Author: dhindin

Influencer Identification: How To Make the Right Choices For Your Program

~ dhindin ~ 1 Comment

While the concept of leveraging influencers to drive success for a communications program is by no means a new one, I’ve noticed significantly rising interest in influencer programming among colleagues and clients.

And while I do agree that influencer-driven marketing can be impactful if done correctly, I’m often disappointed in the lack of rigor behind the process of identifying the strongest online influencers for a campaign – and less-than-satisfactory results of these programs confirms my concern.

Companies and brands that are choosing the influencers they work with based on the fact that they know them, or recognize them as a presence in their industry, or by the number of Twitter followers they have, are missing the boat. And if they’re paying these folks for their support, they are likely spending their dollars poorly.

Let’s examine some of these no-no’s:

  • Because you know them: Many influencers make quite a bit of money by simply being “an influencer.” They attend all the right conferences and build up their networks among agency pros and strategists, who in turn tap the influencers for their client programs. The problem becomes that they tap them for program after program for varying brands and products from shampoo to frozen food to cell phones. In this way, their endorsements become diluted. And even if they could avoid dilution, they end up marketing a wide variety of products to a concentrated circle of followers, limiting the reach of their message and failing to target the right audience for the right brand.
  • Because they have a presence in the industry: Commanding authority among industry insiders often does not translate to influencing consumers. And offline influence, which is often the type of influence these insiders wield, often does not translate to online influence.
  • Because they have a large following: Just because I follow someone doesn’t mean I read all of their posts, and just because I read their posts, doesn’t mean I share them with my own network – let alone being influenced to purchase a product. A significant potential audience doesn’t necessarily translate to significant impact. When working with influencers, quality trumps quantity in most cases (though quantity does still matter, as you’ll see below).

So if these are the no-no’s, what are the yes-yeses? Like any good research, influencer identification requires sound methodology.

When my team and I initiate influencer identification projects, the first thing we do is facilitate a discussion about objectives. For example, if promoting the virtues of dining on beef, do we want to work with influencers who will influence moms, dads, foodies, chefs, restaurant operators, etc.? In other words, don’t try to be everything to everyone.

Once we understand what the team is trying to accomplish, it’s then important to develop a scoring system through which we can standardize criteria on which potential influencers will be ranked.

We often follow the three R’s – Reach, Relevance and Resonance – developing individual scores for each as well as an aggregated overall score:

  • Reach: Number of followers (while this shouldn’t be the only measure, it does need to enter into the equation)
  • Relevance: How relevant are they to your target audience; how often do they converse about the topic you want to be influential within
  • Resonance: How much engagement do their posts drive

By developing a methodology and an algorithm with which to score potential influencers, not only will you end up driving stronger results once you launch your programming, you will also be more accountable to your clients and/or bosses when you can back up your decisions with concrete evaluation metrics.

Social Listening Research: Map the Landscape to Drive Smart Strategy

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Most people in the communications industry are probably familiar with social listening by now, but many are limiting its usefulness.

Many companies only use social listening for monitoring, which basically means turning on a listening tool and waiting for something bad to happen.

That’s smart to do. Many PR pros who have been burned before can attest to the damage one moment in time can cause when an issue blows up and they’re not there to throw water on it. Monitoring allows us to inform our clients of an issue and react to it before it spins into a full-blown crisis.

However, social listening offers significant value in several other areas that a growing number of our clients are benefitting from and getting a leg up on the competition by doing so. Some of these include measurement, influencer identification and research to inform strategy.

My favorite part of my job is that last one. It’s where the magic happens. Where thoughtful research informs impactful insight and is leveraged to drive smart strategy and breakthrough creative.

In this case, social listening becomes affordable consumer research. Whereas in the past, our only choice was focus groups or surveys, which I do recommend in the proper situations where budget permits, social listening now allows us a window into the consumer psyche in “the wild,” so to speak, where they’re sharing their honest opinions with their friends and families.

My team loves conducting these social listening audits for our clients, and our clients love the results. As we analyze all of these posts – often looking back a year or more – we’re identifying the key topics that are driving the conversation and then overlaying those topics with sentiment. In this way, we’re able to determine what proportion of conversation is driven by each topic, as well as which topics are driving the greatest positive sentiment and which are driving the most negative.

This is powerful stuff because even though one topic might drive the majority of discussion, it may also be the most dispassionate area of discussion. By identifying the most passionate conversations, we can advise our clients to increase the focus of their creative to amplify the positive aspects and potentially correct the misconceptions that are driving the negative (or in some cases, stay away from the most hot-button issues).

While this is valuable when looking at our clients on their own, it becomes even more powerful when we do the same with conversation about their competitors. By comparing and contrasting, we are able to identify areas of greatest opportunity as well as areas where competitors may already be entrenched and therefore not worth our effort to focus on.

