Practitioners Guide to Social Influencer Engagement

Copyright © 2012 PR Newswire Association LLC. All Rights Reserved.
eBook
The Practitioner’s Guide to
Social Influencer Engagement
A collaborative work of industry peers
B r o u g h t t o y o u b y P R N e w s w i r e
The ideas and suggestions expressed in the content of this eBook are those of their
respective contributors and are not necessarily those of PR Newswire.

Table of contents
INTRODUCTION
By Sarah Skerik, Vice President, Social Media, PR Newswire ................................... 1
CHAPTER 1 – What’s an Influencer?
The Influencer Next Door, By Malcolm Atherton ........................................................ 2
Mass & Niche: A Deadly Combo, By Chad Lio ............................................................... 4
The Evolution of the 800 lb Gorilla, By Todd Price ....................................................... 6
Listening Equals Influence, By Sebastian Rusk .............................................................. 8
CHAPTER 2 – Finding & Gauging Influence
Choosing the Right Influencer, By Noemi Pollack ........................................................ 10
Measuring Your Social Brand and Optimizing Your Score, By Yael Even-Levy.... 12
The Three “V’s”and How You Can Use Them, By Sudip Chakraborty &
Brianna Harney ......................................................................................................................... 15
Creating Your Perfect Blend of Influencers, A summary of PR Newswire’s
Targeting Influencers in the Sea of Social Media video ............................................. 17
CHAPTER 3 – Engaging Influencers
Three Essential Rules for Influencer Engagement, By Ruth Fine ............................ 21
Five Ways to Build Strong Bonds with Social Media Influencers,
By Margot Heiligman .............................................................................................................. 23
10 Strategies for Ultimate Influencer Engagement, By Steph Russell ................. 26
How NOT to Pitch a Social Influencer, By Howard Greenstein ............................... 28
Twitter as a Luxury Marketing Tool to Reach Influencers, By Megan Sterritt ... 31
The Conversation is the Platform, By Christy Belden .................................................. 33
CHAPTER 4 – Turning Influence Into Brand Advocacy
How to Make an Influencer Want to Sing Your Tune, By Anne-Marie Kovacs ... 37
Turning Influencers Into Your Brand’s Voice, By Tom Bishop .................................... 39
Building a Social Media & Marketing Strategy for Influencer Engagement,
By Lee Anne Forbes ....................................................................................................................
43
The Cadence of Influence, By Vatsala Isaac .................................................................... 45

CHAPTER 5 – Measuring Influence & Maintaining Relationships
Measurements That Matter, By Jared Hendler .............................................................. 48
Measure and Maintain Relationships, By Adam Blitzer ............................................. 51
What My Daddy Taught Me About Social Media-How To Be A Giver Online,
By AndreaWalker ..................................................................................................................... 54
Understanding and Growing From Advocate Insight, By Matthew Clyde ......... 57
WILDCARD CHAPTER 6 – A Little Extra Food For Thought
Optimizing Your Social Media for Search (SSO), By Christy Belden ....................... 61
How To Really Engage Your Influencers With Gamification,
By Toby Beresford ...................................................................................................................... 64
CONCLUSION
By Sarah Skerik, Vice President, Social Media, PR Newswire ....................................... 68

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eBook The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Influencer Engagement
Introduction
By Sarah Skerik, Vice President of Social Media, PR Newswire
The terms “social networks”and “social media”make it easy to forget that
people – more than a billion of them worldwide – are the means by which
conversations propagate and ideas spread. Smart communicators factor the
human element into the communications plans they develop and the content
they create.
Every group of people, whether you’re talking about an informal cluster or
people conversing via hashtags on Twitter, a private group on Facebook or a
coffee klatch at a local café, has its own influencers. Respected and quoted
by many, influencers are the members of the community who sway opinions
through a combination of personal expertise and social connectedness that put
them at the center (and often at the start of) many conversations.
Influencers exist for every imaginable topic. They might be hobbyists,
academics, journalists, professionals, or simply the person next door. Each brings
a unique point of view to a conversation, and developing relationships with
them is important for brands building a connected digital presence.
In this paper, we delve into the different kinds of influencers you’ll find, their
role in shaping online conversation and how brands and organizations can
build valuable relationships with key influencers within their markets and as
well as become influential themselves, ultimately driving their audiences and
influencers to them.

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Chapter 1
What’s an Influencer? Who Are They?
The Influencer Next Door
By Malcolm Atherton, Account Manager, PR Newswire
One of my favorite cartoons of all time is from the New Yorker. One dog is seated
in front of a computer and is looking at another dog. Computer dog says to the
other dog, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Makes me laugh every time. Now, look around. Do you see an influencer? I’ll
wait…
(pausing for effect….)
I was thinking of Mark Schaefer’s excellent session at September’s Content
Marketing World on influencers and, in real life, nobody knows you’re an
influencer.
Ask 10 people to define “influencer”and you’ll likely get 10 answers. Celebrities,
thought leaders, folks with high influence scores (see Klout, PeerIndex, et al.),
and so forth are likely to be uttered. Finding and targeting influencers is the
goal for many an internal Marcomm team and/or agency as part of ongoing
strategies. So, who are these people… these influencers? Chances are that you
walked by one today. The new influencers is ‘The Every(wo)man.’
According to Mark, you can identify who is influential in a variety of ways
without Klout & Friends.

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Chapter 1 What’s an Influencer?Who Are They?
• Are they writing meaningful content?
• Are they providing consistent engagement?
• Do they have a relevant audience?
• KEY Does their content MOVE (shared, commented on, etc.)?
Influencers can ebb and flow. Your next door neighbor may be consistently
influential about a topic today but the neighbor across the street may be
influential about a near and dear topic tomorrow. They are moving targets but
the payoffs can be substantial.
Consider Mark’s tale of Calvin Lee, an unmarried 42 year old who is painfully
shy and owns a design and brand strategy company in Los Angeles. Oh yeah, he
posts over 200 times a year and has over 80,000 followers on Twitter. Calvin is
active online, authentic, and has developed a large and loyal following of folks
who likes what he has to say and moves his content.
Some groups you may have heard of – Audi, House of Blues, South by Southwest
– have provided Calvin with cars to live with for a while, concert access, trips etc.
because they know that he’ll create tons of content (pictures, videos, blog posts,
tweets, etc.) and they’ll gain access to his followers. Win. Win.
How do you find your Calvin? Research, listen, and identify folks who have the
RITE content (relevant, interesting, timely, entertaining) that resonates well with
audiences relevant to you. And when you see your neighbor and you give that
friendly wave, just ask yourself…..“Influencer?”

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Mass & Niche: A Deadly Combo
By Chad Lio, Digital Marketing Manager, The Hoffman Agency
It’s an age-old marketing question that must be re-imagined for social media: do
you publish content for the masses or target a specific niche that provides the
most value to your brand? The truthful answer is both. But how do you go about
this, while still promoting growth in your online community? Let’s break down
each market.
Mass Media
Numbers don’t lie in social media. It’s inevitable that a potential subscriber/fan/
follower will look at your brand’s fan base to help them decide whether to like,
follow or subscribe to your brand. As much interest as they may have in your
brand, the fact that you have a limited initial following may deter them – and,
therefore, become a hindrance to your brand’s mass visibility.
Benefit: Generating content for the masses gives you a wide-open approach.
Your content will more than likely connect with fans that you never knew were
out there. You remove your brand’s limitations by introducing yourself to a large
community base. Publishing to such a large crowd, you’re bound to accumulate
fans specific to your brand in a given social media platform.
Drawback: When marketing to the masses you may spread yourself too thin.
Your brand contributes hours upon hours of creative and passionate content to
share with the world, but let’s face it: a lot of the world is not interested. Is it
worth the expense, time and energy to create content when much of it will be
ineffective by falling on “deaf ears”? Is it useful to publish content to markets
that are not specific to your brand or your location?
Niche Media
What’s a better way to promote your message than connecting with the
community that appreciates it the most? Although relatively smaller in

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numbers, you want the biggest advocates on your side marketing your brand.
They engage, they influence others; but most importantly, they are loyal.
Benefit: You have a truly passionate online community. They consistently voice
their opinions of what your brand can change or achieve more efficiently. They
have no problem taking the time to share and spread the reason why you
created your brand.
Drawback: Although the loyalty will always be present, you tend to appear small,
thus not as influential as major brands. Brands that market to the major masses
may not grow a community that is as passionate, but their visibility becomes
a catalyst for large numbers of impressions.The larger you become, the more
opportunities your brand has to become “the top dog.”
How to use both for a successful community
Often, building a community starts with mass media. As you publish engaging
content to the masses, keep note of specific fans/followers/subscribers that
consistently engage and share your content. Create a separate list of these
advocates – it will eventually evolve into your niche market. Once your numbers are
significant enough that they will increase organically, create an advocacy campaign
for your niche market.These can be special offers, exclusive content, or anything
that reassures that they are part of something special and should be appreciated.
You’ll find that balancing the two markets will drive greater growth than would
be possible by catering only to mass media or niche media.

