Category Archives: Advertising

The Rise of Influencer Listening

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I’ve been doing “influencer marketing” for more than a decade, and calling it that for more than 7 years. I’m not a big fan of what you’re probably thinking about when you hear the phrase “influencer marketing.” What I’m really excited about is not so much outbound marketing and promotion – but inbound value capture through listening to market influencers and thought leaders. Listen to them and learn from them! That’s far more valuable than asking them to share links to what you’re selling!

I did a webinar about it with the American Marketing Association today and I was thrilled that 600 people registered, more than 200 attended live, and almost all of them stayed through the entire hour – not dropping off until we were done. You can check out the presentation on demand here. Related: AdWeek ran a contributed article I wrote on the same topic the next day.

That attendance and the responses we got suggest this to me: the market is ready for this. Marketers are ready to go beyond influencer marketing 101, the presumption of shallow last minute paid endorsements. I sure hope so!

What is strategic, listening-powered influencer marketing? It’s really a two-way conversation and it goes far beyond driving traffic to your company’s website. It does do that, in small part through the advocacy and sharing of “influencers” and in larger part through increased relevance for your more-informed brand, but it does a lot more than drive traffic.

As super smart marketer Leah Kinthaert puts it: “True digital transformation requires new ways of thinking and doing marketing, rather than simply enhancing and supporting the traditional methods. Social media – and more specifically two-way conversations on social media – is a crucial part of it.” Yes!

Below: A network map of the AI thought leadership space on Twitter.

Interested in Artificial Intelligence? Who isn’t these days? If you’re creating content and ever mention AI, you should make sure you know about Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun. They will probably never talk about you. But you’ll be a lot smarter if you spend some time listening to them. Everyone in AI does.

If you want to see some great examples of network-savvy influencer marketing by marketers winning the right to be trusted advisors to their customers, discovering emerging trends early, researching the heck out of their named accounts, targeting ads based on past wins, and yes even smart paid influencer engagements – come spend an hour with my recorded voice and a pretty deck on this AMA webinar.

I hope we’re seeing the beginning of a big change toward smarter, more informed, and more authentic marketing.

Learning Fast About Online Marketing in 2009

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Many readers here are interested in promoting their work online using new social media. Last month I put up a post on ReadWriteWeb titled Top Marketing Geeks Make Their Predictions for 2009. I thought I’d post it here as well for readers who may have missed it, along with some other resources.

Check out the 25 comments on the original post as well for some interesting discussion. Some readers were very critical and I’ve tried to offer some critical thoughts as well, but it’s clear that marking on the web is here to stay. Hopefully it will be based on a greater degree of authenticity, usefulness and innovation than marketing generally is known for.

For more personal thoughts on new media marketing, check out two of my old posts here Social Media for Marketing and Thoughts on Product Launch Promotion. Both are a touch out of date but should be a good source of some still-valuable resources and advice.

Speaking of resources, if you’re interested in new media marketing you may appreciate this OPML file of Chris Brogan’s favorite marketing bloggers to watch in 2009. It’s a special file of all their feeds filtered to deliver just their unusually popular posts (filtering performed by Postrank). You can download that file, then import it into your RSS reader and you’ll be kept super smart all year long. I’ll be keeping an eye on those feeds, myself.

If you’d like a short, concentrated injection of smarts along similar lines, check out my consulting services, just like these happy people have.

And now the blog post I promised…

marketinglogo.jpgWill 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation – perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?

Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we’ve embedded below, but we thought we’d pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there.
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Thoughts on How to Be a New Media Consultant

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I just got a very nice email from someone who found my blog and is interested in moving into consulting as well. I sent them the following thoughts that I think could be of interest to more people than just that one aspiring consultant.

The keys in my mind to being a good and employed new media consultant are:

1. Learn how to do cool new things and blog (well) about them.
2. Let people know that you are a consultant.
3. Make sure you deliver clear value to clients that extends beyond your time with them. Search engine optimization and pageviews are the most common things that consultants try to deliver to clients, but I prefer aiming for education, excitement, comfort with new tools and a sense that they can now be full fledged actors in the social media market themselves. My past clients are now happily reading OPML files I built for them, they see the value of and aren’t afraid of Twitter and they have more skills to use in their own work than they did before we worked together. (They are also doing more complicated things like this, in some cases.) I always aim to over-deliver and I don’t worry about giving clients almost everything I know – this market is too new and too big to worry about teaching yourself out of a job.
4. Stay visible by consistently sharing valuable information with other people. I don’t do that so much on my personal blog these days, but I do it on Twitter, on ReadWriteWeb.com and in face to face conversations.