Finally, when we analyze unbranded industry conversation – where consumers are talking but brands aren’t mentioned – we add an extremely important layer where we can learn where consumers’ heads are, the emerging trends where no brand has yet set claim. This is the all-important white space opportunity where we can get a jump on competitors and look to own an area on the forward edge of the industry.

With all of these components in place, we can effectively map a landscape of the industry that we can use on behalf of our clients to establish smart strategy to build creative programming around.

And because we’ve compiled all of this data going back historically, we are now able to establish benchmarks and set goals for future performance based on the forward-thinking strategy we’ve created, which allows us to measure and improve, measure and improve.

I get riled up just thinking about it. How can you not get excited about this stuff?!

Don’t measure “social media”

~ dhindin ~ 1 Comment

What is the value of social media? This is a question I have received many times.

At face value, it seems like a simple query. And the intention is good. It means the person asking it is thinking beyond basic engagement metrics and pressing for business value.

But it’s the wrong question. There is not one single blanket answer. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with social media. Is your end goal a sale, a lead, a donor, a volunteer? What is that end goal worth to your business?

When measuring social media efforts for our clients, the first thing my team and I ask is what are their business objectives.

From there we want to establish KPIs (key performance indicators), which are outcome-oriented measures that are tied to business objectives.

Then, we determine social media objectives that ladder up to those KPIs.

And…finally…wait for it…we determine the social media metrics that best represent those objectives.

The mix of metrics is different for every client because every client scenario is different. Even various programs for the same client often call for different metrics.

But while the metrics are customized, we have a standard framework that works in pretty much any situation. What we want to do is determine the appropriate metrics that fit into each of five moments in the consumer journey:

  • Exposure
  • Engagement
  • Influence
  • Impact
  • Advocacy

Exposure is most straightforward – usually impressions.

Engagement generally contains two components: Engaging With You (liking/commenting/sharing posts you’ve published in your owned social channels) and Talking About You (mentioning your company/brand/product within social media but not directed at you in particular).

Influence is ability to cause or contribute to a change in the beliefs or behavior of your audience. Ideally this is measured through something like a pre/post survey, but when budget isn’t available, common proxies are tone, message delivery, click-throughs, etc.

Impact is the bottom line. What’s the ideal outcome of the social media effort? This can be financial or not. Sales, registrations, downloads, leads. Whatever the end goal is.

Advocacy is the final step. The virtuous circle of social media. Once someone has an experience with you, do they recommend you to their networks?

Once this framework is in place, quantifiable goals should be set and measured against regularly. Don’t wait for a final campaign wrap-up. Measure frequently to determine what’s working, what’s not and how to optimize moving forward – once you see the great results in the wrap-up report, you’ll be happy you did.

End of Facebook Graph Search Means Trouble for Social Listening Tools

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Facebook’s recent announcement that it will do away with Graph Search has major implications that reach far beyond the native search functionality on the world’s most popular social network.

In the social listening world, Facebook is the elephant in the room. We all know there is an enormous volume of conversation taking place on the platform, but due to privacy settings, only an estimated 1-3% of mentions of the companies, brands and products that we conduct research and measurement for are available to be captured by social listening tools.

Well, that 1-3% is soon about to drop to a cold and lonely zero. Why? Because Graph Search is the source that many social listening tools access in order to pull in even just that 1-3% of conversation. When Graph Search is completely phased out on April 30, those social listening tools will no longer have access to any posts on Facebook (except on their owned channels).

What does this mean for those of us who do this for a living?

It means we need to start informing our clients/teams that we won’t be pulling any Facebook data into our social listening reports (other than their owned pages that have been connected to their social listening accounts), reported volume of mentions will be lower, goals should be reevaluated, workarounds should be sought.

One workaround is DataSift’s new PYLON offering. Not only will PYLON fix the loss of the 1-3% of public Facebook conversation that most social listening tools access, but it actually provides access to non-public posts. Finally, a firehose-type product for Facebook.

Before you get up in arms that your private Facebook posts are being made public, it’s important to note that DataSift is anonymizing all non-public posts. From my position as both a privacy-wary consumer and a data-hungry analyst, this appears to be the perfect happy medium.

The question for me is if my clients are already paying for a social listening tool, should I advise them to pay for PYLON, as well?

For most of my clients, PYLON is too much work. It’s not a user-friendly tool, but rather a raw API. You need technical skills and budgets to organize and analyze.

The more likely solution is that your social listening vendor will partner with DataSift to pull the PYLON data into their system and provide the infinitely more robust data sets to improve their offering. If your vendor isn’t already looking into this, I suggest you give them a nudge.

How are you addressing this decrease in data access ahead of the April 30 cut off? Let me know in the comments section.