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The Evolution of the 800 lb Gorilla
By Todd Price, Director of Business Development, Yellow Dux
On June 29, 2012, the up-and-coming rock band Dirty Americans headlined
Michigan’s “Bike Fest on the Grand”festival. The next day, 1980s rock god Skid
Row closed out the festival. How is it possible that a rock group you probably
never heard of can share the same stage with a band that has sold out arenas
and made three multiplatinum records?
The answer lies in that music, like social media, revolves around consistently
delivering fresh content that is relevant and valuable to your audience.
While the story of these bands is nothing new (one on the way up and one on
the way down), the parallel between their experiences and the social media
landscape is striking. In social media, someone with high name recognition but
little substance can be matched or outweighed by a niche influencer whose
frequent and relevant words on certain subjects carry the discussion topic
forward at an alarming pace. For example:
• Rush Limbaugh hosts a nationwide radio show, authors several books and
does numerous TV spots. Twitter followers = 232,411.
• Maria Popova filters web stories and creates a daily digest for all relevant
items in the Internet world. Twitter followers = 196,235.
• Justin Verlander is the reigning MLB American League MVP from 2011
and doesn’t engage much with social media. Total Facebook Likes = 3,176.
• John Axford is a middle reliever pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers who
consistently uses social media to reach out to fans. Total Facebook Likes =
13,973
It’s easy to see that social media is changing the nature of the 800-pound gorilla.
In fact, there aren’t many of those left. Due to social media, the old notion of the

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megastar – or mega brand – is being replaced by a larger number of 300-pound
gorillas who are building solid followings by creating good content, and then
maintaining their name and their mark by continuing to provide value on a
consistent, long-term basis.
Dwayne Johnson (also known as the Rock of WWE wrestling fame) has said you
should only put forth items of value in social media. To become a leader in your
field, you must continuously provide value and consistently good information
on the topics you enjoy. If you just fill the air with random posts or promotional
information bits, your message will eventually fade into the background noise,
unnoticed.
Try to follow comedian Dane Cook for a week and time yourself when your refresh
button explodes. As someone who tweets EVERYTHING he does, the idea of
bringing value to the audience is lost.Think of your social media as an announcer
at Kmart. If you keep making irrelevant announcements, everyone will eventually
tune you out. By bringing forth value in what you post, your message will
eventually get you from passive engagement to active engagement to influencer
in the social media realm which you hope to dominate.
To bring the message home, let’s go back to music. Jimmy Buffett released his
first nine albums during the 1970s. But he also released four new studio albums,
10 live albums and two compilation albums all spread over the last 10 years.
Twitter followers = 605,364.

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Listening Equals Influence
By Sebastian Rusk, CEO/Founder, SocialBuzzTv.com
Listening seems to be almost non-existent in today’s marketplace. Sadly, many
brands have been misled into believing that social media platforms exist as an
advertising tool. Brands believe they can pitch their product and shove their
message down consumers’throats. The reality is, “push”strategy is yesterday’s
news; social media makes it all about “pull.”
So how does a brand focus on the pull of its audience? It starts with something
we should have been taught when young: listening. The simple idea of listening
to your customer gives them a voice. Social media gives your consumers an
outlet to let their emotions fly. Whether they love your brand, hate your brand
or feel anything in between, they turn to social media to express it. This in turn
allows you to better understand your brand.
The sales cycle has been completely reversed now that word-of-mouth
popularity is at an all-time high. From a business standpoint, social media
platforms enable you to achieve three objectives. The first is to build an online
community where you don’t currently have a presence. The second is to provide
that audience with valuable, tangible content and information. The third (and
perhaps most valuable to your brand) is to engage with the community and get
a true sense of what THEY want. This is the time and place to forget about your
needs; it is about the customer. Once you become the “go to”source for your
audience they will, by default, want to do business with you because you have

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provided them with valuable information. They know you genuinely care about
them and what they think – that goes a long way.
All of this is causing a rapid shift in the meaning of “influencer”today.
Influencers used to be celebrities – those in the stardom spotlight. Now,
influence is moving to those online personalities with a large following.
Bloggers and YouTube stars, etc., now have the power. All of these “modern day”
influencers have one thing in common: they listen! They don’t try to pitch or
come up with some transparent strategy to sell an audience. These influencers
care about what their community wants and says, to which they respond
accordingly and their success shows.
The most exciting part about this amazing shift is that anyone can become
an influencer. Why? Because we are all capable of listening and sharing our
passions. Most times our passion becomes the brand. There has never been an
easier time to start a business or build a brand because it is so easy to figure out
what the community wants. The online tools available to us today didn’t exist
eight years ago, but today they are in abundance and many are free. The only
thing left to do is to take advantage of them.
Utilizing the simple idea of listening allows your brand to realize and embrace
the fact that it’s not about you or what you want to tell the customer, but rather
about what THEY want. Once you clearly understand what your customer wants
and make sure they get it, you are now influencing them. You have now added
them to your voluntary army of ambassadors for your brand, not because you
asked them to, or persuaded them to, but because you listened. You showed
them how much you genuinely care, and they chose to do business with you.
Want to be an influencer? Start listening.

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Chapter 2
Gauging Influence
Choosing the Right Influencer
By: Noemi Pollack, Founder and CEO of The Pollack PR Marketing Group
Nielsen reported recently that consumers trust “real friends”and “virtual strangers”
over newspapers,TV, magazines or ads.1
This trend, coupled with the increased
value of third-party endorsements and positive word of mouth, demonstrates a
fundamental need to earn trustworthy endorsements from influencers in today’s
increasingly consumer-driven environment.The challenge for brands, however, is
not just finding an influencer – it’s finding the right influencer.
The brand Influencer waters must be carefully navigated because there are risks
in engaging them. Brands should consider three important qualifications: how
much influence the influencer has, whether or not he or she influences the right
target audience and, finally, the degree to which an influencer is consistent with
the brand image. If an influencer is speaking to the wrong audience or their
personality conflicts with your brand, then trusted consumer advocacy will not
be effectively earned.
Measuring Influence
Influence is a commonly used word with a very broad definition.Without dissecting
the etymology of the word, suffice to say it refers to the act of compelling someone
(or a group of people) to a particular opinion or behavior. In other words, a
successful influencer would be one who can incite others into converting, whether
that means purchasing a product/service or agreeing with an idea.

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Chapter 2 Gauging Inflluence
Since influence is more than merely being heard, one must look beyond
metrics such as audience size, friends/fans/followers, website visitations and
impressions. There should certainly be a baseline expectation of a person’s
network size, but that should not be the only metric. Influencers should be
weighed more in the quality of interactions they have with their audience, the
amount of responses they earn with their interactions and, perhaps most telling,
the evidence of positive conversions.
For example, looking at the number of Facebook friends is not enough. Do the
friends interact and engage with the influencer? How many comments/likes
does an influencer produce with each post? Is there evidence of conversations
in which the influencer has swayed the opinions and/or behavior of audience
members? This information can be found through an influencer’s blog, through
Twitter mentions and any other platform on which he or she is active.
Qualifying the Influencer’s Audience
Determining whether or not a person is influential is not enough, alone.Your
brand advocate could have sway over millions of people all over the globe, but if
those people are not the right people for your brand, that influencer may as well be
shouting in a vacuum as far as you are concerned. Age-old market research tactics
can ensure that the right person is saying the right message to the right audience.
Vetting a potential influencer’s audience need not be time-extensive and costly.
One can simply research his or her online network and view their profiles. What
types of organizations do they like/follow? Do they respond in a positive way to
brand messages similar to yours? Would they buy your product or be influenced
by your ideas? The influencer’s offline audience can be researched as well. What
organizations is the influencer involved with? Do their affiliations and offline

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activities support or conflict with your target audience? If you had the budget,
would you pay to advertise to this influencer’s audience?
Aligning Personalities
If you are engaging an influencer to become a brand advocate, or even if you
are paying them to be, be clear that on many levels you are relinquishing
control of your brand to this person. Therefore, it is paramount that the
influencer personality and the brand personality be aligned. If the influencer’s
communication style, general personality or personal opinions greatly conflict
with your brand, then you could have tremendous exposure and heightened risk
of negative word of mouth.
In essence, influencers behave as brand spokespeople – but unlike real
spokespeople, brands don’t have direct control over their message. So a brand
should be comfortable with an influencer’s voice, style and public positioning.
In a Nutshell
When actively pursuing influencers, take the time to gauge their level of
influence, as well as their target audience and public persona. When there is a
perfect match, then brand advocacy is effective and far-reaching.
1.
Nielsenwire. 2009. “Global Advertising: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual
Strangers the Most.“ Retrieved from http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/
global-advertising-consumers-trust-real-friends-and-virtual-strangers-the-most/
Managing Your Social Brand and Optimizing
Your Score
By: Yael Even-Levy, PhD, Instructional Design Technologies Manager,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP
Social media is here to stay; it is no longer perceived as a passing trend. Many
companies are using social media both internally and externally to improve their

