The Power of Influence

How Much Do We Really Know About the Influencers?

Catharine P. Taylor , Thursday, March 25, 2010

Social media is a land of many holy grails - if it's not completely antithetical to have more than one - but probably none is more prized by marketers than the Influencer, that person who can sway opinion, get people to buy products and otherwise, well, influence the hearts and minds of dozens, hundreds and thousands of other people.

So far, in social media, this has been a relatively rudimentary exercise. Lots of Facebook friends? Thousands of Twitter followers? Scads of traffic to your blog? Great! Let's sign you up in the name of selling lots of product!

But two bits of intelligence I've read over the last few days show me that we still have a long way to go in understanding influence. Before I go on, here are some of the counterintuitive data points I've come across about the people that everyone wants to friend:

From ReadWriteWeb: That some of the most influential people on Twitter don't do a lot of retweeting. According to January and February data from Tableau Software and TwitterStats, @scobleizer (Robert Scoble) with more than 118,000 followers, retweets one percent of the time (though a quick look at his Twitter account indicates it may be somewhat higher); @stevecase however, retweets 28 percent of the time. He has more than 340,000 followers.

From ICOM (as reported by Mediapost): The idea of the universal influencer is a myth. Individuals can be influential in certain, siloed categories, but don't tend to have influence across all categories. Further, having influence has less to do with demographics or connections than it does with behavior. As the white paper about the study says: "No demographic similarities emerged in the data; there was no skewing toward age, gender or income. Influencers may be grandfathers or twenty-somethings, working mothers or stay-at-home dads. They could be the well to do or the up-and-coming."

What's at issue when you look at these data points is not whether the role of influencers is overplayed though that could be a knee-jerk takeaway. This data underscores it's crucial to understand the nature of influence, and only then will it be possible, as a marketer, to really influence the influencers.

Take the retweeting data above. What this should mean to a marketer is pretty straightforward: that people with true Twinfluence (that's Twitter influence, for the uninitiated) don't spend much time taking other content from the Twittersphere and sharing it. However, that data point shouldn't be extrapolated to the larger thought that they are lacking in influence and aren't worth a marketer's time. The data shows that 71 percent of @scobleizer's tweets in the first two months of the year contained an @sign. That says - and following him on Twitter bears this out -he is constantly conversing with other Twitter users. That certainly is influence; it just takes a different form than retweeting does. @stevecase's tweets contained @ signs 51 percent. Thus, his twinfluence expresses itself differently.

That loops back neatly into the ICOM data, which emphasizes how important behavior is in determining the nature of influencers, not for instance, the number of Facebook friends. Data-mining types will not like to hear the following: most influencers like to spread their influence via non-keyboard initiated word-of-mouth that can't be tracked using an algorithm. Compared to the average user, they don't even spend appreciably more time on Facebook than the average user does -- five hours per week as compared to 4.5 hours, though it, along with texting, appear to be their primary social channels.

I could throw out more data points all day long, but they would point in the same basic direction: toward the knowledge that although we seem to have gotten a pretty good bead on who influencers are, we need to know more about how they operate, in both online and offline channels if we are to truly harness their power.

Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years. Contact her here.

Facebook and Twitter Making a Major Impact on Purchase Decisions [STATS]

A new study shows that those who are fans or followers of a brand on Facebook or Twitter, respectively, are significantly more likely to buy products and services or recommend the brand to a friend.

Specifically, the study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook. Moreover, they’re 79% more likely to recommend their Twitter follows to a friend, and 60% more likely to do the same on Facebook:

Of course, those findings might be a bit overstated — many people actively seek out the brands they’re already fans of and follow or fan them on Twitter and Facebook. But there’s still much to be said for the mindshare that engaging those existing brand enthusiasts on social media sites creates, in turn keeping them active. Plus, the study also found that many consumers across a wide variety of demographics have negative perceptions of brands that aren’t using social media.

Overall, the study is another sign that social media is becoming a competitive advantage for those that are participating, and an increasingly major weakness for those that aren’t.

[via Mashable]

Nestle in social media firestorm

What started as a PR battle with long-time nemesis Greenpeace has turned into a social media catastrophe for food manufacturer Nestle. Today, its heavy-handed reaction to online critics has been described as a “public relations nightmare”.

The trouble started when Greenpeace produced a video campaigning criticising Nestle’s use of palm oil from unsustainable sources – the oil is used in several Nestle products including KitKats. This was part of a long-running Greenpeace campaign against Nestle’s sourcing of palm oil; Communicate magazine covered its demonstration against Unilever in January 2009 (see ‘When NGOs go ape’).
Greenpeace’s latest video pastiches KitKat’s ‘Take a break’ campaign, and features a bored office worker biting into an orang-utan’s finger and smearing blood over his face.

Nestle's response was to persuade YouTube to remove the video (although it can, for the moment, still be viewed at http://vimeo.com/10236827). Armed with this free publicity, Greenpeace managed to gain coverage in several of this morning’s papers.

Cue a torrent of public criticism on Nestle’s Facebook page. Its wall was soon plastered with negative comments and requests to stop using the oil.

That’s when the social media furore really began. Nestle began to delete comments from fans who used altered Nestle logos as their profile pictures. Meanwhile, although it sought to participate in the debate, its responses – or rather those of the employee in charge of its Facebook page – began to betray a noticeably irritable tone; often getting drawn into what can only be described as bickering.

