Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing

by Danny Brown, Sam Fiorella

Identify and Manage the Influence Paths That Convert Brand Awareness to Customer Acquisition! Today, you face a brutally tough, maddeningly elusive new the “wisdom of crowds.” Social media gives consumers 24x7 access to the attitudes and recommendations of their most engaged peers. These are the views that shape buying decisions. These are the views you must shape and use. Influence Marketing won’t just help you identify and enlist key it will help you manage the influence paths that lead consumers to buy. By sharing empirical evidence of hard-won lessons from pioneering influence marketers, Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella provide a blueprint that moves influence marketing beyond simple brand awareness and into sales acquisition and customer life time value measurement. They integrate new tools and techniques into a complete methodology for generating more and better leads—and converting them faster, at higher margins. • Put the customer —not the influencer—at the center, and plan influence marketing accordingly • Recognize where each prospect stands in the purchase life cycle right now • Clarify how your consumers move from brand preference to purchase • Identify key micro-influencers who impact decisions at every stage • Gain indispensable insights into the context of online relationships • Recognize situational factors that derail social media brand recommendations • Understand social influence scoring models and overcome their limitations • Re-engineer and predict influence paths to generate measurable action • Master the “4 Ms” of influence make, manage, monitor, measure • Transform influence marketing from a “nice-to-have” exercise into a powerful strategy Additional online resources can be found at www.influencemarketingbook.com

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

227 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2013

About the author

Danny Brown is Chief Technologist at ArCompany, helping clients turn social media intelligence into business results. He’s the co-author of Influence Marketing, described as “the book that will change the way we do business today.” He’s an award-winning marketer whose delivered results for organizations like Microsoft Canada, BlackBerry, FedEx, Ford Canada and LG Electronics, and his blog is recognized as the #1 marketing blog in the world by HubSpot.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Influence Marketing explores a new model of marketing: Situational Influence. With situational influence, marketers must consider the factors that impact the customer's decision making process as they move from awareness to purchase. Personal, economic, environmental and emotional factors must be considered and how other messages can interrupt the messages you are sending to potential customers.

Instead of reaching out to influencers based on social scoring, hoping they'll amplify your brand's message, situational influence starts with the customer. The customer-centric model focuses on identifying the impact of influence from those people already in the customer's social graph. You also need to understand how other messages can interrupt the messages trying to reach potential buyers.

Mixed in with detailed case studies, practical advice and in-depth reviews of the tools and platforms you'll use to put it their lessons into practice, Sam & Danny lay out the 4 M's of influence marketing: Make influencers, Manage campaigns, Monitor message, and Measure success.

This book teaches companies, personal brands, or anyone trying to spread their message what influence is, how to measure it, and how marketers attempt to use influence as a marketing tactic. It describes in detail the many social, economic and situational factors that impact the effectiveness of an influence marketing campaign. Influence marketing is, obviously, a book about marketing, but community managers and anyone using social media to build their audience will find it beneficial.

[Dwayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's what I love about this book -- it's firmly rooted in consumer behavior principles. I think such a connection to the tried-and-true principles of marketing is often lacking in other books dealing with social media as a marketing tool.

And to build on that note, another focus of this book is taking your influence marketing program on social media from spray-and-pray (oh, this person has a high Klout score -- let's get her to talk about our widget) to carefully targeted (oh, this person is thinking about buying and she pays attention to these three people -- let's get them to talk about our widget.)

I might be oversimplifying; this is not a simple book selling a quick fix. The methodology is reliant upon social media listening tools and human review that smaller organizations might not be able to afford. But here's the thing -- even if you don't have cash for a flashy new SaaS whose name is missing all its vowels, or has too many vowels, reading this book will steer your thinking about influence and social media in a more powerful direction ... and that's definitely away from strategies based on wanton use of scores from platforms like Klout and Kred.

This book reminds you that in order to make an impact, you have to adopt a customer-centric view. As marketing communicators we have to strive to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. This book is a useful read for any marketer.

[Marjorie Clayman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strong read for people who have been steeped in social media marketing in particular. If you have been looking for the disconnect between finding measurable ROI and the strategies most social media gurus preach, this book fills the gap and offers alternative ways (and better ways) to approach the space. Still immensely enjoy the fact that I can read a book by two people I know and see several other people I know quoted within the pages. Pretty neat.

This book is not necessarily a good match for industries in which there is not a lot of online "buzz." Also, although I understand the logic behind it, the style of a lot of summation and referencing to past chapters is not one of my favorite approaches, but it does not get in the way of the content.

[Bart De Pelsmaeker · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I started reading this book, I couldnt put it down. The book is a captivating, knowledgeable and insightful guide through influence marketing and how it can be used. I particularly enjoyed the infusion of "solution selling"-like analysis applied to influence. Highly recommended for everybody involved in marketing or selling today

[Du4 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting perspective. Lots of great lessons in here on how to better segment and target people for influence-based campaigns. I particularly appreciated the specific advice on how to construct better Boolean queries to find influencers online using sociL media analytics platforms. The authors' proffered methodology holds promise for some campaigns but I don't think it's as inclusive or as uncomplicated as they make it out in the book's later case studies. Book's organization and flow could have been better constructed but overall I found it a good read.

[Nicolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

SPOILER: Read my book notes here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/240388321/B...

Give a good framework. The only problem with the book and the framework is that a big part of it would consist in practicing the framework. Not eough practical examples are given.

[Richard Trus]

This is one great book if you are needing to find influencers in social media marketing. Learn about the analysis of platforms like Klout, PeerIndex and Kred.

When Klout and other Social Scoring platforms started out they were seen as credible measurement tools for measuring the influence of individuals. However, when the “game” of how the Klout and social scoring platforms came into question it was quickly seen that you could manipulate the “Game”. Therefore social scoring platforms evolved into content aggregators who existed to show the relationships between content and individuals, because they could not identify with their scores who was influential.