Influencer Marketing is the act of targeting specific thought-leaders, critics, industry giants, celebrities, and just plain interesting personalities. Wikipedia currently has it defined as “a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orientates marketing activities around these influencers. Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, or (in the case of business-to-business transactions) they may be third parties.”

It operates on the “network effect” where one person is connected to five, five to fifty, and fifty to five thousand (a.k.a. the pyramid scheme)

One of the other ideas it works around is degrees of separation there are between a few people. Through today’s technology (social media, blogging, near limitless telephony) most of us are only 3 to 4 people removed from almost any other person. (This is pretty scary, as I can draw direct lines to most celebrities, politicians, and my best friend’s next door neighbor.)

The Network Effect is very closely related to the Chaos Effect. Hundreds of people have a “web” of connections that overlay on top of hundreds of other individual network “webs”, and at every possible point of overlap and connection a message or emotion can be relayed. Every point of contact becomes a potential broadcast station, reaching ten other points of contact, that become ten broadcast points, etc, etc.

Within just two or three simple relays of information, the original message takes on a creative undertone. Every person responsible for relaying the message mutates and changes it. Sometimes for better or worse. Sometimes not even relaying the original message. As children most of us have probably played a version of this scenario where a story is told around the room, person to person, and by the end of the relay it doesn’t sound anything like the original.

Now multiply that effect by a factor of 250 million online users in the United States, each individual with a unique mindset and personal motif for relaying the message.

That is when the network effect just turned to the chaos effect.

Why is this connection important?

The best comparison is to use a calm body of water as an example. If you drop a pebble into it, you create ripples that carry across the pond. If you drop two or three, you create several different ripples that interact at millions of different points and create a unique interaction. In science, if you zoom down to the smallest level of the water you can actually see every point of contact actually causes another unique ripple that carries throughout the pond. These smaller ripples may be hard to spot, but they are there.

In the online world of influencer marketing, those small ripples are the equivalent to our individual conversations and buzz about a product.

You cannot create these unique conversations by only dropping a single rock.

You can however place rocks strategically into the audience, watch ripples carry through different channels of communication, and tactically insert new ripples by dropping another well placed idea.

What makes an influencer and influencer?

There are many different criteria, but the largest one is that they are thought-leaders. For whatever reason, people listen to them, follow them, and try to mimic their ideas. In the offline world influencers were mainly considered to be journalists, authors, celebrities, industry leaders, and politicians at the top level. On a secondary level, the real influencers are the people behind the scenes: political advisers, editors, stock analysts, lobbyists, and publishers.

In the online world influencers are a different breed. Many real world influencers have made a migration to being thought-leaders online, but many technical and marketing savvy minds have created new “influencer” status for themselves by understanding how technology connects other people. Between knowing how to look at traffic patterns, keywords, user profiles, and other statistics you can fairly quickly analyze if an online entity is an influencer (as an author, I was flattered to have my content stolen off this new site within the first week by someone who thought so highly of my thoughts. - I still had the site shut down for using my content with their name on it, but it was still flattering.)

How does this affect my business?

The communication happening within the social media realm (blogging, podcasting, video, online communities) is creating a unique ecosystem that connects thousands of influencers within hours. Industry buzz can be created in minutes or even seconds, and the speed at which it occurs is playing a pivotal role in marketing and public relations.

Some steps for understanding social media influencers

Discover the largest influencers in the industry. This can typically be done by looking at both raw metrics and history. How many people read the information? Who reads it? Who reads the readers? The top influencer in an industry may only have fifty readers, but those readers may be the journalists, decision makers, and drivers in the industry (it isn’t about quantity, its about quality.)

Place yourself in the influencers shoes before trying to influence them. Professional influencers usually monitor industry news and noteworthy developments. They are trying to establish and build a reputation for having knowledge, if you can give them the information to build that knowledge, you may have an influencer on your side. Personal influencers are in it for emotional reasons, they believe in what they are trying to do. This is actually a large percentage of the social media influencer crowd. Do not try to pitch an idea to someone who LOVES something else.

Build connections. Lots and lots of connections. Success in an influencer campaign is about developing multiple points of contact and relationships. The more you know about a person, the better you can find an influencer who already agrees with what you are trying to accomplish. Unlike real world influencers, most social media influencers are on dozens of different services and have volumes of information about them online. Read it.
Provide options. Do not try to “ram home” a singular idea with an influencer. Think of influencer marketing as repetitive negotiation. Money may be what they want, but more than likely it is something else. If you know about the influencer you are dealing with, sometimes a good bottle of wine, a pair of concert tickets, or a night out on the town with them is the best way to build a relationship (side note, I like wine - I grew up in wine country.)

Don’t think one night fling, think long term relationship. This is a hard one for most business marketers to understand. Influencers are influencers because they have relationships that make them what they are. They do not want to “churn and burn” those relationships, and they do not want one night stands. If you want to have a good relationship, go in with the intention of building something for the long-haul and stick with it (in the end, you never know where you or they will be in six months.)

• How do you find influencers in your industry?
• What are some of the benefits and problems you’ve ran into with trying to work with influencers?

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