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outreach and external reputation, and many have teams that monitor and
evaluate its impact on their corporate brand (e.g., public online identity). The
same concerns that companies have about their brand apply to individuals as
well. After all, unless you assess your efforts, how will you know if your
messaging is effective and impactful?
Here we focus on you, the individual, and provide you with best practices
for measuring your influence and optimizing your social brand. All tools
mentioned here are free, and you do not need to be a social media guru or a
programmer to use them.
Utilizing Social Media Analytics
The most useful social media analysis tools go beyond number of followers,
likes or page views to validate that your messaging is working by measuring
your online influence.
The tool PeerIndex uses algorithms to measure the speed with which you
find and share content on any specific topic, and the volume of your sharing
on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. It gives a total
score ranging between 0-100 based on three key components: your Authority,
Audience and Activity. If your content is re-tweeted or commented on a lot
by others, for example, your Authority score will be high. A total score of 20
is average. A score of 40 or above is high to very high. You can influence your
score by sharing more content and with greater velocity, but you have to keep it
relevant and high-value in order to get comments and re-tweets. Keep in mind
that many will not follow you if your score is low.
Another tool is Klout. It measures your influence based on your ability to drive
action on a scale of 1 to 100 by using data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

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and Foursquare. It measures how many people you influence (e.g., true reach),
how much you influence them (e.g., amplification) and how influential they
are (e.g., network score). In addition to your score, Klout provides you a score
analysis and visual graphs. Klout also offers perks and badges based on your
score. These are exclusive products, coupons, or experiences that you earn based
on your influence. Apparently, some influencers have earned perks like laptops
and airline tickets. If you’re using a Chrome browser, you can add Klout to your
Twitter account and view Klout scores next to names of friends and followers.
Optimizing Your Score
Improve your social media ranking by implementing three easy steps: validate,
improve and interact. When you validate, you unfollow those who do not follow
you back after a while. Unfollow those with very low peer index scores and
keep your inactive friends to a minimum. Use SocialBro to see who your news
followers are, and follow them back if their peer index is high or their profile is
similar to yours. Check “recent unfollows”and unfollow back if applicable.
When you are done validating, you are ready to improve your score by ensuring
that your friends with a low follow ratio are kept to a minimum. These are the
people that have very few followers. Keep your own follow ratio high so that
you’ll have more people following you than the number of people you follow. My
preference is to keep my ration as close as possible to 2:1, so for everyone I follow
I have two followers of my own.
Of course, none of this matters if you aren’t interacting with your friends
and followers and saying something worthwhile! To become a social media
influencer, ask yourself why should others listen to or follow me? It all comes
down to engagement and the quality of your posts or tweets. Post only
meaningful content, reply to questions and re-tweet tweets of others. Ask
questions, and make sure to respond to posts/questions by influential and
famous users that follow you. Also, add relevant hashtags (#), participate in
trending topics, create Twitter lists that focus on a specific topic. And above all,
have fun and enjoy it.

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The Three “V’s”and How You Can Use Them
By: Sudip Chakraborty, President/Founder, Xypress LLC
Brianna Harney, Data Analyst, Xypress LLC
While analytics – the practice of extracting meaning from data – can seem
overwhelming at first, its value is immeasurable when properly used. Analytics
can help you identify key influencers among people already in your network,
reveal an understanding of the behavior patterns of the groups that these
people influence – and allow you to build your marketing plans accordingly. The
well-known “three Vs”of big data analytics (volume, velocity and variety) can
help you do all this. They provide a highly valuable framework for evaluating,
identifying and ranking influencers in the social media world.
Volume
Start by capturing the volume, or quantity, of information provided by social
media users to identify influencers. The magnitude of material generated by
someone could be an indicator that this person is someone to whom others will
pay heed. For instance, with bloggers, take into consideration specific counts for
volume: how many posts they create per a certain time period, the number of
words in each of these posts and the amount of comments per post. Similarly,
for Twitter, capture total followers and tweets, retweets by followers and the
sum of interactions occurring with other followers. Using these numbers to
measure volume will provide insight as to which users are covering the most
breadth, and could potentially be influencers due to their high volume of posts,
tweets, and/or comments.

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Velocity
Volume alone, however, is not enough to determine if a user has substantial
influence with others. Consider the notion that, for example, Twitter-user A has
500 tweets and user B only 200. But A completed these tweets over six months’
time and B did so in one month. Therefore, A is tweeting at a rate of about 83
tweets per month compared to B’s 200 per month (a 41.5 % higher rate). This
example shows how velocity is also critical to your analysis.
Velocity is captured using rates of volume-over-time, such as the rate of blog
postings or tweets (as described above). By analyzing velocity for specific periods
over time (such as monthly over the course of six months or a year), these rates can
show whether a user’s volume production is accelerating, constant or decelerating.
Acceleration is ideal, though it’s important to keep in mind that acceleration is likely
to eventually plateau or even decrease even for the most influential users.
Finding users who have accelerated at a constant rate can help you identify ideal
influencer candidates, because these consistent users have a high likelihood of
gaining followers or commenters steadily over an extended period of time. High
velocity means new material is being produced constantly, which can translate
into a continuous increase in number of people influenced.
Variety
This final “V”is different than the previous two in the sense that higher volume
and velocity is always good but “more or less”variety is not essentially “good
or bad”– that depends on your marketing needs. For example, a potential
influencer who covers a wide variety of topics will likely impact a broader
range of people – ideal if you are planning to broaden your customer base. A
lack of variety, however, could mean the potential influencer is a specialist in a
particular area. Even though that person does not cover a wide array of topics,

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he/she could have extensive knowledge in one field that makes results in a
trusted source who influences others very deeply. So, when assessing the variety
of potential influencers, keep your objectives in mind to decide whether more or
less will be a greater asset to your marketing plan.
Verdict
Although this is not one of the “Vs”of data analysis, the verdict here is this:
to find influencers among people you already know you must analyze the
three “Vs”to identify social media users who have a high volume of material,
produced at a rather quick velocity and cover either a wide variety of topics or
concentrate on a topic of interest to your marketing needs. Once you find those
who meet your criteria, use the framework to evaluate and rank the influencers
in a way most applicable to your goals. For your objectives, volume (or reaching
the highest number of people) may be the key priority. Or, perhaps your goal
is to market to a broader customer segment, so variety is your top concern.
Regardless of your preference, rate the influencers by what you feel is essential
to your marketing campaign.
After you reach your “verdict,”you will have pinpointed the influencers among
people you know, thus opening up valuable marketing opportunities.
creating your perfect blend of influencers
A summary of PR Newswire’s Targeting Influencers in the Sea of Social Media video
Social media has taken the world of public relations in entirely new directions –
far beyond traditional media outreach and into new realms online. The ocean of
information and conversation gets deeper and deeper.
To navigate this sea of social media communicators need to focus on influence.
More specifically, you need to scale your brand and your brand messages to all
of the new breeds of influencers who are making waves in social media.
Who Are They? Which Ones Will Work Best for Your Brand?
Experts talk about the 1-9-90 rule of social media. It’s an important way to think
about the big, medium and small fish in the sea of information and influence
known as the social sphere.

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The Pros and Cons of Targeting Big, Medium and Small Influencers
The big influencers, the big fish – the 1s – are not hard to find. If you’ve been
targeting traditional media, you may already be on a first-name basis with some
of your biggest influencers as they have moved onto Facebook and Twitter.
The social influence scorekeepers have them on their radar. But, they’re harder
to engage, because everyone wants a piece of them. And while their reach could
be in the millions, that might not get you very far. Studies show that people turn
to their real friends, not the biggest influencers, when they are deciding, joining,
purchasing – in a word, actually acting on your messages.

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What’s more, the risk of targeting the biggest influencers can be high if they have
negative things to say about your brand, yet the potential reward is equally high.
The 9s are easier to engage than the biggest fish, and should be more influential in
your sphere. Many of the digitally born 9s are deeply knowledgeable about what
interests the people in their networks, and their devoted audiences know it.
However, the 9s are not always easy to find. Many social media monitoring tools
can help you identify them, but a bit of data digging is also required, as you’ll
likely uncover a few false positives along the way.
The 9s are equally influential in getting their audiences to act, and not act based
on their recommendations. But this risk does not necessarily eclipse the reward!
Establishing a connection with your 9s can give you access to a powerful group
of influencers – and the loyal audiences who follow them.
And what about the 90s? These small fish are really hard to identify. After all, we
are talking about real friends, and real friends of real friends.
They can be time-consuming to engage, and clearly, have a limited reach. Still,
small can be very powerful. Consumers like what other consumers have to say,
and that could mean a huge opportunity for you.

