Taking Ideas and Bringing them to Life | Gregarious Narain — EP020

Common misconceptions and future vision of influence marketing

Today our guest is Gregarious Narain! Greg is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist, co-founder of the innovation firm Before Alpha, and previously the CTO and founder of Chute. Prior to Chute, Greg was the first employee and vice-president of product at Klout, where he established the Klout store we know and love as the standard for online influence. We discuss the common misconceptions of influence marketing, how Greg works with different companies to show ROI, the traditional vs.current ways of message distribution, the challenge of a brand portraying the right personality, and how brands can create great experiences for their customers.

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Links: Episode 020 mp3 file, Influence Marketing Podcast RSS feed

Main Points:

• Showing value or attribution is getting easier for companies, but still a challenge. Social media reintroduced the model of relationships and sharing organically, but still a challenge.
• Social media presents an opportunity to tell a more authentic and naturally-delivered story.
• The ability to drive influence online as a score gave people interest to visit Klout. It was misused, but still was a dynamic and interesting way of measurement.
• The misconception of influence marketing is that it is “influencer” marketing, where you take your message and hire a person to send it out into the world.
• The notion and ideas themselves are important. We are seeing a world where people want authentic messages they can trust and can see through the old way of being talked at rather than a community discussion.
• Motion and the messages that tell your story. Many times it would be better for the influencer to help create the message, but not be the one to distribute it.
• We are seeing more people come to video as a way to consume information.
• A brand is not an individual, so the most authentic version is that all of those people believe that thing rather than the brand saying one inauthentic message.
• The heart of the relationship is seen as someone sticking up for the brand and their values.
• The journey of taking ideas and bringing them to life is inspiring and interesting to Greg.

About our guest, Gregarious Narain:

Gregarious “Greg” Narain has been at the forefront of social media marketing, influencer marketing, and product marketing for more than 20 years. In his illustrious career, Greg has helped drive marketing verticals — such as content management, email and customer relationship systems, and marketing research — with a focus on product development and launches.

Greg has been the founder of numerous startups in the influencer marketing space, as well as being the founder of his own agency that worked with startups and Fortune 500 companies on product development and business strategies. Greg brings his product experience to marketing by leveraging his experience and problem-solving skills to dissect industries, define problems and create innovative product solutions.

Gregarious has spoken internationally at many leading industry events, including Cannes Lions Innovation, DreamForce, NAB, SXSW, AWS Re:Invent and is involved with numerous nonprofits and organizations.

Mentioned In This Episode:

• John on Twitter: @jtroyer
• Kathleen on Twitter: @dailykat
• Gregarious Narain on Twitter: @gregarious
• Gregarious Narain on Medium: Gregarious Narain
• Gregarious Narain on Linkedin: Gregarious
• Before Alpha

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.