Social Media Influencers - Who They Are and How to Recognize Them?

“With a disproportionate ability to spread information and add credibility, influencers are human TV stations and magazines.” Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert, Co-author The NOW Revolution

Smart marketers have started taking a serious note of social media influencers. With information overload from various online and offline channels, today buyers trust opinions of friends and experts, more than the advertising campaigns by brands.

As observed by Ian Carrington, Sales Director for mobiles at Google UK, during the Google+ event at Social Media week in London, “Consumers were 300 percent more likely to buy a product recommended by a friend.”

So who really are the social influencers? Celebrities with hundreds of thousands of fans and following? Friends and colleagues whose opinion we tend to trust more? Experts in a particular field? Well, I would say that social influencers can be any or all of these – depending on the product and brand.

For example:

1.    For a medical instruments brand, a well-known doctor’s opinion will be valued more than a well known personality’s opinion.

2. At fashion shows, celebrities have started making their mark because for young generation, those are the fashion icons.

3.  For baby food, organic and earth friendly products, credible Mommy bloggers have become real movers.

4.    A grocery store once sponsored a cooking show where the show chef used items from the store and made exotic dishes. Now, for the store, the chef was the social influencer.

5.    After the Tsunami, Japan Tourism saw a sharp decline in visitors. Therefore, to make an impact, Japan tourism had proposed to start a project inviting bloggers and people who are active on social media to come and visit places in Japan by offering them free flight. The proposal was that the bloggers will visit the places which had got affected by Tsunami and then write about how the places been recovered successfully.

Considering the variety in the types of influencers, the question comes to mind is that how to know if you, as a marketer, are choosing a right influencer? Well, I think the real social media influencers have some common characteristics such as:

•  They have a very engaged network. They are in touch with their network well. They don’t just broadcast messages but are well-connected with their network and they are able to influence conversations. 
• They are credible for people to take notice. They opinions are valued because they ‘know’ what they are saying – either because of their professional expertise or general experience.
•  They have reach – The reach could direct or indirect. Either they are able to directly reach out to masses or they can reach out to people who can in turn reach out to masses.
• They have their own style and people appreciate them for their style and with that style, they can keep the people engaged.

It is undoubted that in the coming years, a major trend in marketing is going to be social influence targeting. As brands are realizing the value of social influencers, they have started forming more close relationships with them. But I believe that social influencers should never ‘endorse’ any brand. That makes them loose their credibility. Then it starts appearing like advertising. Social influencers should maintain clear, unbiased, informed and well-thought of opinions to retain their credibility.  

What is your take? Have you ever made any purchase decision because of social influencers? Share your thoughts, experiences and comments. 

Social Media for Product Companies

Let’s accept it – social media is changing the way we live today. So if you believe that your products are going to change people’s life for good, you need to be closer to your audience through social media.

Let us take up three popular social media platforms and see how those can be used for your products business. 

Facebook: More than 700 million people are on Facebook and that’s a very significant number itself. You can use Facebook as a very powerful platform for:

• Educating People: This is especially very useful if your product is innovative, based on some ground-breaking idea, involves concept selling and requires explaining some new concepts.
• Generating Feedback: Got a new version of the product? Ask the users about their views. You can also gather feedback about specific features, customer support, an advertising campaign or even your ads. Since the feedback comes right from the existing or potential users of your product, it is a very valid which can immensely help you in your product development, technical support as well as marketing and sales.
• Knowledge Sharing: Share useful tips, knowledge-base articles, cool short-cuts and tricks for effective use of your product. This will not only keep the fans engaged but also provide great value to the users.  
• Customer Support: Want to be closer to your product users? Allow them to post their questions and queries on Facebook. If possible, provide immediate answers or route the query to customer support team/ support forum.