20
To reduce your risk of wasted time, start with the most valuable and easy-to-find
90s – the most active users in your own social sphere. – and make them your
superstars. As for cultivating additional 90s out there, being visible is key. By
giving these fish food for thought through active, ongoing communication, you
can help plant the seeds to grow these relationships and your time investment.
The fish in the social media sea are not created equal, but they all have value.
In the end, your own communications strategy and objectives will help your
formulate the right mix of influencers to target.
Your strategy will help you determine how to weigh the potential for quick
wins with medium influencers versus the long-term proposition of courting the
biggest influencers and how to consider the cost/benefit ratio of pursuing the
smallest fish. There are metrics and analytical tools that can help you calculate
all this and more.
Now, go fish!

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Chapter 3
Engaging Influencers
three essential rules for Influencer engagement
By: Ruth Fine, President, Social Icing, LLC
One of the first social media questions many companies ask is, “What kind of
content is appropriate to share on my social media profiles?” To answer this
question, you must first understand that one key to the success of any online
campaign is to consistently provide information that is relevant, up-to-date and
useful to your intended audience. That’s why successful online social media
campaigns follow three essential rules captured in these words: dialogue, value
and party – as in inclusion of third-party content.
Let’s discuss these three elements in detail.
1. Dialogue (vs. Monologue)
To be successful in your efforts, remember that communication is a two-way
street. To engage influencers, your social media presence should be engaging.
Posting tweets, status updates or other “monologue”communications should
be in proportion to dialogue actions such as re-tweets, mentions, shares
and comments. In other words, make sure each social channel offers multi-
dimensional communication.
If you spare effort in this area, your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts
can end up falling flat and looking spammy – a quality that any online brand
manager should seriously avoid. Remember, your social media channels are an
extension of your brand: make it count.

22
Chapter 3 Engaging Influencers
To start off on the right foot, consider what kind of information your subscriber
wants to know. For instance, if you’re a plastic surgeon, your audience may be
interested in makeup and other cosmetic products. In that case, you’ll want to
create your content around this topic, eventually branching out to other health
and beauty topics. If you’re an accountant, perhaps the latest financial news may
be interesting to your subscribers. Once you’ve identified the type of content
that makes sense for your subscribers, it’s time to share it. This is the surprisingly
easy part. A daily tip or suggestion, a comment on a recent news headline
or even a quote of the day can be a great way to get going. Start off small:
anywhere from one-to-four daily tweets, status updates or comments is all that
it takes to get your social media campaign up and running.
2. Value
The concept behind any social media campaign is to provide value for your
audience. For example, there must be an incentive for subscribers to follow or
like you online. Enter blogging, coupons and specials. Just like any other major
campaign, you’ll want to map out an editorial or marketing calendar for your
online communication strategy.
For instance, if your company sells children’s items, you’ll probably want to pencil
in an online special in the months of August and September just in time for
back-to-school. Or, if you’re a professional, consider offering a free consultation,
coupon or any other kind of special to your subscribers for liking your Facebook
page or for following you on Twitter. There is always something you can offer to
your audience that adds value.
Blog on relevant information that your audience will find useful. Keep current in
your industry and let people know what’s happening in your world. Adding your
spin or slice of advice to a hot topic in your industry not only creates authority,

23
but it adds value to the subscriber who is already interested in what you have
to say. And, hosting the blog on your website can also boost your website
performance in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). You never know who
will discover your blog post and become your latest customer or client.
3. Inclusion of third-party content
No subscriber wants to be bombarded with constant commercial messages
from your brand – that’s one reason why it’s essential to include third-party
content as part of your communication strategy. Third-party content refers to
articles, news stories, photos, videos or other multimedia sourced from websites
that do not belong to you.
For example, sharing a relevant article from the Wall Street Journal or the New
York Times – or any news source for that matter – is a great way to include
third-party content on your social media platforms. Not only will you retain
your existing audience, but your chances of growing your influence – and your
audience – also increase significantly. Pepper in an occasional article or video
and you’ll create the type of social media profile that subscribers look forward to
joining, in addition to upping your influencer engagement.
5 Ways to Build Strong Bonds with Social Media
Influencers
By: Margot Heiligman, Director of Solution Management, SAP
Five years ago, my role at SAP was business influencer marketing. We had a
three-pronged approach that worked soundly:
1. IDENTIFY the influencers who are involved in “deals”
2. ENGAGE influencers in engagement models which produce a two-way-
street relationship
3.
LEVERAGE influencers into marketing programs

24
This approach is still valid today, however, the opportunity that social media
influence brings extends beyond marketing. Today, social media monitoring
enables us to identify influencers on a topic, brand or product. It also provides
sales, marketing and service professionals ways to segment social engagement
into selling, marketing and serving actions, respectively.
Sales – Which influencer is the right person to support a prospect’s question
in a pre-sales scenario? An example: we had a prospect find us on Twitter and
ask if we knew of a reference customer who had the same needs and use of
our solution. A customer-influencer was perfectly suited to contribute in this
scenario, and we brought him into the conversation.
Marketing – An influencer who blogs and promotes content to a wide following
may be your best marketing influencer.
Customer Service – An influencer who is using your product and monitoring
for questions/issues may be the best to advocate and support you in an online
community. There are numerous examples of companies who do this very
well – such as giffgaff, the UK-based telecommunications company. Giffgaff’s
influencers handle nearly 100% of customer questions.
We engage with social-impact influencers and look (on a real time basis)
at which social channel conversations represent sales opportunities, which
constitute marketing content, nurturing, or offers and which represent
topics around customer service – such as product use questions or issues.
At SAP, we have deployed solutions to enable social selling – including SAP
Sales OnDemand – in order to bring collaborative selling to our own internal
“sales warriors.”To monitor for influencers and to engage customers who are
having conversations about using our solutions, we use SAP Social Customer
Engagement OnDemand. We are monitoring the conversations taking place and
benchmarking the way social influencers can have an impact.
Often, conversations around “finding”social media friendly influencers that
business customers or digital customers value segue into deciding which online
tools – like Klout or Kred – should be used to measure an influencer’s impact.
Individuals such as PR professionals, influencers, customers, prospects, marketers
and call center agents all play an influential role – they are creating conversations
and seeking thought leadership around your products and services.

25
So how do you build a lasting engagement with the right social media-friendly
business influencers relevant for your business customers today?
1. Participate in the trending topics – Check out Google Trends or
HashtagBattle to ensure that your topic has a voice in the social web and
that you sit squarely in the center of it with those who hold court there.
2.
Personalize – Ask yourself if the influencer content you are sharing is of
value to your customer. An influencer can be a customer, a social network,
an association, a news site and more. If their words are relevant and of
value to your customers – share.
3.
Engage proactively – Follow the social thought leaders’tweets and RSS
their blogs; use (at a minimum) Google Alerts or other social media
management tools to find relevancy and share insights.
4. Show that you are human – Don’t be afraid to add your initials or name
to tweets or social messages to influencers. Acknowledge mistakes and
correct them. Pick up the phone if you’ve built enough of a rapport.
Follow through.
5. Take the high road – Know that how you engage with influencers and
customers will define your reputation. Be trustworthy, and an exemplar
of openness.
Foster two-way-street relationships with socially engaged influencers. Do your
homework, using social tools to identify influencers who cover various segments.
Include influencers who are cross-topic and multichannel so that customers can
find them. Be sure to understand the strengths of the influencer: will they assist
in your sales approach?Will they promote your products, solutions and services of
value to their followers?Which influencers like to provide helpful tips, training or
answers to inquiries about your products?

26
Monitor, listen, moderate and foster engagement. Enable your cadre of social
influencers to participate in your social sales, social media marketing and social
customer service opportunities. And you’ll be ready to identify, engage and leverage
the next key social influencer who speaks to, and benefits, your customers.
10 Strategies for Ultimate Influencer Engagement
By: Steph Russell, Online Marketing Strategist, Pulled
Having a blog, whether it’s your main site or a complement, is a crucial part of
your online marketing to build relationships with your influencers and your
customers. In particular, it’s important that you play up your blog to your
influencers, who stand to make a big impact for you and spread the word about
your content to their loyal listeners.
By building a strategy around your blog to encourage and reward your
influencer’s engagement beyond basic content, you can begin to reap greater
brand recognition and build stronger relationships with your influencers.
10 Actionable Strategies for “Ultimate Influencer Engagement”
1. Blog or Forum Moderators
Find the influencers who are most active in your blog
comments or forum and invite them to moderate. They’ll help
get conversations started.
2. Guest Posts
If you know who your influencers are, offer them the chance to
guest post. You and your influencer will both walk away with
some great exposure and a new relationship.

