Algorithmic Influencer Marketing

19 Jul 2017

I had a great Penny Chat with Kara Fulgum regarding a very foreign concept to me, Influence Marketing. But first off…

What on earth is Influence Marketing?

Influence Marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. (Yep, totes stole that from Wikipedia.)

Why on earth am I suddenly interested in Influence Marketing?

If you’ve been friends with me for very long, you’ve probably heard me reference my mysterious side-project, the social-network-infiltrator! Basically it is a Twitter graph scraper that is able to apply simple algorithms and answer interesting questions. Questions like:

• Who are the 10 most central thought leaders in Nashville Python?
• Who are the top 1000 people in Nashville that are interested in Python?
• Who works in the engineering department at Emma?
• Given an individual, what communities is she/he involved in?

If you connect the dots, this type of tool should be pretty useful in the world of Influence Marketing, it can help PR/Marketing firms find the right influencers more quickly and target them more precisely.

Here’s what I learned.

Kara is a junior dev at a marketing firm, but before that she was a Public Relations expert specializing in Influence Marketing for Country musicians. So, developer and PR expert, Kara is the perfect person to talk to! Here are some of the neat things I learned:

• Influence Marketing concrete example: Let’s say a Country music client approaches Kara to promote a new single. Kara will begin research to identify the “best” influencers on YouTube. A good influencer will have a large number of active viewers and will be a good match to the style of the client. Once a set of potential influencers has been identified Kara will contact them to see if they are interested in promoting the musician. Then the details are worked out and an influencer might agree to play the musician’s music in the background of their video and post a link in the comments for a certain fee.
• There are lots of influence platforms: YouTube, Vine, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, blogs, etc., etc.
• Research is time consuming: Kara (or Kara’s employees) would spend large portions of the day watching Vine clips and YouTube clips in order to narrow down the potential set of influencers. Once narrowed down, you still have to contact each influencer (hundreds per day) so that you can talk with the small portion of influencers that actually respond. And then, the fees are so wildly varying, that only a tiny portion of the contacted influencers will end up under contract.
• Middle markets are springing up: Because it takes so much time to track down influencers, a middle market of Influence Management has popped up. They have already done the hard work of tracking down important inflencers and standardizing the interactions with the influencers, so often times PR firms skip over much of the research and just deal with the influence managers.
• Old school Public Relations is still alive and well: All of the above has to do with the new idea of Influence Marketing, but the older PR idea of “Make friends with a news media writer and feed them ideas” is still common practice.

Where does this leave my social-network-infiltrator bot?

It seems like my little Twitter bot might find some good use in this field. Kara told me that the tool has successfully inferred what college she attended, what sorority she had joined, her affinity to Country music, and her recent career change to software development. So the tool seems to be accurate! But will it be useful in the field of PR and Influence Marketing? Here were my takeaways:

• The tool can reduce the research time of PR experts by identifying “the right” influencers quickly and reducing the amount of content that you need to rummage through to find them.
• The tool can identify hidden “micro-influencers” - those that don’t have huge following but are nevertheless quite influential for very specific markets.
• The tool can help old-school PR by literally enumerating all the employees of various media outlets.
• But, the tool would benefit from a little bit higher-level interface. You currently have to specify “example accounts” (for instance these might be “typical Nashville Python developers”) and then the algorithm identifies the “influence leaders” for that group. A better interface would just allow the PR expert to type search terms in order to get at the same information.

I learned a lot from our discussion Kara. Thanks for your time!