The Bottom Line

By Nick Hayes
nick.hayes@influencer50.com

Problem One has been solved. There are now people employed to head up Influencer Relations. Now Problem Two, what to do with the title?

Researching for a book makes people take notice of you. That became clear to me when I approached a handful of top vendors that we most respect and asked them if they’d like their own influencer marketing activities to be featured in the form of a case study. Aside from one or two, almost all responded, and quickly. Most within just a few days. All were courteous and encouraged our work on the book, but few felt they had any examples to contribute.

The surprise was that these people were from the very top brand-name companies, with titles such as ‘Head of Influencer Relations’. And it turned out from our conversations that most had been in their roles for more than six months. Now if they hadn’t wished to feature in the book because they wanted to keep their successes confidential I could have easily understood. But that wasn’t always the case. The fact was, only very few had an easily packaged, tangible program in place in their companies. I heard several stories of how some had spent the first few months wondering exactly what they were meant to be doing in their new role, wondering exactly who were the influencers beyond the obvious three or four names, and having to endlessly explain to internal colleagues of their new function. But almost no stories of live programs with tangible results.

So I figure we are now at the stage of most major companies understanding the impact of these non-traditional influencers, and acknowledging their need to address them. Few now even argue that these influencers can be critical to sales success. But influencer programs aren’t underway because no-one knows how to measure their success in addressing them, and without program measurement nowadays, no-one green lights the program. We have a measurement problem.

And until we can identify key metrics to measure the targeting of influencers, then influencer programs will stay for those companies in the ‘nice to have’ rather than ‘must have’ category.

I’m actually quite happy with this, because it shows a major progression from just eighteen months ago when few companies even acknowledged the need to address their key influencers separately from their existing PR and AR campaigns. Both PR and AR disciplines have taken decades to establish metrics that vendors, agencies and all stakeholders accept, even if they do tend to be cruder and more numbers-based than most practitioners would like.

Now unlike the vast majority of PR and AR campaigns, expensive print adverts and the like, salespeople totally buy into the need for influencer programs, they know explicitly the power of those constantly whispering into the ear of their prospect’s decision-maker. And salespeople know that they personally can’t get to those influencers. So there’s never a problem getting the support of the salesforce when it comes to influencer programs. Measurement came reluctantly to PR, AR and other fields. Looks like we need to be much more aggressive with it before Influencer Programs become widespread.