Online Influence

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.