27
3. Private Members or Press Area
Establish a private member area within your blog where
influencers can be the first to read new content, recent press
releases, hear about news before everyone else, look at new
products or even vote on the new products they like the most
and want to see featured.
4. Hire Them
Influencers usually know a good amount about your brand
or the industry/category that your brand falls into, so much
so that they are capable of making a big impact. In some
instances they may know more than you do. These are the
influencers that you want to be a part of your team … hire
them!
5. Opinions
Everyone has an opinion. If you find an influencer who
expresses an opinion about your product, acknowledge it
on your blog. Even a bad opinion can often be made right by
addressing the influencers’issue.
6. Photo spread
What better way to show off how great your product is than
by featuring its influencers? Do a photo spread on your blog of
influencers who are loyal fans using your product.
7. Product recommenders
Use your blog as a means to find, write about and recommend
similar products and services in your industry. Put together a
team of product recommenders made up of your influencers.
8. Testimonials
If you know that an influencer is a user of your product, ask
for a testimonial from them. Or better yet, ask everyone to
contribute reasons why they love your product and then
select a small number of your biggest influencers as feature
testimonials on your blog or website.

28
9. Blog columns
Send a special invite to an influencer and invite them to have
their own column on your blog.
10. Host an Event
Every one loves a party! Hosting a physical event for your biggest
influencers is actually a fabulous way to show your appreciation,
showcase new products, take part in seminars and network at
the same time.
These are only some of the many strategies you could use to build relationships and
engage with your top influencers. Above all, the relationship and trust you build
with your influencers is what will ultimately keep them talking about your brand.
How NOT to Pitch a Social Influencer
By Howard Greenstein, President, Harbrooke Group, Inc
I’m not really an influencer in my daily life, but I play one on the Internet. As a
blogger for over 10 years with a solid following on Twitter and a regular column
in a well-respected online site of a business magazine, I reach an audience
companies like to target.
I’ve also been on the blogger outreach side, trying to make friends and influence
people to get coverage for my own clients. While I have your attention and can
influence you a little bit, here’s a few rules on how NOT to pitch me and a few of
my influential friends.
HOW NOT TO PITCH RULE #1: Ignore My Content and Audience
I write a column for start-ups. It says so on the column masthead. At least once
a day I get a pitch from a company who wants me to cover a large enterprise

29
tool, a solution for “SMBs with 100-500 employees,”or a 27-year-old firm. If you
can’t be bothered to look at what your outreach target covers and what their
audience cares about, your outreach target probably won’t bother to reply.
Automated tools and lists are great, and they can really help give you guidance
and direction for an outreach target list. But once you’ve gotten that list, go to
the URLs, read the content and confirm that you have the right person. I do that
for every outreach campaign I work on. Does it shrink the list? Yes. Would I do it
any other way? No way.
According to Melanie Notkin, founder and president of Savvy Auntie, the lifestyle
brand designed for cool aunts, great-aunts, godmothers and all women who
love kids, “The most common DOA error a publicist makes is referring to my
brand as something mom-related, or pitching why moms will love the product
or service. Savvy Auntie is the lifestyle brand designed for the nearly 50 percent
of Americans who are not (yet) mothers but love the children in their lives. The
fact that the publicist did not care enough to learn what my brand is makes the
decision to not spend time caring about his or her client’s brand pretty easy.”
By the way, Melanie’s influence creds include being a “Top 100 Most Powerful
Woman on Twitter”and at the time of this interview, having over 80,000
Facebook fans.
HOW NOT TO PITCH RULE #2: Assume I Will Do What You Ask, The Way
You Ask, When You Want It Done
Stefanie Michaels, CEO of Adventure Girl Holdings, Inc. (known to her 1.5 million
Twitter followers as @AdventureGirl), targets an audience that is all things
lifestyle, with a heavy lean on travel. She points out that, “PR people assume
that you will automatically tweet, share, write about their clients.”What’s the
worst pitch she’s ever received? “I had a company send me a press release with
the tweet they want out there (complete with hashtag) in their header, then
throughout the content. It’s like begging, a sign of desperation and a total
turnoff. We finally have our own voice to use as individuals, so don’t put words
in our mouths – let us use the content you send out, and come up with our own
way to say it. That is, if we even want to, after a pitch like that.”

30
Notkin adds, “Any pitch that is not actually editorial but promotional and
expects me as a publisher to do it free of charge is a bad pitch. When those
pitches come from billion-dollar businesses, they are among the worst. Why
would I spend time promoting a brand’s sweepstakes free of charge? I am a
publisher first, editor second. I did not build a highly targeted and influential
audience of PANKs® (Professional Aunts No Kids) with discretionary income
and time relative to moms, to promote products and services free of charge –
especially when there is no editorial connection between the product and my
audience. With the exception of toys, I do not assign writers to write content
about random products for sale.”
HOW NOT TO PITCH RULE #3: Build Influence Not Relationships
The best pitches come to me from communications professionals and company
leaders who have created relationships with me because they know they’re
providing value to my audience – not feeding me stories. They don’t seek to
influence as much as to enlighten. The content they pitch relates to the things
start-ups need to know to improve. That makes them valuable allies, not
influence peddlers.
Notkin’s take on this: “Influence is about relationships. Brands are about
promise. The two work seamlessly well together. Invest in the equilibrium and
the world will go ‘round.”As Michaels notes about the way she communicates
online, “Stop ‘seeking to influence’– just be honest in your thoughts and what
you like, and share as if you’re talking to a friend, find your passion and have
your own voice. After all, (and thanks to my heroes – the founders of Twitter), we
have one, so use it. For companies: be real people, not machines, listen to your
consumer, respond and don’t be afraid to misstep, that makes you human.”

31
Twitter as a Luxury Marketing
Tool to Reach Influencers
By: Megan Sterritt, KWE Partners, Principal Director of Account Services
With continuous discussions of a sluggish US economy in 2011 and media
portrayal of Mexico as an unsafe destination for travelers, Mexico’s tourism
industry suffered a blow. The luxury sector was hit especially hard as many
consumers found it difficult to justify nonessential travel.
After developing a “personalized luxury”marketing concept and a series of mini
indulgences, Marquis Los Cabos Resort in Mexico, recipient of the AAA Four
Diamond and member of Leading Hotels of the World, and KWE Partners, the
resort’s agency of record, needed to successfully launch the campaign, designed
to appeal the importance of value to the wealthy.
Harnessing the “know, like, trust”of industry social media influencers plays an
integral part in launching campaigns and disseminating news to consumers.
One of the main objectives of any campaign is to reinforce the resort’s luxury
image. This reinforcement is vital to the continued success of a luxury brand.
Support for this luxury image can be garnered from partnering with other
brands of a similar cachet as well as tapping into individual influencers. Twitter
users tend to skew towards educated, upper income individuals, the very groups
that luxury brands intend to entice. It is important to target these individuals,
and essentially go where customers are. In today’s social-media world,
leveraging the current Twitter craze was essential in order to kick-start social
media buzz about Marquis Los Cabos’personalized luxury approach, as well as
its new mini-indulgences concept. Another main objective to the team was to
increase the number of individuals following Marquis Los Cabos in advance of
scheduled Twitter flash sales. Finally, the team needed to focus on shedding a
positive light on Mexican luxury tourism, cognizant that a large part of Marquis

32
Los Cabos’success relies on the strengthening of Mexico’s reputation as a safe
destination among social media influencers in the travel industry.
So what did KWE Partners do for their client, Marquis Los Cabos, in order
to achieve the aforementioned goals?
• Initiated an international ‘Tweet Up’event for Travelers’Night In (#TNI)
– a fast-paced Tweetchat of travel experts and avid travelers. The
community responds to the questions, sharing experiences, ideas and
new strategies.
• Themed the event as a “Mini-Indulgences”remote #TNI weekend at
Marquis Los Cabos, inviting top Twitter influencers with large followings
to give the event maximum credibility and create a compelling reason for
#TNI participants to be particularly drawn to that week’s #TNI
•
Created a series of events for influencers to generate more coverage and
highlight the hotel’s different indulgences. Events ranged from private
shopping tour of sponsor Luxury Avenue Los Cabos and treatments
from the mini spa indulgence menu to a fine leather passport cover
from sponsor Hartmann luggage. A sample of the resort’s famed $1,000
Tequilas Premium Clase Azul tequila popsicle with gold flakes, considered
the world’s most expensive tequila pop (a KWE “invention”) was delivered
during #TNI to maximize impressions
• Secured other luxury brands as co-sponsors, to benefit from their halo
and contribute to added chat content – Virgin America, Hartmann
Luggage, Luxury Avenue Los Cabos
•
Built Twitter buzz before and during the #TNI by
»
» Encouraged Tweetup participants to tweet about their excitement
about visiting the resort before the event
»
» Encouraged participants to post images of the resort and its
amenities before and after the event to keep buzz levels up
•
Formulated 10 #TNI questions for tweeting travelers around the globe,
including:
»
» Favorite hotel amenity
»
» Most impressive hotel service

