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Feb
5
Influencers: How to Create a Dialogue With Them
February 5, 2007 | Anita Campbell
Articles defining “influencers” are not too hard to find. However, it is the rare article that gives actionable advice about how to create a dialogue with influencers.
A recent article by Nilofer Merchant at MarketingProfs.com is one of those rarities. Five Ways to Develop a Dialogue With Key Influencers offers insights into how to develop a communication program with influencers — those individuals whose opinions and advice influence your market.
The striking thing is how much an influencer strategy today relies upon Web surfing at Amazon, forums, community sites and blogs:
Influencers need to be sought out. They do not run in packs. They are more likely to be leading the pack, but that’s not necessarily the case. These are also not the early adopters (who often like technology stuff or new stuff for its own sake and are willing to be irritated first). So the key is to figure out what would make a good influencer for your product/service/category/idea. Then think hard about where they would hang out and how can you find them.
You can go to online forums to see who is commenting. You can check Amazon profiles as sometimes this is the “recommended list” guy or gal. For each market, you need to find the few among the many.
The article also points out how the Web multiplies the influence of these influencers:
Influencers are key conduits of information. It’s as if your Aunt Louise suddenly became the world’s leading authority on nonfat yogurt and people throughout the world recognized her. Influencers know many people and are in contact with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people in the course of a week. They have a powerful multiplier effect, spreading the word quickly across a broad network when they find something they want others to know about.
I would add the following to Nilofer’s excellent article: In the small business realm, especially for products and services used by small businesses, you will often find that influencers are small business owners themselves.
Their motivations tend to be more complex than those of consumer influencers.
In the consumer realm, influencers tend to be driven out of internal desires to be seen as influencing ideas and activism. Those kinds of motivations exist for small business influencers, but you have another important motivation overlayed on top of all the other motivations: small business influencers see their activities partly as marketing for their own businesses.
Small business owners on a tight budget never have enough money for marketing. So they turn to the great equalizer — the Web. Becoming an “expert” online is a way to draw attention (traffic and brand recognition) to their business, their products, their services.
That’s not to say that small business influencers can be “bought.” Their credibility is crucially important to them, just as it is with consumer influencers.
However, there are things that small business influencers may value quite highly, that cost nothing but a little time and effort on your part. Small business influencers are going to look for the marketing value of attention from a Corporate vendor. For instance, linking to the website or blog of a small business influencer, or inviting them to serve as a guest expert on your site (with no editorial limitations on what they write), can be huge gestures. Making that kind of outreach to small business influencers goes a long way toward ensuring an open, two-way dialogue thrives.