That’s what’s worked well for me so far. Do other consultants reading here have other high-level points that they think are important to communicate?

I didn’t mention it in that conversation – but I do provide training and advising to other consultants sometimes. (As well as working on projects with clients together.) If you’re a consultant interested in some training on the particular things that I’m good at teaching – feel free to drop me a line.

One of my fantasies for awhile has been to hire other consultants for an hour of their training in whatever they do best. I think it would be awesome to do that once a month. Maybe a trade would be good. Oh, the possibilities are nearly endless. It’s an exciting time to be learning about the internet.

Prioritizing your reading list and doing rapid niche research using AideRSS

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AideRSS is a service I’ve wanted to make creative use of for some time. It’s neat – you supply an RSS feed and it ranks posts in that feed in order of reader engagement. The company is Canadian, too, and Canadian internet stuff is totally hot.

AideRSS scores each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it’s been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blogsearch engines, etc. Thankfully, it scores those posts relative only to other posts in the same feed. So while a post on TechCrunch with 20 comments might score a 5 out of 10, for example, a post on Marshallk.com with 20 comments would score a 10 out of 10! Unfortunately, and this is a big dissapointment, AideRSS is just plain wrong far too often – reporting, for example, completely inacurate numbers for several posts in my feed. Come on AideRSS team, fix these problems. So it’s nothing to bet the bank on, but there’s some real potential here and as a rough guide it could still be useful today. I’ve contacted AideRSS to ask why they are getting things wrong as often as they are.

That’s all well and good, it’s a good way to see which of your posts are getting the most reader engagement (at least via these gestures being measured) and the widget that AideRSS provides is a neat way to highlight your most popular posts – but I know there’s a lot more that’s possible here.

Tonight I tried something unusual, at least it seemed that way to me. I plugged the RSS feed for items I’ve tagged “toread” in del.cio.us into AideRSS. It worked! It appears that the service figured out which were the hottest items in my feed. What a handy way to prioritize! I could grab scored RSS feed from AideRSS, including “good posts”, great posts or only the best posts. Here’s a widget displaying the best posts currently in my “toread” feed, according to AideRSS.



Isn’t that cool? Obviously it would be nice if users could define the number of characters and items displayed in that widget and the metrics used don’t capture anything personalized – but nonetheless, I think there’s some real potential here. (The numbers fetched aren’t always accurate, either – hopefully that will improve.)

Here’s an idea I thought of previously: say you’re looking to identify some of the top blogs in real estate. (Woo hoo!?) I would recommend starting at http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate and sorting from authority. There’s an export in OPML link there, which unfortunately will not give you anything other than the top 10 blogs in that category no matter what you try to do, but you can import that OPML into AideRSS. You can then see the hottest posts in each blog, in other words: you can get a feel for what that blog’s community of readers takes interest in. So Technorati+AideRSS = easy identification of the biggest interests of top niche bloggers’ reading communities. Sounds invaluable to me.

These are the kinds of ideas I help come up with and implement with my consulting clients; though we wouldn’t want to depend too much on a tool that’s as loosely accurate as AideRSS is today.

If this general idea is of interest to you, perhaps more for personal use than marketing purposes, see also Rogers Cadenhead’s recent post on APML – Attention Profiling Markup Language. I tagged it in my blog and shared items feed, which you might like to subscribe to.

Thanks for reading.

“Should I write an article on Wikipedia?” Blogher as case study

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I noticed last week that there was no Wikipedia entry for Blogher, the women-centric blogging conference, blog aggregator and now VC funded company.  Shocked, I twittered that this was the case and my buddy Jeremy Pepper replied asking whether he should write an article.  

This was the second time in a month someone has asked me a question about whether they should be the person to write an article in Wikipedia so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.  A Blogher article in particular makes an interesting case study.

Wikipedia has great Search Engine Optimization, can be a good traffic generator and is a good reference source.  People like to have an entry in Wikipedia for their projects for a variety of reasons.  In this case, there ought to be a Wikipedia page about Blogher just so that people can go to this widely trusted source to learn about the project. Who should start writing that page, though?

In general – here are a few things I think are important when considering whether you ought to be the person to write about something in Wikipedia.

