (size of audience) would not be influential if the sub-text of that topic was shifted slightly to “retirement savings” or “personal net worth.”

Traackr continues to offer real-time filtering and ranking of people based on the resonance and relevance of niche topics for users of the system where the context is meaningful.

What impresses me about Traackr today is that it has been successful at filtering down big data to manageable and actionable insights that marketers can use right away.  The focus remains on filtering and organizing online content around people.

Instead of setting lofty goals and making exaggerated claims, it’s focused on providing a tool that marketers can use – and measure – today.

There’s still a long way to go for software companies seeking to capitalize on the reach of social influencers; however the recent updates by Traackr show they are learning and adapting. It’s a good sign for the industry.

Only you can determine if this tool is right for your business but I recommend you check out the platform and its newest features.