33
»
»
Fantasy travel experiences
• Steered #TNI discussions around the topic that Mexico as a safe and
family-friendly vacation destination and Marquis Los Cabos as the
premier resort for affordable indulgences
•
Created industry research/intelligent PR angles for print media after the
Tweetup to generate offline media coverage
Overall, the #TNITweetup was a great success! During the #TNITweetup, over 14
million impressions were cast, corresponding to 1.4 million+ unique impressions,
a record-breaking number for the #TNITweetup. Close to 4,500 tweets were sent
during the 90 minute event.This reinforced Marquis Los Cabos’luxury brand, and
generated positive social media buzz surrounding the resort, as well as successfully
launched the resort’s customized luxury marketing program. Capitalizing on
Twitter influencers reach, and luxury brands’cache proved to be an effective way to
strengthen Mexico’s reputation as a safe and family-friendly destination.
The Conversation is the Platform
By: Christy Belden, VP of Media + Marketing, LeapFrog Interactive
In the digital space, if a conversation can be had, a social media platform
exists. As marketers, we need to be a part of the conversation to help facilitate
brand engagement. Capturing where and when these conservations take place
is a challenge.
Determining a social media platform is a crucial step in developing your social
media strategy. Facebook has moved from a college-only platform to one you
could almost call “mass (social) media.”This may work for some brands, but the
cost of entry into Facebook is getting higher and higher, with a need for more

34
resources and content. Yet having only a Facebook presence may not be the right
social media strategy for your brand.
Social media platforms such as Pinterest and Path are having success among
social media users because they offer a different experience than Facebook. Even
Twitter, which traditionally has taken a backseat to Facebook, is experiencing
more rapid growth of late.
What this tells us is that consumers are looking for a multitude of online
experiences. Creating a social media strategy around a single platform will likely
alienate customers, miss customers or not engage with them in the way they
want. Worse, it will do all of the above. A multi-channel social media platform
strategy will help create meaningful engagement points with consumers and
lead to greater ROI.
With the many conversations occurring, assessing the effectiveness of social
media platforms at reaching your target audience can direct you to maximize
your efforts. In choosing your social media platforms, the following questions
will help you determine which are best for your brand.
What are the business goals you want to accomplish by using social media?
It must be a priority to understand why you are engaging in the social media
space. Social media is valued as low cost or even free. However, there are a
considerable amount of hours and resources involved in effectively executing
a social media strategy. Many companies have chased trending, “hot”social
media platforms without a clear understanding of their expectations from the
engagement. Thus, when the platform does not perform the channel is deemed
unworthy. Understanding the business’goals for social media will help steer you
in determining the right platforms.

35
Who is your audience and where do they “live”in social media?
Understanding who your audience is, and where they are currently engaged
online will impact your social media platform selection. If you want to reach
Millennials, Twitter may be the platform to use. Women 55+ are the largest
growing segment on Facebook, whereas women 18-34 dominate activity on
Pinterest. Video sharing platforms such as YouTube, Metacafe or Vimeo are good
sources for reaching the ever-elusive male 18-34 audience. LinkedIn is good for
reaching B2B. Whatever your target audience, understanding where they are in
the social media space will dictate social media platform adoption.
What type of content does your audience respond to?
Social media allows a plethora of content types to be distributed and
consumed by audiences. Content types can vary from a white paper to a
blog to a 140-character tweet, or from a picture to an infographic to a video.
Understanding the content affinity of your target audiences will help you
navigate the social media waters.
Which platforms can support your content needs?
Upon review of what types of content your audience is engaging with, a review of
the capabilities of the platforms is a must. If your audience values video, a platform
likeTwitter would not be the best option. If you have fans who are heavily invested
in the brand and discuss the brand at length, then a forum may be the best
option to house those in-depth conversations. Social media platforms cannot be
everything to everyone so choose the best one to fit the expected content.
What are your resource capabilities?
An honest assessment of the skill set and time it will take to execute on your social
media platform is important. Some platforms allow you to schedule content. If
you are pushing out a significant amount of content, then this may help manage
the flow. Other platforms are image-heavy and require photography and creative
assets. Writing needs also will vary depending upon the platform. In addition, staff
or a third-party vendor should understand the platform and the appropriate ways

36
to interact with customers on it. For example, it is commonplace to use hashtags
onTwitter but not appropriate in Facebook.
What is your burden of proof?
Some social media platforms have evolved to include proprietary analytics,
whereas others do not offer, or have very limited, analytics insight. If your
organization is data driven, this may drive which social media platform is
adopted. Understanding what the platform can provide ahead of time will go a
long way to determine the success of the social media strategy.
If you are fortunate and have a big enough staff or outside vendor to assist you,
then you have the capabilities to be in the “Big 4 Networks”(Facebook, Twitter,
Google+, LinkedIn) and even extend outside into niche platforms. However,
companies with limited resources may be forced to choose fewer platforms.
Analysis and planning of your needs will lead you down the correct path.
These questions should not appear new. They are similar to, if not the same
as, the questions traditional media has been asking for many years. Traditional
media buyers and planners have had to select from different radio stations, TV
outlets and various print publications. It is the same process in selecting social
media platforms. We must tackle social media with the same due diligence we
apply to traditional media.
A social media platform exists for every audience. A true analysis, using the
criteria above, will help you determine your needs and allow you to make the
best decision for your business.

37
Chapter 4
Turning Influence Into Brand Advocacy
How to Make an Influencer Want to Sing Your Tune
By Anne-Marie Kovacs, Principal, BOOMbox Network
Here’s the must-ask question if you are going to work – successfully – with
influential bloggers: “What’s in it for the Influencer?”
Bloggers, once seen as media pioneers, vocal consumers, freelancers and
experimenters are now media darlings, valuable influencers and thought
leaders. But even with their new position as “influencers,”bloggers (unlike
traditionally paid journalists) don’t have a research team or other infrastructure
to support them. And, until they get to the magic page view volumes that
generate advertising revenue, most are not paid for the writing that earned
them their influence and loyal followership. They depend on their own ingenuity,
time, objectivity, opinions and passions to get a story published. That is what
creates the authenticity their readers love and trust. This is the environment that
a top brand wants to be a part of.
My Recommendations for Engaging with Such Influential Bloggers
Make it personal: You’ve read a lot about this already. Ironically, even in the
age of Twitter and Tumblr, you want to go the old-fashioned route. It’s about
relationship building. This means, no more generic blanket emails. It means
doing your homework to know who you are talking to and why. It means picking
up the phone or setting up a meeting and talking live. Unless you care enough to
take the time to reach out to these influencers directly and in a personal manner,
why should they care to talk about your brand?

38
Chapter 4 Turning Influence Into Brand Advocacy
Make it worth their time – monetize the relationship: Offer paid compensation.
Standard rates now range from $25 to $150 per blog post. The most valuable
bloggers will not accept anything below $100. Anything less is not worth the
time, research and care it takes to compose a quality, relevant and appropriate
blog post. (Note on samples: That “room freshener”sample is research material,
not compensation! Unless the product or service has a high retail price point
($150 and above), consider free samples as perks at best.)
Make them feel privileged: Create opportunities for your selected influencers
to be the first to know – about new products, new features, new anything!
Consider VIP-type events. These can be a very successful way to introduce
influencers to your brand AND provide them with a meaningful experience, a
unique brand story to tell and remember.
Make it long-term: Take the time to build the relationship and maintain it on a
long-term basis. If this influencer was important enough for that one post you
needed, you’ll want to maintain that relationship for all your future updates,
news and launches.
Make it easy: That means providing as much background information as
possible to save influencers hours of research and ensuring that they will have
the correct info and data. Make it easy to read, easy to find and relevant.
Make it reciprocal: You want influencers to promote something of yours? They’re
in business, too. How can you help promote them, help them build their network
and business reputation? That is mutual value and it provides more incentive
for influencers to want to work with you. But, you must first understand
their professional goals. Consider your best influencers as spokespersons or
ambassadors.
Make them your eyes and ears: Influencers have their ears to the ground and
their fingers on the pulse of their own areas of specialty. You’re paying many