1. Conflicts of interest: If you have an antagonistic relationship with something, you probably ought not write about it.  If you have a financial interest in that subject’s success, I am of the belief that it may be ok for you to write about it so long as you practice…
2. Disclosure: Make sure your user page identifies who you are and what you do for a living.  Being open makes a world of difference.
3. Value add: In addition to a neutral point of view, make sure your post adds important value to the Wikipedia community by being truly informative.  Also, the more you have contributed to Wikipedia in general the more any specific contribution will be respected.  
4. Time invested: In some cases, like if a PR agent is writing about their client, I would recommend that in addition to disclosing the fact that you are a PR agent on your user profile page, you should also consider editing the article live in Wikipedia.  Multiple edits over time, even if from the same user, demonstrate time spent on the article in Wikipedia and help demonstrate respect for the platform.

To answer Jeremy’s question about Blogher I first searched in Technorati for his name and the word Blogher, to see what his relationship with the group was like.  He had written some supportive blog posts about the event, which received favorable comments from some people I understand to be leaders in the Blogher community.  I know that Blogher is generally supportive of participation by men.  I also did a google search for this query: site:http://blogher.org “for wikipedia.”  I found one forum thread about the fact that there is no Wikipedia article for Blogher.  The conversation seemed supportive of the idea, people were just wondering who should write it and how it should be done.  The thread seemed to taper off without any clear answers for that question.  That lead me to believe that there wasn’t any clear reason why the Blogher community did not want an article about Blogher in Wikipedia.

I suggested that Jeremy write one up and post it while logged into a Wikipedia account that was clearly tied to him personally.  That way people could see who was responsible and contact him to discuss it if they wanted to. He hasn’t written that article yet, but that’s ok. Eventually someone will write it and I think this is a good opportunity to talk about these questions.

If he does write this article, here’s how I suggest this and other articles begin.  In addition to maintaining a “neutral point of view” and sticking to the facts, it’s important that an article be long enough to satisfy the community of Wikipedians who dislike very short articles.  I’ve had articles be deleted because they weren’t substantive enough.

Since Blogher is an active online community there’s an opportunity to make sure that participants there know that a new Wikipedia entry about them has been posted.  Emailing them or posting to the Blogher forum could be good ways to let them know. Once they know about the article, they will have a chance to edit it as they see fit and help watch in case this new article gets nominated for deletion, as does happen frequently.

Finally, I’d suggest that if you add a new entry to Wikipedia that you check back daily for the first week after posting it to see if any conversation about the article has been posted or if the article has been nominated for deletion.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for your entry’s history, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to track by RSS whether your article has been nominated for deletion.

If it is nominated for deletion, there will be a discussion and vote.  In that case, you can let people know and provide the URL for the voting page so they can participate in the conversation and respond to any concerns that the Wikipedia community may have.

Those are some of my thoughts about writing articles on Wikipedia.  There’s no guarantee of success in Wikipedia, but if you make a good-faith effort to contribute value to the community (with any interests of your own weighing less heavily than the interests of the community) then odds are good.  You’ll learn more about online social media from the experience of engaging, so in most cases I say yes – write that article.  

I’m going to email a link to this post over to one of my Wiki-loving buddies and see if we can flesh out answers to these questions all the more.

Thoughts on Differentiation

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Saying the following to a consulting client – what do you think?

“Being in close to a service and seeing all its differentiation is not the same as having that differentiation be appreciated in the market – at some point it just doesn’t matter to most people. Offer an API, partnerships with a number of other cool startup contendors, and a different aura (respecting privacy better than Google for example) and you can at least be much more high profile – perhaps moving from being seen by casual observers as an also-ran to being a Golden Boy.”

Like Marc Andreeson, I think the web is not in a bubble. Everyone from consumers to industry bloggers to VCs – heck, developers and your own company, can use some solid strategy for how to deal with the fact that many of us are doing things that basically look identical from a standard distance away. I think APIs and partnerships are great things to think about in this regard. The parties who engage on those levels will take the time to notice how you are different, and the end result will be a much more visible differentiation as a result of your roll in the larger ecosystem. Del.icio.us and Technorati are examples of this, Twitter is too.

Zooomr Relaunching Live by Video

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It’s 3:45 my time and photo sharing site Zooomr is about to launch a new version of their service. How are they doing it? With a live video chat on UStream! This is a model of transparency for the future. If you come by in time, they are responding to the text chat going on at their UStream page. They’ve also recorded a short video about the new features they are adding.

These guys work hard to build relationships with their users all around the world. They are doing a lot of things that I really admire.

An interface available in more than 15 languages, free pro-accounts for bloggers who write about them, rapid feature development – the list goes on and on. Way to go, guys.

I had the UStream player in question embedded here, but it was leaking audio when my pages loaded.