What You Need, When You Need It - Contextual Relevance In Social Influence
We no longer surf the web, we shape the web.
Contextual Relevance. The alignment of what you need when you need it.
It's nothing new. Targeted banner ads and recommendation engines have been trying to get more and more granular about figuring out the topics you're interested in for years. And now with mobile smartphones and geolocation being common, contextual relevance has taken on a whole new level of meaning. Want to know what restaurants are open of the type you like within walking distance of where you are right now? Done. That's contextual relevance.
In the world of leveraging Social Media Influence however most of the marketing efforts today do things exactly backwards. Typically that means finding the most appropriate 'mass influencer' with the most followers/friends and having them praise your product or service in some way.
Singular Definition Of Influencers
There are exceptions to every rule, I've run those types of shotgun campaigns before very successfully. But in most cases they are better suited to advertising objectives like awareness, not marketing objectives with a call to action. The problem we have is in the definition of an "influencer". Or rather, in our singular definition of what constitutes an influencer in social media. I have no issue with the idea that a rock star, a book author, a funny person, or someone who simply pumps out regurgitated information all day are 'influencers'. What I do have a problem with is our incessant focus on them. There are few products and services, and few matching mass influencers that can be put together to achieve the equivalent of putting you on Oprah's book club.
Why do we do this? Have you ever seen the actual number of responses when these folks request an action out of their multitude of followers. I have. It can be disheartening to say the least (which is most of the time). Or sometimes, rarely, magic happens. But chasing the storm hoping for lightning to strike you is rarely the best use of your money.
Easy Like Sunday Morning
I know why we do it. It's easy. It seems like a shortcut. It's easy to measure potential reach and become enamored with those numbers. They are easy to find. Easy to segment to some broad topic that isn't time sensitive. It's easy to treat it like an old school campaign and not worry about the long haul. Those mass influencers stand out like sore thumbs against the backdrop that is the 'normal' user. Want to know who they are? Go to Klout, BlogDash, or any other number of other services. Done. Now you can go take a wad of cash, some free products, or just a good smile and begging methodology, whatever works for you. Regardless, it's quick, and it's easy...it just doesn't work very well.
The reality is that what works, with a high percentage likelihood, is really hard to do. Why? Because success, particularly in social media, is derived from contextual relevance. But in a relationship driven, real-time stream like Twitter or Facebook, that changes moment to moment. Like the example I gave in my last post, the influence that a plumber has when your sink is clogged is profound, but on the days when it's not clogged? Not so much. So trying to segment in advance down to that level of need is impossible, or at least not cost effective. But due to that 'relationship' angle in social media it's also difficult to just pop into someone's stream and say "Hey! I heard you need a plumber" without any prior relationship or third party testimonial.
No Substitutes
So what's that mean? It partially means that in all businesses there is no true substitute for the hard work of delivering a great product/service and then being directly involved in your community...online or off. Big surprise right? Influence is about trust. You depend on leveraging the trust your customers have built up and advocating on your behalf. I don't know about you, but most of my customers don't have a million followers. But what I *can* do is figure out who my most likely customer base is (you should already know this anyway) and then use a lot of listening, a lot of parsing, and a little sideways intelligence to filter down those people to a manageable group and develop relationships with them. Genuine, true relationships. Reacting to someones 'point of need' (help, I need xxxxx) will garner you a very small percentage of the success that others reacting on your behalf will (you should go talk to xxxx, he's a good guy/company). Besides, directly reacting yourself doesn't scale very well.
I Apologize In Advance
So, who are your *real* influencers? When we're talking marketing objectives they are those people with their measly little 400 followers for the most part. Joe and Jane public. Those are the people you should be spending your time building relationships with, not Lady Gaga. I prefer to call these 'Advocate Programs' not influencer programs, but it's really one and the same. Doing it this way takes time (sorry). Doing it this way is hard (sorry). Doing it this way requires thinking ahead of the point of need (sorry). Doing it this way works.
It's just a good sized piece of Word of Mouth Marketing combined with a dash of Relationship Marketing and a smidgen of listening tools (don't forget to season properly). Ok, maybe that's not the simplest concept in the world, but unlike Influence Marketing in social media there are a ton of great books and articles out there on those other topics and they are completely relevant. You could do worse than picking up Brains on Fire as a starting point (just don't tell Spike Jones I said that, his head is already big enough).
You Need Both Sides Of The Coin To Spend It
I was recently having a brief conversation with Chris Brogan which led to a larger one with Amber Naslund in regards to how this industry is divided amongst the perceived 'Fluffy Cheerleaders of Social Media' who only talk about relationships and engagement, and the 'Stick In The Mud ROI Contingent' who only talk about how something doesn't exist if you haven't measured it. The reality is that to maximize your return you have to be, and do, both. It's a long tail activity that requires a lot of effort, both to do and to measure (CRM anyone?). Get used to it.
Long story short, if it's easy, you're probably doing it wrong.
Cheers,
*Photo Credit: Automania
20 Comments
Daniel D'Alonzo
President
moxieTODAY
Crud.
Seriously though, I agree that we're doing these things because they are easy, not because they are effective.