39
thousands of dollars to research your customers, so throwing a few questions
to your ambassadors is a really inexpensive way to get information and insight.
Hire them to collaborate on market research or in developing customer-facing
projects or events.
We are in a communications era where messages spread by influencers hold a
resonance and credibility that traditional advertising does not. And, depending
on the channel, these messages will have long tails and a long shelf life. In fact,
a blog post lovingly dedicated to your brand or product may have a perennial
online presence. With the simple steps mentioned above, you can create
goodwill and encourage your chosen influencers to be enthusiastic and eager to
sing your brand’s praises.
Turning Influencers Into Your Brand’s Voice
By: Tom Bishop, Director of Marketing and Communications,
KnowledgeVision Systems, Inc.
After several months of experimenting with social media and learning the best
practices, you’re finally doing everything right on your brand’s social pages.
You’re posting regular updates and videos, creating conversations and gaining
followers. Your audience is full of influential people who share your posts and
help your social presence expand. You’re a social leader, the kind we’re all trying
to emulate. Congratulations! You’re ready for the next step: driving revenue.
Unfortunately, this is the step where most brands stumble.
The problem at this stage goes beyond the fact that social media is different
than every other trackable marketing activity you can pursue. It’s that the
difference is both subtle and profound and, therefore, difficult to grasp and
implement. In social media, natural behavior is paramount. This changes
everything about your marketing approach. Let me break it down this way:

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• With most branding avenues, you are trying to use an activity to drive a
specific behavior.
• With social media, you use natural behavior to drive buying activity.
Let’s say you sell backpacks. When I buy a backpack, I actively search, study and
explore the options available to me, using whatever resources I can find. Most
of those resources are created by the brands themselves, and they are designed
to funnel my research activity toward a purchase by creating a specific path that
ends at their shopping cart.
But on a social platform, where I have been talking about backpacks with others,
I might receive a shared link from a friend who is a fan of your brand. It is my
choice whether to check out the link. In this case you are not driving my friend’s
behavior or mine; you are offering a resource (the link my friend is sharing) that
meets the needs of our current natural behavior.
So my friend is your influencer, and what you’re trying to do is turn his natural
sharing behavior into my activity path. Thus the first profound difference in
social media is that influencers are not necessarily the targeted customers.
Instead of trying to sell, you’re trying to lower the threshold and sweeten the
incentive for my friend to share your link with me.
Since you’re doing everything right, you already know my friend is an influencer
and you now know that he’s shared a link with me. How can you encourage him
to keep influencing, and me to convert to a customer?
Let’s Establish a Few Ground Rules
1. The influencer is not necessarily the customer. This means you must
appeal to the differing needs of two people, not just one.
2. It is easier to keep an existing customer than gain a new one. This means
my friend may need less of an incentive than I will.

41
3. On a social platform, I’m not actively seeking to buy, but I am following
up on my friend’s share because it’s in the moment.
4. Your goal is not to make a sale today, it’s to make me an influencer.
That’s right, the goal on a social network is to attract me to your brand through
my influencers. It is widely believed that the reason display advertisements on
social platforms don’t work very well is that the behavior is different: shopping is
active, while social networking is passive. As a brand, you’re best approach is to
get noticed by me, by appealing to my friends for a little help.
Key Ways to Use Natural Social Behavior to Drive Activity
Gamification Rewards
Game rewards are not about discounts or giveaways; they
appeal to a user’s interest in raising his own credibility.
Influencers are influencers because they like to be needed,
so give my friend points or let him unlock levels the more he
shares your posts. You can highlight people who reach certain
levels on your own page. You can share their photos, posts and
comments. They can unlock and post icons that indicate they
have expert knowledge of your product.
Team Programs
Unlike “Refer-A-Friend”campaigns, where you reward
influencers who send you names you will manage in a central
database, a team system lets your influencers manage their
own referrals. Social media is all about giving the users control,
so encouraging them to build and lead a team is perfect for
social platforms. Many charity organizations manage their
fundraising events this way, and if you think about it, they are
at the forefront of using influential supporters to generate
interest using the team model.

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Exclusive Memberships
Enable certain people to become part of exclusive programs,
where you use email to send them updates about your
company, pre-release software, advance promotions and
event passes. Communications to these people are not about
discounts, since the primary draw is how good it feels to be an
influencer. The goal is to invite them to get their friends into
the member group so they can become insiders too.
Discount Programs
Stay away. I mean it. Discounts are great for shoppers who have
actively searched and are nearing the end of the sale process,
but need a nudge to click “Confirm Purchase.”With social
media, you are spreading the word about the value of your
brand and inviting people to be associated with it. That brand
association is meant to last; discounts are best for driving a
single sale, not a long-term relationship.
Brand Advocates (a.k.a. Rock Stars)
This kind of program is for very special people who are influential
beyond the realm of social media.These are people who regularly
blog, speak at events and conferences and entertain.The model
here is that you are sponsoring them in return for touting your
brand in the popular venues they operate in. For sponsored
advocates, it often means giving them free or deeply discounted
products and services. Above, I mentioned staying away from
discounts – and I still mean it. So these should be people who are
already deeply committed fans of your brand, and who meet a
certain threshold of popularity.They are the people everyone in
your industry has heard of and respects.
The guiding principle behind all of the above is that the purpose of influencers is
to bring more people to your brand, and the point of making people influencers
is to raise the likelihood of a sale when the opportunity arises. Who is more likely
to buy from you when they decide to actively make a purchase? Those who have

43
never heard of you, those whose friends told them about you or those who have
created a relationship with you?
Social media contains a massive population of people who have freely given a
lot of information to businesses, whether they like it or not; 900 million people
are on Facebook alone. You can’t communicate your brand’s value to all of them
without a lot of help. Finding influencers and appealing to them is not only a
great way to build your brand on the web today; it’s the only way.
Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy for
Influencer Engagement
By: Lee Anne Forbes, Marketing Manager, Micro Strategies
Once you have identified your targeted group(s) of influencers, it’s time to roll
out your message-delivery platforms, messaging, mechanisms and timelines –
in other words, a marketing plan for each new campaign or event. You may have
defined several groups or types of influencers and they may each require a
different set of messages, timing and platforms.
For example, if your influencer is an IT coder – let’s call him Fred – and you want
to let Fred know that your company has just released code updates, there are
multiple ways to get your message out to him and encourage him to share it.
You may even release the code to Fred ahead of time, if he promises to test it and
blog and tweet about his experience with it, and the benefits he has found. You
can have a whole group of “Freds”do the same thing.
Strategic Outreach
Outreach can include email to Fred; you can post to the blogs that he reads, you
can tweet to the accounts that he follows, you can update your website, LinkedIn
and Facebook pages. You can even deliver location-based marketing (LBM)
incentives for Fred to share the fact that the new code has been released. You can
re-tweet within reason and rework the messaging on various platforms to make

44
sure Fred (and the like band of merry men and women) has gotten the message.
You can invite Fred via Facebook and Linkedin and emails and your website to an
onsite “New Code Release Demo Event”and use an LBM tool like FourSquare to
incent Fred and friends to tweet their location and activities while at your event.
You can highlight customers who contributed to the new release. Highlight
them on your blog, in press releases, on your website and in your tweets.
“ABC Company wishes to thank Fred from DEFG Company for his insightful
suggestions that helped shape our latest code release.”
Just as traditional marketing communications programs rely on more than
one platform to reach audiences and deliver the correct messaging multiple
times, so too the social media strategy you employ should incorporate a variety
of message structures and platforms. You will note over time which platforms
your favored users frequent and on which ones they “lurk.”Speak to the users
and the lurkers and incent them to add their voices. The users may engage in
conversation with you, the lurkers may not.
YouTube provides a great way to showcase Fred and the group at your demo
event, testing the code and sharing snippets of their excitement about the new
release. The video link can be tweeted, blogged, put on websites – and so on.
The possibilities for engaging your influencers and encouraging them to spread
the word are endless. All you need is some newsworthy activities and an
ongoing, evolving plan!

