Winfluence

Reframing Influencer Marketing to Reignite Your Brand

Jason Falls

• Editorial: Entrepreneur Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781613084472
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Entrepreneurship

Winfluence by award-winning digital strategist Jason Falls, is THE authoritative book about influencer marketing from the perspective of businesses and brands. An invaluable guidebook for marketing managers, small business owners, marketing consultants and agencies alike, the book explains how influencers came to be, how they came to be so powerful, why so many brands are counting on influencer marketing for business success and how anyone who is not, now can. This book not only explains the who, what, when, where, and why of influencer marketing but then adds the how—more specifically and predictably than other books can hope for. It offers detailed guidelines, case studies, cutting-edge ideas, how-tos for measuring success, and more to help any business owner, marketer, agency account person, or digital strategist see and seize the opportunity to drive business results. Through a series of narrative stories, interviews, and case studies, the book illustrates how to take what many people consider good influencer marketing to a new level of success from a long-tail perspective—not short-term, one-off executions.

–– part I ––

THE PROBLEM WITH “INFLUENCER” MARKETING

— chapter —

1

HOW INFLUENCER MARKETING BECAME A PROBLEM

Billy’s mom drags him around town taking pictures and videos of him, seemingly just to post them on social media sites. She dresses him up in ridiculous outfits and makes him wear sunglasses. He sits in an old lady’s lap at a nursing home. He poses by a pool at a nighttime party. Not long ago, his mom made him host an evening in a dance club, complete with his picture on the flier.

Billy doesn’t seem to mind. But then, he hasn’t even had his first birthday yet.

Now you may be thinking Billy’s mother is neglectful, even selfish, capitalizing on a child’s cuteness to gain social media followers. And yes, Billy is a kid. But he’s not the kind of kid you’re thinking of.

Billy is a goat. As in the animal. His “mom” is owner Jo’Lee Shine. Billy goes by @realbillygotti online, and he’s been dubbed “The most stylish goat in cyberspace.” He has amassed 182,000 followers on Instagram to go with his 151,000 fans on Facebook. He’s been a guest on The Maury Povich Show.

To give Real Billy Gotti some context, 182,000 is more than twice as many copies printed each day than the Raleigh News & Observer, one of the main daily newspapers serving Billy’s home state of North Carolina. It’s also larger than the circulations of papers in Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Boston, and Detroit.

Add his Facebook audience to the total. If Billy’s 333,000 total fans were a publishing audience, his social media presence would rank as the 11th largest newspaper in America, just behind Houston’s Chronicle and above Philadelphia’s Enquirer.

Did I mention this is for a goat?

Now, I have to admit that goats give me the heebie-jeebies. Some people think they’re cute or funny, but they’re the demons of my nightmares. It’s the eyes. They have freaky eyes.

Personal phobias aside, how the hell does a goat have more than a quarter of a million followers? Ones it can potentially influence to consider, try, or buy products?

Ironically, it all started when those very consumers, who are today influenced by goats, initially grew tired of being influenced by anyone.

In this chapter, you will learn what qualifies someone as an influencer and learn how online influencers came to be. I’ll walk you through the story of how social media emerged so you understand why our current media landscape is so fractured but still full of opportunity. Finally, I will demonstrate the power of online influencers and begin to connect their influence to the formidable discipline of word-of-mouth marketing.

DEFINING INFLUENCERS

But before I go further down the goat path (or any other path, for that matter), it will be helpful to agree on what makes someone an influencer. Most people assume we’re talking about YouTubers and Instagrammers—people with big social media audiences, who brands want to pay to talk about their products and services online.

That’s a good starting point, but it is incomplete.

The broader definition of an influencer is anyone who has influence over another person. In a marketing context, that means anyone who might sway your decision to purchase a product or service. That could be someone with a big online audience, but it could also be your neighbor, an aunt or uncle, the barkeeper at your favorite watering hole, or even a couple of strangers in line at the DMV you overhear talking about their experience with a company or product.

For the social media influencer, I believe the role requires the intent to influence. But if we were to only focus on YouTubers and Instagrammers, we would be leaving out other wonderful paths to influence audiences in ways that benefit our brand. And including those is a key ingredient to Winfluence, as opposed to influence.

So for the purposes of this book, and the subsequent conversations and ideas that will come from it, my definition of an influencer is this:

—An influencer is anyone who can persuade an audience to think or act differently. —

For most of this book, you can assume we’re talking about individuals with mostly online audiences who have some degree of intent to build a bigger audience and monetize their impact by partnering with brands.

But as you will see in Chapters 3 and 4, I’ll also make a case for reframing how we think about influence and influencers altogether. So we will talk about off-line influence as well. Or even those who create influence accidentally, with no intention of persuading people to buy.

And we’ll talk about how you as a brand, business, or marketer can leverage all the different types of influencers strategically. That approach is another key ingredient that distinguishes Winfluence from influencer marketing.

HOW INFLUENCERS CAME TO BE

In the 1970s, the world was in some ways idyllic. OK, maybe the fashion trends didn’t exactly have staying power. And some ’70s music makes people cringe even today. But it was a simpler time.

