We attended the Influence Marketing Summit in NYC last week and
listened to some interesting presentations.
The approach of this summit is to define “market influencers” from the
online perspective, especially with regard to social media. Of course, one of the more interesting
aspects of this conference was defining who are “influencers.”
The speakers identified them as:
- Media people – who have a “built-in audience
- Writers/bloggers – who have “followers"
- Product User - “power users” or vocal ones, who have many friends and followers
Because of the need to contact and work with each of
these people individually, there’s an inherent problem of “scalability” with
this model…
Anna Lingeris, Manager of Public Relations and Consumer
Engagement, for The Hershey Company, is responsible for a variety of brands:
Hershey’s, Reese’s, Hershey’s Kisses, Kit Kat, Twizzlers, and Ice
Breakers. Her presentation started with
asking all the Tweeters in the audience (live and online) to tweet #bdi and
#hershey to get free product (!). Not a
bad idea, as she had colleagues monitoring the feeds. Because there was a screen at the front,
illustrating the conference feed, it was easy to see how many people took her
up on this.
Anna’s definition of “influencers” are the people who have
followings online (such as bloggers). She
went to a blogger conference and put up a kiosk that allowed uses to create
their own “Easter Basket” of Hershey’s products, along with a quote of what
they like to do with their family.
Hershey’s then delivered these baskets and enjoyed the many blogposts
they received. They took the top 20
blogposts for their own website. So the
“influence” included the bloggers, their circles, and capturing that excitement
(and stories) on their own site. The
messaging they used, based on their research, was “how Easter is celebrated by
their families – and family traditions.”
BJ Emerson, VP Technology, for Tasti D-Lite took a different
approach to “market influencer.” BJ doesn’t worry about scalability – but
rather feels that the “numbers will take care of themselves” if you do the 1:1 relationship
well. His goal is to create
“experiences” that are memorable and can be talked about – such as an office
party with ice cream.
With that in mind, he targeted specific individuals to talk
to in Twitter and to deliver ice cream to – at their offices. This got the “influencer” to talk about Tasti
D-Lite online a lot, and also touched/affected his/her coworkers (the ice cream
came for the whole office to have a party).
He had fun showing “in-depth” stalking he did of customers –
to find out who the influencers were (using geo-location, for instance, to
target someone in the Empire State Building in NYC, where there’s a Tasti
D-Lite downstairs). He also reached out
to celebrities who mentioned the ice cream – asking them to reveal their
favorite flavor. This kept the
conversations going online and reached the thousands of fan each celebrity
has.
There were other interesting presentations – about
“influencers” being more internal (such as franchisees). All of which indicates that there are many
ways that “influencers” can be found – depending on the way products and
services are sold and the approach one wants to take.
We’re always looking for creative ways to define
“influencers” in business and markets.
Do you have any you’d like to share?
Let us know…. And we’ll keep showing how “influence” is taking off as
the new paradigm.
