How to win friends and influence people (in the social web).

There is nothing new about brands and their agencies seeking to influence the influencers.  


Brands for example, have always used celebrities to help win influence -  sports stars, film actors and pop icons all have the potential to impact the way we spend our money and the brands we choose but in some ways celebrity is the easiest route for a brand - after all it's not difficult to reach out to a celebrity, simply a case of calling the agent. 

The more difficult group to reach are the non-celeb influencers in society - 'style leaders', 'opinion formers' and 'early adopters'.  Before web 2.0 arrived many a marketer struggled with how to reach these people and many ingenious promotions were devised to get the right products in to the right hands.  Brands and their agencies are still grappling with how to reach the same key influencers but the difference is the social web - and it's no small difference because now through social networks and the ability for all of us to create content like this blog, or a posting on Facebook, or the pinning of a photo to our Pinterest board , or a tweet, or uploading a video to YouTube, or indeed any aspect of engaging with the social web, is the potential to influence others and ultimately the brands they choose .


However, the degree of influence we all have in the social web varies enormously and how you find the right people with the right influence is the focus of many enterprising new businesses such as Klout, Kred and Peer Index which are all attempting to measure individual social influence and some like TweetReach and TweetLevel which focus on a specific social network such as Twitter.


This excellent report below, from our friends at the outstanding Altimeter Group, takes a closer look at some of these businesses and proposes an Influence Action Plan for seeking to win brand influence in social networks.


They also provide some interesting case studies from Microsoft , Starbucks and Virgin America, which look at how they sought to reach digital influencers and the results.


I would add these two notes of caution to the report:


1. Use the influence scores as a guide but at the moment nothing replaces researching a category online and working out for yourself who has influence within it and who are the key players.


2. This report somewhat ignores the 'value exchange' - that's the term I use for what a brand is offering the influencers in return for the relationship.  A free product is not the answer (although it may be in part, see my previous blog '10 things I've learnt about bloggers) but it needs to be a long term program - the relationship isn't over when the promotion ends - it's for ever!

The Rise of Digital Influence

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