There's a graph waiting to be created (I'm not that smart or gifted) that suggests we should only allow algorithms to do our thinking for us when the scale of the enterprise demands alternative views are unpracticable and that the costs of inaccurate data returned from the query are de minimis.
Think of Google, v Klout. The scale of the exercise makes an algo the RIGHT solution for Google. Klout? Maybe not.
Someone gets a bad result on Google? Who cares! A bad data set or wrong list delivered to a company by Klout? Potentially 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars wasted.
This whole concept of online influence measurement is just stupid. Do the leg work and find out who the REAL influencers are and then go to work. Stop relying on automation to do your work for you. There's a time and place where those tools make sense, and I'm afraid ID'ing influencers is not it.
The thing I fear, as a consumer rather than purveyor of business services, is that contextual relevance can, after a while, begin to pigeon hole me into smaller and smaller pigeon holes until I only ever get to see ads for things I use on a regular basis. If I only ever get to see ads for Tim Horton's I may never get to live dangerously and actually try a Second Cup or Starbuck's or Dunkin' Donuts when I'm feeling adventurous.
Who decides what's relevant for me?
You are right, finding advocates and creating formal programs is tough. The internal buy-in, support, financial investments is even more difficult.
danieldalonzo - Appreciate the blog praise. As for the rest, Small is the new Big :)
Amber Naslund - Always a pleasure to see you here dear friend, and thanks for all the twitter love about the post
Rick Stilwell - It will indeed leave a mark :)
SeanMcGinnis - I don't actually have an issue with Klout, or any other influence measurement tools. In fact I've used them quite a bit. I do however take issue with the fact that people want to leverage these rolled up single number scores without actually understanding what they represent. Automation is good actually...to a point. You have to have some means of narrowing your *potential* pool down to something that is manageable. The problem is people are using that as the end point, when it should be just the beginning and the real work (human) gets involved.
colinwu58 - When we're talking pure automation I think to some degree that's true, although to be fair the algorithm's today are very, very good. So presenting to you something you didn't *know* you'd like that's in a different category than you've ever explicitly displayed is entirely possible. However, that's contextual relevance in a more static state. When I ran interactive for the agency of record of Levi's in the late 90's I had the pleasure of working with an early technology startup called LikeMinds that kicked off a lot of the recommendation engines we see today. And much like a Meyers-Brigg test can tell you things about yourself that you weren't completely aware of, so too can some of the more intelligent algorithms...but only from structured data they've compiled over time. The challenge is getting ahead of the curve and finding those *likely* advocates and engaging before the point of need where social media is concerned.
Michael Brito - Correct on all counts I think. I have an old post here: http://www.techguerilla.com/sams-social-media-30-the-importance-of-advoca that predicts the next movement on the technology front will be SAMS (social advocate management systems).
RobynsWorld - Good to see you here! Thanks for the comment.
Bernd Nurnberger - A wicked problem indeed. Loved the comment
(Friend of Spike's, BTW. He's not with Brains On Fire anymore, right?)
But I do wonder about going after influencers, large or small, rather than being one yourself. If you truly provide an authoritative product or service, can't you allow a community to build around you (what used to be called a customer base)? I think that might be overlooked by some social business models looking for -- as you so aptly described -- the quick fix. But why build a campaign when you can build a social storefront (even if you don't do social commerce there), and provide customers with non-product content, service and dialogue?
Mari: Thanks for the comment. More complex thinkers and harder workers would solve a lot of problems and that's a great way to word it.
I agree with your point that for many businesses the most powerful marketing resource consists of people with a few hundred followers or friends, or whatever the going platform name is for a person who connects with other people online, rather than someone with tens or hundreds of thousands. The former are more likely to receive reciprocation for a call to action from their social networks. If I follow your thinking correctly, one of the ways social media monitoring can go wrong is by failing to focus on the patterns of reciprocation in people's networks, depth rather than breadth. It is in many ways a qualitative distinction independent of quantitative estimation and, as you rightly say, tough "human" work.
In reality, most people don't take the time to build an influential online identity. It's a small minority. There are many smart, influential people who don't blog or worry about their follower numbers on Twitter. The greater challenge, IMO, is to measure user intent and credibility in order to create direct relationships with people we don't know. A more dynamic social web!
"Social Media" is not about "media" as in "the air". it is about "social" as in connecting.
Here is the post http://cocreatr.typepad.com/everyone_is_a_beginner_or/2011/04/first-social-me...
I think Gladwell did us all a disservice back in the day when he talked about mavens and connectors...in a pre-social media world. I call it the "Influencer Security Blanket" since it's so easy to get our heads around the model of a chosen few.
Mark Earls, as you undoubtedly know, does a great job of diving deep into what you described below.
Still, in spite of all of this, all the Duncan Watts data, I think there's some sort of deeper human need, maybe going back to elementary/high school and wanting to be the "popular" kids or at least chosen by them.
If I write an eBook (and I just did, but won't do a shameless plug here ;-), do I want the 400 fans to tweet it out (of course), but will my ego be boosted more if they do it or if one of the "cool" kids like Brogan or Kawasaki does it?
Long term reach, influence, and the most important metrics of pipeline/revenue are driven by the 400, but we look for validation and Cialdini-like social proof if we can say "hey, one of the 'Influencers' tweeted it."
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