“And what part of 'Nestlé encourages breastfeeding' is not clear?” it said at one point. At other times, it mocked users’ spelling errors.

When this tone was questioned, it replied: “So, let's see, we have to be well-mannered all the time but it's perfectly acceptable to refer to us as everything from idiots right the way down to sons of Satan?”

Users were quick to leap on this. Tom Rafferty, responded: “If you genuinely feel that way, then may I respectfully suggest that you should not be working in corporate communications.” Thomas Walker said: “To the person who is speaking on behalf of nestle. STOP! You're causing yourself a public relations nightmare right now and are seriously damaging your reputation!”

Communications practitioners have expressed disbelief at Nestle’s handling of the criticism. Chris McCrudden, creative director at Speed Communications said: “Sadly, this is a textbook example of how putting the wrong communicator in charge at a difficult time can make a bad situation worse. They just left the wrong person in charge. It's not often you see a $195 billion dollar company behave like an 11-year-old during a playground brawl, but we did today. Its tactical comms response was breathtakingly bad."

Robin Grant of social media specialists WeAreSocial said: “What Nestle did in removing the video was naive. The legal recourse inflames the situation, and brands need to be aware of this. People are acting as a mob today, and the key thing is not to inflame the mob. Nestle’s stance has changed as the day has gone on. They exacerbated the situation by baiting the crowd, but have learnt as the day has progressed.”

That much seems clear. Nestle’s latest status update says: “Social media: as you can see we're learning as we go. Thanks for the comments.”

Tracy Frauzel, head of digital communications at Greenpeace, was understandably pleased. “They’ve made it so easy for us,” she said. "Nestle just don’t seem to have a good understanding as to what happens on the social space."

Nestle declined to comment.

[via Communicate Magazine]

Facebook ousts Google as most popular U.S. site

 

Facebook is now the most popular site in the U.S., according to analytics firm Hitwise. In the week ending March 13, 2010, Facebook surpassed the previous most popular site, Google, in terms of overall traffic for the week.

Facebook sat at 7.07 percent for all U.S. web traffic, whereas Google was at 7.03 percent. Looking at the graph above, it’s clear that Facebook has seen a steady rise in traffic since last year. Traffic to Facebook increased 185 percent compared to the same week last year, whereas visits to Google increased only 9 percent.

In early 2008, there were reports of Facebook’s traffic plateauing, but now it doesn’t seem like the site needs to worry about that too much. I would attribute the major rise in Facebook’s traffic in 2009 to the release of Farmville in June, and similar social games throughout the year.

Looking at the graph above, there’s a distinct rise in traffic starting in June. In late August, we reported on Zynga’s claims that Farmville was the fastest growing social game ever. In little over two months, Farmville had acquired over 11 million active users. As of today, the game has over 83 million active users.

Compared to the rise of social games on Facebook, there was little happening at Google to encourage traffic growth.

Comscore, another analytics firm, still ranks Google ahead of Facebook. Google is the top site by reach at 81 percent of the U.S. population. Facebook sits behind Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft at 53 percent, according to TechCrunch.

Five Reasons Companies Should Not Block Access to Social Networks

Last week, a client told me that they don't allow employees to access YouTube at work. "Do your employees carry cellphones?" I asked. The answer was yes, of course. Well then, most of them already have access to YouTube - right in their pockets.

The fact is, resistance to social network access at work is futile.

The Economist, in a special report on social networking, notes that a survey of 1,400 chief information officers conducted last year by the recruitment firm Robert Half Technology found that only one-tenth of them gave employees full access to such networks during the day, and that many were blocking Facebook and Twitter altogether.

Here are five reasons companies should allow social networking:

1. Resistance is futile.
   Workers increasingly have internet access on their smartphones. By the year 2013, 43% of global mobile internet users (607.5 million people worldwide) will be accessing social networks from their mobile devices, according to a new report from eMarketer.
2. Don't assume people won't find other ways to waste time.
   Executives' biggest concern? That social networking would lead to "notworking" instead of working. As the Economist report notes, "This assumes that people would actually work rather than find some other way to pass the time they have to spare."
3. Social networks can actually make workers more productive.
   Three out of four of the 895 experts interviewed for the recent Pew Internet report "The Future of the Internet IV" said that use of the internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge, according to Janna Anderson, study co-author.
4. You'll miss great ideas.
   Great ideas can come from any level of a company. Using social networks internally (wikis, blogs, forums, even IM) fosters collaboration and allows workers at all levels to contribute ideas.

   Experts emerge from within a company when collaboration is encouraged, and along with them come some of the best ideas that would otherwise be lost. Because people can comment on information, companies often learn of internal expertise they didn't know about already.

   In most big companies, instead of collaborating, marketing competes with sales, advertising competes with PR, and so on, creating silos that prevent fresh ideas from being heard.

   I've consulted for companies where the marketing directs of divisions had never even met their counterparts in other divisions, let alone collaborated with them. As a result, they often were working on similar projects without sharing knowledge or resources. This wastes money and squanders ideas that could be helpful company-wide.

5. Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think.
   Managers worry that employees will leak confidential information or speak poorly of the company. Most people have much more common sense than to jeopardize their jobs with wanton comments in social networks, especially these days.

   If you can't trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.

   People who want to say something negative will find a way, with or without access to social networks, during business hours. However, negative feedback can also provide an early warning that changes need to be made, either in policy or employees.

All in all, companies have more to gain than to lose by allowing employee access to social networks. My bet is that it'll take another two years for most companies to figure that out.