Like most people in the U.S. in the 1970s, I grew up with four TV stations—ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS—along with one or two country and pop radio stations, a local newspaper, a major daily newspaper that occasionally covered the news where I lived, and two or three magazines that my family subscribed to. Along with the local movie theater, a rare trip to the nearby larger city to see a live theatrical production, and some records or eight-track tapes, that was the extent of my media landscape.

To become a member of that media, you had to go to school and learn how to be a writer, director, producer, or editor: learning to uncover facts, corroborate them, and report them fairly. For broadcast media, you had to be licensed by the FCC. In print journalism, you had at least one, if not several, layers of editors, proofreaders, and fact checkers to make damn sure you didn’t publish something inaccurate, incendiary, or misleading.

Ethics was also a huge part of your training. You understood that “advertorials” were pushing the boundaries of right vs. wrong, and they never, never, never came from the editorial side of the building. They weren’t stories; they were ads.

Being a member of the media took time, training, and technique. And even though we didn’t call them by that name, they were influencers.

Now think of news sources we turn to today. Those TV and radio stations from the 1970s still exist, but now there are also hundreds of cable TV channels, four or five local TV stations that may or may not be affiliates of the main networks, and dozens of on-demand platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and more.

And don’t forget online video platforms like YouTube, Facebook Watch, and IGTV!

You also have a multitude of local radio stations, satellite radio, and hundreds of podcasts from which to choose. Then there are social networks, where content from all those news sources (and more) is shared. Some people rely solely on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Snapchat to get their friend-filtered “news” of the day.

Many news media outlets have corresponding websites that function just like newspapers, magazines, TV, or radio stations on the internet. Then there are more than 31 million blogs out there that often pose as news sites. And let’s not forget social news or news aggregator sites like Reddit and Fark.

What happened?

Social media happened. The world went from a trickle of information to a flood of biblical proportions, filling every eye and ear with news, opinions, rants, and arguments from every angle and perspective imaginable.

And this flood of floods began at the turn of the century. Yes—the 21st century.

THE GENESIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

If your mind is still ambling lazily down that small-town road in 1975, fast-forward to 2000. Beyond the Y2K bug freaking everyone out, the turn of the century was marked by a consumer revolution in technology. There was no one big, dramatic event that sparked it. Instead, consumers insisted on a series of gradual, intentional, and methodical changes that, in aggregate, turned the media landscape upside down.

First, the internet emerged as a place to explore. After the home computing market matured in the 1980s, the 1990s introduced higher-performance machines with ever-increasing processor speed and functionality. Modems for connecting to the web became standard features.

According to U.S. Census figures, the percent of American consumers with computers in the home rose from roughly 20 percent in 1990 to half of all households in 2000. Just a year later, half of all those computers had access to the internet.

Part of the reason consumers were so attracted to this new medium was their revulsion at how marketers had turned all the other mediums into spam factories.

Think I’m wrong? Let’s look at the tea leaves of that era:

Cable TV networks, which went from 28 in 1980 to 79 in 1990, continued their explosive growth rate heading toward the 21st century, with 171 in existence by 1998. Several of those networks were subscription-based, like HBO and Showtime, which allowed consumers to see long-form programming without being interrupted by ads.

The first TiVo DVR shipped in 1999, ushering in the era of on-demand TV (no VCR needed). One of its chief appeals to consumers was the ability to skip commercials.

Satellite radio’s era began with the launch of Sirius’s first satellite in July 2000. Future merger partner XM launched its first satellite nine months later. The promise both services first sold to consumers: no commercial interruptions in their music.

Most major web browsers added the ability to block pop-up ads in the early 2000s.

The Do Not Call Implementation Act, which established the National Do Not Call Registry, was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2003 to protect consumers from annoying and unwanted phone calls from telemarketers.

That same year, Congress also passed the CAN-SPAM Act, an attempt to protect consumer email inboxes from the same type of intrusion.

It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Is there any other brief span in history during which so many innovations centered on stopping marketing? By the way, do you know what SPAM means, at least in the official regulatory record of the U.S. government? Brace yourself.

“CAN-SPAM” stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. There we are, standing beside pornographers as the repugnant cretins of the consumer’s world.

The general distaste for advertising was perfectly addressed, Martin Luther-style, in the seminal work of the day, The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. This modern-day “95 Theses” was originally posted online in 1999. You can still read them all in just a few minutes at Cluetrain.com. The book version was published in 2000.

While I’m admittedly paraphrasing, these declarations said, in essence, “Stop bugging us, you marketing turds!”

The only reason this wasn’t the prevailing theme of the early 21st century was the other big thing that happened around that time: Internet-based companies were multiplying like bunnies, but they forgot to develop revenue-based business models. They were thus staring down the barrel of an unstable stock market and rising interest rates. The dot-com bubble was bursting.

What does that have to do with social media? Here’s my theory:

All those internet nerds suddenly lost their companies and jobs and had to move back into their parents’ basements.

They all met online in chatrooms and forums to figure out what to do next.

They collectively agreed that the solution to getting their jobs back was to make the internet easier to use so it would appeal to more people.

Someone said, “Let’s democratize the media and make everyone a publisher!”

OK, that last one is a stretch. I don’t think changing the media landscape was that intentional. But the end result was certainly the same.

To be fair, we should re...