Influence Marketing is Strategy, Not Tactics
If you are in an organization that thinks influence marketing is just a tactical piece of a marketing budget, even if it’s a big piece, the organization is doing its self, its employees, advocates, and partners a grave disservice. Working with influencers and creating influencers, both inside and outside the company is a strategic part of company survival. The right kind of program sows the seeds for how the company will look in the future. To put this in different words, how you treat your influencers, both within and without, is a reflection of you and your company’s business ethic. If your company tosses programs and people away every six months in a re-org or a planning process, it will never gain and keep customers. Communities, people and programs are valuable — often more so than products. Just look at how Apple’s community sticks with it even when the MacBook Pro overheats, or the software stinks, or the price rises dramatically.
In a small way, that’s been more highly visible during the last decade or so with the “viral” growth of social networks. LinkedIn and Twitter especially owe their very existences to influencers who grew the platforms and continue to use it, even if they are quite different influencers. Recruiters built LinkedIn and journalists grew Twitter. Snapchat, too, grew through influence marketing — pre-teen to pre-teen. The number of times Snapchat has made a major product decision and had to reverse it shows you how important its advocates are to its growth.
Even Facebook still relies on influence marketing. Why did we all originally join? Because someone influenced us to do so, even if that influencer was only a classmate or a relative. In fact, Facebook has been successful even in the face of all its privacy scandals, because it has a higher purpose connected directly to its business model: to connect the world. That’s strategic, and that’s important.
And say what you will about Facebook, it has now resolved to spend a bit of its massive fortune to make sure it can preserve user trust. Facebook has to make sure that it’s influencers (you and I) feel comfortable staying on the platform. Every time I see a Facebook post that says “I’ve got to back away from this for a while,” that’s an influencer in your newsfeed beginning to influence you. If that continues, we’ll all leave.
Which is why you must begin to treat the people in charge of your influence marketing program as seriously as you treat the influencers you and they are trying to cultivate. Everyone wants meaning and purpose in a job, and community managers, public relations and analyst relations people, dev rel managers, and partner success managers are no exception. Typically, they take community-related jobs because they understand the strategic value of those jobs, but then some overload treats them like disposable and fungible tacticians. “Oh let’s try more of this and less of that next quarter.”
And down the drain go all the relationships they’ve carefully nurtured. Some of them go with those relationships, and some customers accompany them down the drain.
Until you realize that influence marketing is strategic, you won’t get the value out of it that you should, and you will continue to devalue the employees who are responsible for the relationships your team actually holds.