Twitter: Twitter is a perfect broadcasting medium to convey your message to a large user-base.  Use Twitter for:

• Announcement: Announce new release, new product, deals, special offers, webinars and collateral release like white paper or ebook. Twitter has tremendous potential of reaching out to a large audience in a very short period. Remember to use appropriate hashtags to get maximum reach.
• Knowledge Sharing: Share interesting news, articles, your own blog posts, news items and establish your thought leadership.
• Customer Support: Many companies like Comcast, HomeDepot are effectively using Twitter for providing customer support. But make sure that your support staff is extremely well trained to provide real-time, online support on social media.

YouTube: Online video marketing is growing, and it’s growing very fast. If you have not yet included it in your marketing strategy, it’s high time that you take it seriously. YouTube, with more than 2 billion views per day, undoubtedly holds a prime spot in your social media tools list. 

Here are the types of videos you can upload on YouTube:

• Product Videos: Upload your product demos, how to videos and videos explaining critical features. This is sure to get appreciation from your product users. For new users, it’s so much easier to look at the audio-visual format than read plain text to understand the product.
• Technical Support Videos: Provide videos for most frequently asked technical questions like installation/ un-installation of the product, activation or even using a popular feature. This will surely reduce the load on the technical support team.
• Conference Speeches: Is someone from your company speaking at some conference? Record the speech and upload it for those who missed it. This will be great in establishing your thought leadership.
• Customer Testimonials: Go beyond textual testimonials. Have videos of customer testimonials. If one picture is worth 1000 words, one video could be worth a million words :-)

So get ready with your social media strategy and get maximum from it. Remember, don’t start with “how to increase sales through social media” but see “how to engage and converse with your audience through social media”. After all, conversation comes before conversion. Sales will be an obvious byproduct if you have engaged audience.

This article was first published on Technorati at:  http://technorati.com/business/advertising/article/social-media-for-product-companies

Building Pre-Launch Buzz – Mix of Creativity, Diligence and Focus

While launching a new product, many miss out on pre-launch buzz, that is creating buzz about the product and making people interested in it even before the product is launched. The concept of pre-launch buzz is not new. Film industry has been using it for many years.  The purpose of pre-launch buzz is to create desire, need and excitement for the product in the market. With this, when the product becomes available, it starts selling like hot cake.

The best way to use the pre-launch phase is to warm up the market, your prospects, your customers. Use this time to engage with the market, look for feedback, ask questions, address objections, conduct surveys and answer questions.

I believe that for the pre-launch buzz to be successful, it needs to have a right mix of creativity, diligence and focus.

Creativity: Pre-launch buzz creation definitely requires a lot of creativity. Rather than going by the regularly mentioned things like putting up a teaser, offering a whitepaper etc, you need to identify what will appeal to your audience, what will excite them and what will make them talking about your product/ service? Of course, this requires a thorough understanding of your market, research of your target group, your competition (if any), detailed understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and so on.

Focus: What do you want to achieve from your pre-launch buzz creation campaign?  What exactly do you mean by creating buzz? Yes, the end result is to get more customers or users for your product, but that need not be the sole objective of your campaign. You need to widen the scope and achieve more than that. As mentioned above, some of it could be getting some insights through surveys, handling objections, establishing your thought leadership in the market and so on.

Diligence: The reason I have included this factor here is because the pre-launch is a delicate and sensitive phase in your product lifecycle. It could make or break the product. The right kind of buzz can make the product very successful while a poorly executed pre-launch campaign can make the product introduced with a negative impression. So spend some good, quality time in planning and executing your pre-launch buzz campaign. Spend dedicated time in managing the campaigns and monitor the responses carefully.

I recently came across an interesting pre-launch buzz campaign. This company, IDYeah Labs, has not yet revealed what it is planning to launch but has just introduced a contest asking its Facebook fans to guess what it is up to? Certainly an interesting and welcome effort of using social media (only) for creating the buzz. Let us wait and watch how it works out for the company.

Have you come across any pre-launch buzz campaign which really appealed to you?