Influencers vs. Advocates
Let me first deal with that question which some of us have asked ourselves for a while now. What is the difference between an influencer and an advocate? Here are two posts which tried to answer this question;
As you can see from the comments, there were some disagreements with both posts as to what the difference was. I do not have the magic answer either; however, I will share my opinion after first looking at some definitions.
A definition of influencers
Individuals who have the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of their (real or perceived) authority, knowledge, position, or relationship. Alternatively, Brown and Hayes[*] defined an influencer as “a third party who significantly shapes the customer’s purchasing decision, but may never be accountable for it.
A definition of advocates
A person who supports a cause and exercises his right to be heard, or represents a party before a court or tribunal to defend it or plead on behalf of it.
So it seems to me that influencers are particular types of advocates, who have an effect on the purchase decisions of others, and not in a political or legal sense.
From now on in this post I shall use the term influencer because I am talking here about advocates who, in various degrees, have an effect on the purchase decisions of others, so they are influencers.
How can I find my brand influencers?
You should be able to spot a brand influencer very easily. They pop up regularly and say good things about your brand! When I was a community manager at Philips I had a great relationship with them over a number of years. They would answer many customer questions, and left the more difficult ones to me when they felt it should be responded to by the brand. If you are doing Social media correctly and regularly talking to your followers, subscribers, members, etc, then you will know who your brand influencers are. There are a few other ways to find your brand influencers. I list a few of them;
- Commission a Social listening survey from a competent company like Oxyme. There are many other social media intelligence companies like Radian6, Attentio, Crimson Hexagon, Collective Intellect, Sysomos etc. Radian6 actually has an influencer widget, which gives you the ability to set the factors of influence that are most relevant to you.
- The Adobe Social analytics tool enables you to integrate data from your Facebook, YouTube and Twitter channels with your web analytic data to identify the people who have brought you the most referrals, actions, or revenue.It is a very neat solution and I highly recommend it to existing Omniture users.
- These two suggestions can not only find the influencers for your brand, but they can also asses how much influence they have. Here are some very quick cost effective alternatives;
- For Twitter and Facebook, RowFeeder could be used to see who is referencing your brand and how often.
- For Twitter, a simple option is to use the Formulist “Top fans” app, which you can now have added to Hootsuite.
- For Blogs, look to see who regularly comments and refers to your blog. You can do this manually or consult your commenting system if you employ one, like Livefyre or Disqus.
- Communities like Linkedin allow you to see who are your top participants. JIVE communities allow you to add points for commenting and many other actions, and as an administrator, you can run reports to see who your top contributors are. You will need to check what they were doing to earn the points, as not all actions are those of influencers, referring to my quoted definitions earlier in this post.
- Lastly, there are some free tools like Topsy or Socialmention. Just search for one of your brand names and see who is talking about it. I particularly like the list of “top users” shown down the left hand side of the results page of Socialmention. Remove your own usernames and then explore the rest! In Topsy.com, use the “search experts” option.
- Here is a list of influencer identification tools that I love sharing. It is a year old, but I just love it.
In many ways, brand influencers share the same characteristics in B2C and B2B. You will find highly technical influencers in almost all subjects and most of them influence both online and offline, so do not discard the powerful effect of word of mouth. Some can tell you far more about your products than your own marketing departments! Here is one of my past posts on the power of word of mouth.
Knowing that influencers are out there is one thing, but interacting with them is another.
If handled well, you can multiply the effect that your top brand influencers will have on your earned media results.
Do not approach them using non branded email accounts, and do not blatantly ask them to promote your content.
Influencers love insightful information, either gained by experience or via data sources. So if you can supply that to them, and in advance of others channels, it might be a huge win-win. They also like to have their questions answered in a timely fashion when they come to you as well. Brands can even ask influencers to answer other customer questions, which I have experienced myself from the influencer point of view.
Start carefully, with one or two influencers, then build up to develop a successful program. I suggest looking at the checklist created by Jeremiah Owyang. It is all good stuff, but working with influencers can also be dangerous if you opt to pay them. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has guidelines for disclosure of paid media on blogs and other social media, so it is well worth reading up on this if you choose this pathway and you fall under the scope of the FTC guidance.
One of my favourite authors on the topic of brand influencers was Augie Ray. I enjoyed debating the topic with him while he was at Forrester Research. I suggest having a peak at one of his reports from February 2010, which was titled “Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid”
In summary… Influencers vs. Advocates
For any brand in this Social media age, identifying your Influencers should be a logical next step after first crafting your Social policies, and venturing on your first phase of Social interaction. Please refer to the above checklist that I referred to plot when you logically move onto engaging with your influencers.
Have you identified your influencers and what benefits did you gain by engaging with yours?
Interview with the Social Media Jedi about Influencers and advocates on the Pluggio blog
References
- [*] Brown, Duncan and Hayes, Nick. Influencer Marketing: Who really influences your customers?, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008.
- Image1: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
- Image2: Clive Roach / CliveRoachBlog
- Image3: Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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