Influencer Marketing - Identifying Influencers

Identifying Influencers

The first step in Influencer Marketing is to identify influencers. Influencers are specific to discrete market segments, and are used as conduits to the entire target segment. While there are lists of generic influencers (such as the Time 100) they have limited use in marketing programmes targeted at specific segments.

Market research techniques can be used to identify influencers, using pre-defined criteria to determine the extent and type of influence. For example, Keller and Berry propose five attributes of influencers:

• Activists: influencers get involved, with their communities, political movements, charities and so on.
• Connected: influencers have large social networks
• Impact: influencers are looked up to and are trusted by others
• Active minds: influencers have multiple and diverse interests
• Trendsetters: influencers tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets

Most of the literature on influencers focuses on consumer markets. There is less insight into business-to-business influencers. A key distinction between consumer and business markets is that most of the focus in consumer markets is on consumer influencers themselves. This is because word of mouth communication is prevalent in consumer environments. In business marketing, influencers are people that affect a sale, but are typically removed from the actual purchase decision. Consultants, analysts, journalists, academics, regulators, standards bodies are examples of business influencers.

Not all business influencers are equal. Some have more influence than others, and some mechanism of ranking is required, to distinguish between key influencers and less impactful people. A model for ranking business influencers has been developed by Influencer50, thus:

• Market Reach – the number of people an individual has the ability to connect with.
• Independence – whether an influencer has a vested interest in promoting a particular point of view.
• Frequency of Impact – the number of opportunities an individual has to influence buying decisions.
• Expertise – how much of a subject matter expert is the influencer.
• Persuasiveness - the degree of consequence in ignoring an influencer's advice.
• Thoroughness of role - the extent to which influence is exerted across the decision lifecycle.

Several other companies including Ammo Marketing, Liquid Intelligence and DesignKarma Inc. in the US, Agent Wildfire in Canada, SCB Partners in Europe and Vocanic in Asia have developed their own proprietary methodologies for identifying and targeting influencers for a market (or market sector).

Fred Reichheld, a consultant at Bain & Company, has developed a methodology to determine the extent to which firms' growth is influenced by customers' propensity to make referrals to colleagues. Reichheld distills his research down to a single question: how likely is it that you would recommend company X to a friend or colleague? From answers to this question, a Net Promoter Score is determined, which correlates strongly with a firm's growth rate.

The Avant-Guide Institute, a New York–based trends consultancy, has a large proprietary network of influential early-adaptors (called "Trendsformers") numbering in the thousands, including journalists, bloggers, academics, industry analysts and professional advisors.

Using online social media tools to identify influencers

Web services can be used to crawl social media sites for users that exert influence in their respective communities. Exactly how much is the user engaging the online community? The social influencer marketing firm then asks those influencers to try client products/services and discuss them on their respective social networks. Clients can then observe, through an enhanced digital dashboard, with metrics that measure the dissemination of brand mentions across numerous web platforms.

There are at least 70 companies offering online influence measurement. Advocates of this online-only approach claim that online activity reflects (or pre-empts) the trends in offline transactions. For example, Razorfish released one of the first social influencer marketing reports, entitled Fluent. The report discusses many theories surrounding social marketing, including the importance of the push/pull dynamic and online consumer empowerment, authenticity and importance of buzz marketing.

In addition, online activity can be a core part of offline decision making, as consumers research products and review sites.

Critics of this online-only approach argue that only researching online sources misses critical influential individuals and inputs. They note that much influential exchange of information occurs in the offline world, and is not captured in online media. Indeed, the majority of consumer exchanges occurs face-to-face, not in an online environment, as evidenced by Carl. He notes that "an overwhelming majority of WOM episodes (nearly 80%) ... occur in face-to-face interpersonal settings, while online WOM accounted for only seven to ten percent of the reported (WOM) episodes."

Carl concludes that "The majority of the WOM action still seems to be happening in the offline world. These findings are especially provocative since they emerge at a time when more and more organizations are paying attention to how their brands are discussed online and recent academic research has focused on online WOM. Thus it is important for organizations to keep both online and offline conversations on their radar screen."

Keller Fay announced in 2007 that "While experts have previously estimated that 80% of marketing-relevant word of mouth takes place “offline” (i.e., face-to-face or via telephone), the new results indicate that this figure is even higher - 92%."

More recently, Nate Elliott at Forrester observed that "the huge majority of users influence each other face to face rather than through social online channels like blogs and social networks."

And the Fluent report, though generally orientated towards online measures admits that "it is necessary to remember the effect that offline social activity has on purchasing decisions." It also notes that survey "respondents trust offline friends most, with 73 percent indicating near or complete trust versus just 33 percent for online friends."