The data is out there: Marshall Kirkpatrick and the science of influencers— EP016

Influencers on social media can supercharge your business or change the world — it’s up to you

Today our guest is Marshall Kirkpatrick, Product Director in Influencer Discovery & Research at Sprinklr. Previously, Marshall was Co-founder and CEO of the influencer tool Little Bird, which was acquired by Sprinklr.

We talk with Marshall about his experiences with the early days of Twitter, and how identifying and working with influencers in a given space is powerful both for networking and marketing in business, but also for learning and understanding new ideas and collectively working together on the challenges we all face.

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Links: Episode 017 mp3 file, Influence Marketing Podcast RSS feed

Main Points:

• Marshall shares some of his earlier innovative work in social media and his observations on the current state of Twitter. Twitter enables a “zero distance” between companies and customers, creating the ability for a dialogue that may not happen in person.
• Marshall had his own Kerouac moment as he traveled the country talking with people.
• Twitter followers vs metrics: Marshall has about 60K Twitter followers. He tweets 5–20 times a day, and a lot of tweets get less than 1,000 impressions. A tweet each day with 2,000 or more impressions is a nice base hit.
• Marshall’s definiton of “influencer marketing”: a broad spectrum of activities that companies and individuals can engage with that range from paid collaboration and brand advocacy model all the way to a relationship-cultivating, research-based consistent way of doing business that may or may not include explicit brand advocacy, but can help a brand optimize their own content for relevance and become an influential thought leader themselves.
• Marshall, John, and Kat talk about their slow warmup to Twitter when first introduced to it in the early days of the platform.
• Simon Wardley’s model of different types of roles as systems and companies mature: pioneers, settlers and city planners.
• Marshall explains how he monitors and tracks certain tweets and activity in different areas through the Sprinklr dashboards.
• Five ways to add value on social media: say something first, say it best, bring multiple perspectives together, have a unique perspective, be funny. Marshall shares how social listening can help a company grow a body of knowledge.
• In our regular lightning round, Marshall talks about co-founding Little Bird with his wife and continuing to work together with her as one of the things he’s proud of.
• Marshall is very interested in how social media can transform how we come together to work on some of our hardest probelms we’re facing, such as the environment.

About our guest, Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall Kirkpatrick works as a Product Director in influencer discovery & research at Sprinklr. He was previously co-founder of Little Bird. Prior to that, he was Co-Editor at ReadWriteWeb, the first hired writer at TechCrunch, and a consultant to companies large and small.

Mentioned In This Episode:

• John on Twitter: @jtroyer
• Kathleen on Twitter: @dailykat
• Marshall Kirkpatrick on Twitter: @MarshallK
• Marshall on Medium: Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Marshall’s web site: marshallk.com
• Sprinklr
• Techonomy
• Simon Wardley: Pioneers, Settlers, and Planners (2012) and On Pioneers, Settlers, Planners, and Theft (2015)
• Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability (TED Talk)

The Influence Marketing Podcast is a podcast from the Influence Marketing Council, an industry council for B2B brands who innovate in influencer, advocacy, and community marketing. Podcast co-hosts John Mark Troyer and Kathleen Nelson Troyer are also co-founders of the IMC. For more information, go to influencemarketingcouncil.com.