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The Cadence of Influence
By: Vatsala Isaac, Independent Marketing Consultant
Recently, I’ve become something of a masochist. I get thrashed every weekend
– on the squash court, by my husband. New to the game, I struggle to keep pace
with my uber-competitive instructor. The advice flows fast and free, until it
reaches a deafening crescendo of the phrases, “Steal the T, be the T, return to the
T.”For the uninitiated, the ‘T’is at the center of a squash court, formed by the
half-court line meeting the short line. Allow me to illustrate:
Always the first to mix work with play, I notice an interesting parallel between
managing social media influencers and the delicate equation that is two
players in a confined space fighting for the attention of an agitated, beady-eyed
squash ball. What players do in this T-zone is similar to how competing brands
currently engage with an influencer, which too often is more about a mad bid
for attention than a considered strategy. Jostling for space to coexist, aiming
for the attention of the same pair of beady eyes, trying to learn the best time to

46
strike, hoping like hell that you’ve packed enough punch into your shot and that
the ball will return for more, not fizzle out after it dings the tin … sound painfully
familiar?
Let’s put our rackets down and discuss my four-point squash strategy for
engaging with influencers.
1. Location, location, location: “Stealing theT”in squash means staying front
and center, at the receiving end of all the action. Staying in the eye of the
storm allows a player with average-sized limbs to volley by stretching and
spinning around the court. At any point in the game, you are as close as
you can get to the ball.The moral for social media influence? Once you’ve
decided on the influencers you want to target, shadow them at all times,
staying close enough to strike – comment, retweet, post – at a moment’s
notice.The nimble nature of the squash game closely resembles today’s
business ecosystem, where reacting instantly to key events is critical.To
empower yourself to do so, you’ve got to be there, when and where the
action is … and to do that, you’ve got to steal theT!
2.
It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing: The Incredible Khans are
synonymous with the game of squash, and their advice to beginners is
simple: keep your eye on the ball and practice hitting it as hard as you
can. Do this for an hour every day, till you can feel the lactic acid build
up in your arm. In social media, influencers love a hard-hitting piece
of communication: flamboyant yet backed by substance. In Tamar
Weinberg’s interview series about what gets the attention of the who’s
who of influencers, the responses don’t come as a surprise: do something
epic, do something interesting, provide information that is relevant and
useful to the influencer and keep doing it, be differentiated, make noise,
amaze us… the list goes on, but you get the point.

47
3.
The winner’s standing tall: As a newbie at squash, I’m often frustrated by
how much running I do – and how little my husband does. I’ve even been
called an “average workout!”Turns out, the better you get at squash the
more you learn to control the ball’s pace and direction.
McKinsey, in a report outlining the consumer decision journey, shows
how pull marketing trumps push in a world of empowered consumers.
When targeting influencers, the easy way out is to spoonfeed them the
information you’d like covered. Resist. Influencers are inherent news junkies
and love the thrill of a chase. A case in point: Le Perrier did a a great job of
building multiple return customer visits into their strategy in the Le Club
Perrier video (which was ranked No.1 among videos tweeted not long
after it launched).The video introduces users to a club scene – and gets
raunchier the more you share it. Just the thought of it now and I need a
cool sip of bubbly water … oh! I see how this all worked out for Perrier!
4. Influence, not interference: Oftentimes, dominating the entire squash
court and getting in the way of your opponent’s shot is mistaken for
stealing the T. This could injure you and your opponent. The truth
remains that there is a time for each shot of publicity as much as there
is a place. Monitoring your opponent’s moves like a hawk lets you
watch his shot, time your own strike, and position yourself right before
you reach for the ball. So it is with targeting an influencer who is at
the receiving end of multiple calls to action. Sure, your campaign may
need to adhere to an editorial calendar. But if your fiercest competitor
has just announced a groundbreaking product, don’t interfere unless
you can concretely add to the conversation. Or vice-versa, in the case
of the arrival of the iPhone 5. When news of an upcoming release on
September 12 got out, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Amazon made
sure their own announcements came out a week in advance!
Timing your communication, and accenting it right is key to engaging with
influencers. It really is a mating dance. And god knows, there isn’t a dance
without a cadence!

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Chapter 5
Measuring Influence Maintaining Relationships
Measurements That Matter
By Jared Hendler – ExecutiveVice President, Global Director Digital Creative, MWW
Measurement is hardly a new concept. We’ve been measuring our progress since
the dawn of time, when cavemen hunched over their latest kills, comparing who
brought down the biggest mammoth. Everyone inherently understands the
value of measurement, but not everyone has the training to do it effectively,
particularly when it comes to social influencer programs.
What follows is a brief overview of what measurements truly matter in your
influencer programs, and how you can turn those metrics into actionable,
sustainable engagement that provides long-term value to your brand.
Analyzing Outcomes
In order to assess where you are, you have to know where you were aiming to
be. At this chapter in the book, you’ve already defined your strategy and moved
forward in the planning phases of your engagement process. You should have
defined relevant, actionable and measurable objectives.
Key to the measurement process is ensuring you have planned for outcomes
relevant to your efforts. And that means aligning the outcomes you’re looking
to achieve with some sort of action, whether it is driving a purchase, increasing
web traffic or getting more individuals to recommend your brand to a friend.
Let’s be clear. Making a comment on a blog post is not an outcome – it is an
output. Contacting 50 mommy bloggers is not an outcome – it is outreach. The

49
Chapter 5 Measuring Influence Maintaining Relationships
outcome is what these efforts produced for you. How your efforts took today’s
situation and brought you closer to where you want to be.
What to Measure, and the Tools to Do It
There are many metrics to measure ranging from industry relevance to media
volume, reach and sentiment as well as a lot of tools to consider – but no ready-
made tool is a silver bullet. Here are a few we use and recommend:
•
TRAACKR: Use it to understand if your influencers are relevant and
identify new influencers in order to conduct additional outreach. We use
TRAACKR to find noteworthy individuals in almost any industry, including
very niche markets. At MWW, we’ve used TRAACKR to compile influencer
research related to even the most granular of topics – do-it-yourself
home improvement, solar panels, immigration reform, you name it.
We’re often asked to keep track of influencers in particular industries –
sometimes as many as 50 at a time. TRAACKR can not only help you with
the quantitative monitoring; it can lead you in the right direction to make
qualitative decisions for your brand’s engagement strategy.
• NetBase: We employ its semantic analysis capabilities to derive purchase
intent and primary brand perceptions – offering the opportunity to
benchmark and evaluate your efforts on these key points when required.
• Build your own: No campaign is exactly the same and no measurement
approach covers every situation. At MWW, we help brands increase their
relevance – but we felt that no tool explicitly measured this relevance
for us. So we developed our own tool, NetRelevance, to answer the
fundamental question: did we help our client matter more? In other
words, have we helped them create and maintain relevance? To measure
the relevance of a client, campaign, or message, our algorithms account
for the breadth, depth, and intensity of dialogue. NetRelevance helps
us not only understand who shaped the conversation (a top-tier news
outlet vs. a Twitter influencer), but also how the conversation – and the
relevance of the brand – changes. With your own analytics tool, you can
analyze industry insights in ways that other tools may not allow. For
example, we recently used NetRelevance to examine the differences in
how consumers watch video content on mobile devices versus tablets,

50
and uncovered clear insights that help our clients determine what kind of
content is most likely to build relevance on either platform. NetRelevance
has shown us that if you can dream it, you can build it.
So You’ve Measured – Now What?
Once a campaign begins, it is your responsibility to continuously engage with
users. Monitoring and evaluation can continuously add value to this effort by
uncovering themes that drive quality engagement. In fact, properly managed,
the active listening and engagement phase can become a wellspring of insight.
This is where the true power of social influencer engagement really begins.
Properly defined metrics set up the opportunity for outcome-oriented insights
that help drive and refine engagement efforts while increasing efficiency and
maximizing engagement ROI.
But don’t let metrics dictate your voice. Engagement should always remain
authentic and personal. It is important for influencers to know you are listening
in good faith and that they can truly help shape your brand. Get to know your
influencer base and engage with them on an individual basis. Metrics and
measurement help you identify them – but the worst mistake you can make is
to treat them like a number.
Follow Up
While things may fall through the cracks every once in a while, sustain
momentum by closing the loop on any correspondence between your brand and
your key influencers. Just because you didn’t secure the engagement you initially
wanted on your first try doesn’t mean that an influencer won’t be receptive to
your brand’s message the second time around. If the situation is reversed and
you initially missed an engagement opportunity, a late response is always better
than never, particularly when your goal is to indicate value for these influencers
and brand ambassadors.

51
Go Forth and Be Influential
Ultimately, any influencer engagement program should sustain influencer
relationships in a meaningful way for as long as possible. The best influencer
relationships are those where the influencer feels passionately about your
brand. But this passion can’t be accomplished overnight.
Influencer engagement programs need to be extremely well-strategized and
thought out, and your brand’s relationships with these influencers must be
managed carefully. Always use a combination of analytics and experience to
your advantage when developing an engagement approach to any influencer,
whether their sphere of influence is large or small. Your approach to creating
and maintaining relationships can have major impacts on your brand – positive
or negative. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your approach is
always optimized and thoughtful.
Measure and Maintain Relationships
By: Adam Blitzer, Founder and COO, Pardot
Your social media relationships, like your personal and professional relationships,
need to be cared for and nurtured or they may slip away from you. Once you’ve
established your network of social media influencers, you need to calibrate and
maintain your network to ensure continued returns on your hard work.
Maintaining relationships with your influencers is all about continued value.
Value is not only the return your business is getting from your social media
efforts, but what you are providing your followers. It may sound intuitive, but
it’s surprising how frequently social media managers fail to recognize how
important it is to reward your influencers. Relationships depend on mutual
value. Maximizing this value for both parties is the key to maintaining your
influencer relationships.

Practitioners Guide to Social Influencer Engagement

Practitioners Guide to Social Influencer Engagement

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