Influence at SXSWi -- and a #throwdown with Fast Company

Post-SXSWi, I've recovered and even dug out a bit. There's still a metric ton of content I want to post. But I will point you to some posts I wrote as a contributor to The Cincinnati Enquirer's SXSW blog during the event.

During the melee in Austin, David Binkowski, Krista Neher, Saul Colt and I sat on a panel to discuss the topic of influence. Below is the director's cut of slides. We did not get through all of them, so I added a few as well as some links for reference in the speaker notes. I went long in the Slideshare version as we addressed some of the questions folks were asking on Twitter. We just ran out of time before we could answer them.

In discussing what Influence is NOT, we got into celebrity influence. This brought up everyone from Charlie Sheen (popular vs. influential), Ashton Kutcher (broad/absolute influence) and Kenneth Cole (did his errant tweet have a positive impact?), to Klout (one site can't do all the work), Chrysler (a missed opportunity for the brand to be human) and Kim Kardashian (relative influence with a specific group).

SXSW 2011 - Influencer #Throwdown: Defining Influence Once & For All

Fast Company Throws Down
One reason we ran long was a special, unexpected guest. Fast Company Senior Editor Mark Borden discussed the panel singling out the Fast Company Influencer Project in our session description. "Influence 'experiments' like Fast Company's project do more harm than good when it comes to defining and measuring influence." Borden's point is that the project was test and learn...and Fast Company did learn from it. Good point. And in hindsight the fact that we didn't ask Mark to sit on our panel is a miss. We're glad he stopped in.

But we stand by our comment. I have more of an issue with social voting projects as a whole. As I've said here previously "When we ask consumers to vote, generate content, watch a video or otherwise, we need to ask if we're merely creating a transaction to generate a metric. And if the answer is not clear, well, it probably is clear.

Social efforts like voting campaigns can be executed well and can have an impact. They can also do nothing more than preserve one-way communication between a brand and a consumer. We tend to over think this to achieve an easily-generated quantitative metric."

Recaps, Cases & Tweets
In addition to what we did talk about, one case study I wanted to discuss focused on how to find influencers. A team of folks at my employer used a process we have in place to create a blogger outreach list. It was trained on the top 20 influencers discussing DIY, home design/improvement projects. You can see more in the slides on how the list was created and the impact it ultimately had on the results.

We got some great questions and some great feedback from attendees. You can get some more back story from the discussion via our Twitter transcript if you want to dig. Or check out  recaps from Christophe Jammet and Kellye Crane. I'm also looking forward to doing a point/counterpoint on "Content is King" with Bazaarvoice's Ian Greenleigh in the near future.

"Instead of counting the people who reach, reach the people who count
My colleague's quote helps me conclude this post. There's no silver bullet, automagic shortcuts for finding influencers. While we'd (always) love better data to measure at a more exact level -- to identify different influencers at different points in a consumer's brand interactions for example -- it's a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures.

Key influencers are more than likely different for each situation/brand/project. Tie it all back to business goals and you'll be able to focus your efforts if nothing else.

Comments

[Mike Boehmer]

Thanks for the report! Insights such as these give me ideas on ways to better target our social media marketing efforts.

[Gary_r_lee]

Great post, and sorry I missed this panel, as it's one I would have liked to have heard and participated in.

Love this quote: "Instead of counting the people you reach, Reach the people who count." This is exactly right. And sums up why influencers matter so much. If we can reach the voices most impacting, or most influential, to our market, we have the potential to dramatically improve our marketing efforts over social networks, blogs and online publications. Great quote.

I agree with many of the points made here as they align tightly with how we at mBLAST (and many other smart people in marketing) are talking about the "art" and "science" of influencer identification and measurement. Refreshing to see your points here. Well done.

One note for you and your readers, the process described for identifying the influencers in the case study for Tigressa aligns with our mPACT solution set, and can automate the process if you have to go through it again. Check out http://www.mblast.com/mpact for additional information on our solution, or also our blog at http://blog.mblast.com/mbwordpress/ to learn more. We designed mPACT from the ground up to tackle the hard work of sorting through all the voices out there to find the ones most topically relevant to the keywords important to your market, and then use a set of algorithms and heuristics to discover and rank the most influential ones -- the ones actually impacting your market. We cover social networks, blogs and articles.

Nice blog and keep me posted if you guys decide to convene this panel again or one similar. I would be interested in participating as this is a topic we are passionate about.

Gary Lee
CEO, mBLAST
twitter: @gary_r_lee
Use mPACT to find, listen to, and measure the voices which impact and influence your market.
http://www.mblast.com/mpact

[Kevin Dugan]

Gary: Appreciate the add here. For all of the panels I attended, there were many I didn't find out about until after the fact. I can relate.

Thanks for the heads up on mPACT and mBLAST. Like you said above, it's a combo of art and science. Even as the science gets better, I think this will remain the case. Blogger outreach (in the case of Tigressa) is all about participation and it should follow more of a community relations model instead of a media relations model. That said, there is overlap between the two. But community relations requires us to roll up our sleeves and get engaged. And since social media is an engagement tool....

Thanks again.

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