For brands looking to drive purchase decisions, Influencer Marketing is the most important new approach to marketing in a decade. Targeting influencers is a great way for brands to align themselves with a niche lifestyle segment, which makes influencers an invaluable asset.  For brands, it’s important to remember that influencers come in all sizes and shapes, and while some of them can rock your world, others can poison your well.  If you are hoping to persuade people to adopt a new product, it’s imperative you target influencers with gravitas who are considered original thinkers by your target audience or else…let’s take a look at one influencer program gone wrong and try to learn from it.
An Influencer Program Gone Wrong
Since I’m in the business of social media and online marketing, I enjoy reading Christopher Penn’s blog. Chris is a thought leader in internet marketing, so I was totally surprised to read his review on the new Sony MDR-X10 headphones. Since when is Chris reviewing personal audio gear, I thought? As it turns out, Chris is part of an influencer program which lets online influencers receive free or discounted products from brands directly. The influencer program appears to make its money in part by selling lists of influencers to brands. The program matched Chris with Sony for the promotion of its new headphones. The problem was that Chris gave a negative review of the product and made a “don’t buy recommendation”.
Meaningful Data is Key
So what went wrong? Why was Chris put into this marketing campaign? Why was he matched with a brand if there was even a chance that the program could go so wrong?
The problem here is the data. This program matched Chris with Sony based on data about his social influence. Chris has influence in the social sphere, so data that measures his influence online suggests that he can have a far online reach and promote a brand. Even though there is data that determines that Chris is an influencer,  that doesn’t mean the data is meaningful. When it comes to meaningful influencer data, Brian Solis, author of the Altimeter Group’s report  “The Rise of Digital Influence”, proposes three pillars of influence as a possible framework. The pillars — Reach, Relevance, Resonance — determine how a person can cause change and effect their social network.
Now let’s see what meaningful data could have been obtained about Chris to help Sony decide whether or not to approach him during influencer outreach. We are looking at publicly available data that can easily be obtained by brands by running a simple, manual, online search; no big data or other fancy tech words involved.
Pillar 1: Reach Data – Hit!
Solis defines Reach as “the measure of popularity, affinity and potential impact.” Using Compete’s free site analytics we can learn that:
1. Chris’s blog gets thousands of unique visitors per month.
2. Chris ranks 5th under “Competitive Rank” among social media peers such as Chris Brogan (1st).
Visiting some of Chris’s linked social accounts can teach us that he has 57,869 followers on Twitter, 1,145 Likes on Facebook, and approximately 4,391 RSS subscribers to his blog. For most brands, Chris perfectly represents the Power Middle. These are the true influencers, as opposed to those with the largest networks or those that may be loyal product users, but have small communities.
Pillar 2: Topical Relevance Data – Big Miss!
Topical relevance is the “glue of the interest graph and the communities of focus” as per Solis. Here we’d like to examine Chris’s Authority, Trust and Affinity in the context of the specific topic at hand: personal audio gear. Collecting meaningful, topical relevance data signals is a qualitative task by nature, hence a bit more complicated than collecting quantitive reach signals. Still, as demonstrated below, sufficient data exist as long as you know where to look for it.
1. Chris’s Klout Page
Klout lists Magazine, Apps and Facebook as Chris’s most influential topics. Nothing here about Audio, Music, Pop, Gadgets or any other topic that can be somehow associated with Sony’s headphones.
According to his LinkedIn Q&A profile, Chris has expertise in Internet Marketing, Writing and Editing, and Education and Schools. No expertise in modern pop mixes found.
3. Chris’s Blog
Blogger Stephanie Dulgarian who works with TapInfluence, a turnkey Influencer Marketing Platform, has great advice for brands looking to reach out to influencers. Her first piece of advice is, “Get to know me, my blog and my audience.” Luckily, Chris has a blog. This is his content hub and the best place to search for topical relevance. Using his blog’s search, I came up with the following product reviews: The Dip – a book by marketing guru Seth Godin (a recommended one by the way),  SuperDuper – a system recovery solution, and  MailStrom – an email productivity app.
Next using Google’s Keyword Tool, the following keyword groups were retrieved for Chris’s blog: Marketing Social (14), Analytics (7), Social Network (10), Social Media (8). So far, you can see a perfect correlation between the products that Chris reviews and his topical relevancy, and that Sony’s new headphones totally don’t fit here.
Pillar 3: Resonance – It’s Complicated
Resonance (also known as Impact) is defined by Solis as “measurement of the duration, rate and level of interactivity around content” and is usually the hardest to measure. Obtaining meaningful data signals on resonance requires some exploratory data analysis of large data sets. For brands, targeting an influencer with a high resonance, and engagement that results in positive sentiment is like hitting the jackpot (as long as Reach and Topical Relevancy are hits as well). In this case, not only this influencer program miss big on Relevancy, but the engagement with Chris resulted in negative sentiment, where his resonance created damage for the brand. A quick Google search for “Sony MDR-X10 Review” shows Chris’s review at no. 8:
Lessons Learned
An influencer program can go awfully wrong if influencers are poorly targeted. This program chose to match a low-end lover’s product designed by Simon Cowell to an audiophile that listens to “orchestral music.” Chris doesn’t do “modern pop mixes.” He listens to the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria soundtrack as his sample.
Takeaways
- Know your brand attributes and your target audience (influencees)
- Research and segment influencers based on Reach, Topical Relevancy and Resonance
- Take time to know the influencer, read his/ her blog, twitter stream, etc.
- When using a tool ask for the targeting methodology and to review the list of influencers prior to engaging.