Influencer Relations: Follow the Golden Rule

Ever heard of hungry-girl.com? If you aren’t in the food business, you probably haven’t. But if your audience is female, weight-conscious consumers, then blogger Lisa Lillien is your Oprah.

At least that’s how General Mills sees it. The world’s sixth largest food company, whose brands include Wheaties and Green Giant vegetables, has even let hungry-girl.com announce two of its products, according to public relations manager David Witt. Lillien is “one of the first consumers who was found a following with their own voice,” Witt says. “She’s one of the most cogent voices in the weight management field.”

General Mills is one of the more prominent consumer products companies to leverage the power of bloggers. The company maintains three significant platforms with which it interacts with this new breed of influencers.

• MyBlogSpark.com is a members-only club where bloggers can try out new products and participate in surveys and events.
• Pssst… Is a word-of-mouth network in which several thousand influencers have opted in to receive news, behind-the-scenes information and product samples.
• MyGetTogether is a place where Pssst members can register to host parties and events featuring General Mills product samples.

Having bought into the power of word-of-mouth, General Mills has learned a thing or two about working with consumer influencers. For starters, it believes in having an objective for engagement. Witt ticks off the company’s goals: brand advocacy, awareness/trial, introducing something new and exciting, furthering engagement with the brand and improving the way the company works. “If you believe that 10,000 people are smarter than one, then we become better by listening to our market,” he says.

General Mills doesn’t treat its online influencers like the media. The relationship is closer to a friendship than a business exchange. “When you have great news, who do you tell after your family? You tell your friends, of course,” he says. “That’s the philosophy we try to engender.”

A critical principle is to make influencers feel like insiders. That goal doesn’t have to be expensive to achieve. For example, every member of a General Mills network gets snippets of behind-the-scenes information delivered by e-mail at effectively no cost to the company. Some also get the privilege to buy branded merchandise from the company store. “Who cares if they don’t buy anything? There’s no cost to making the products available to them,” reasons Witt.

Particularly influential members may be invited to visit the Betty Crocker kitchens or to give feedback directly to management about new product ideas. Witt stresses that General Mills never tries to twist arms or buy loyalty. The company insists on following the FTC and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association ethics guidelines, which basically come down to “identify yourself and be clear about the intent of the relationship,” Witt says. “Be authentic and overtly transparent.”

In a nutshell, treat the online influencer as you would treat someone who invited you into her house. Witt likes this quote from Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay cosmetics: “Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’” Isn’t that how you would like to be treated?

More Stories and Advice at Awareness Community

The article above is one of several that I’ve recently written for Awareness Networks. Awareness was actually one of the first companies in the enterprise social media business. Its enterprise blogging platform was in use by some companies as early as 2005. Recently, Awareness has gotten into the business of integrated social marketing with a service called the Social Marketing Hub. The Hub enables businesses to manage their presences in multiple social venues (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and quickly cross-post information in a manner that’s appropriate to the destination site. The company is signing on boatloads of customers, so if your social media presence is a bit chaotic right now, give them a look.

Meanwhile, here are some other articles I’ve written for the Awareness Community:

• Old Spice Exclusive Interview: The Greatest Smelling Marketing Campaign in History
• Five Questions with SEO Expert Mike Moran
• JetBlue Listens Till It Hurts
• Social Media Case Study: Cree Leads the LED Lighting Revolution
• Twitter Best Practices — Getting the Most Of Your Tweet Time

Tip of the Week: Notepad++

The notepad is one of the most basic utilities on any computer. It’s a bare-bones text editor with a handful of fonts, no formatting and almost no special features. So why is it one of the most vital tools in my technology arsenal?

I’m not referring to Windows Notepad. I’m talking about an open-source alternative called Notepad++. I use it every single day. Notepad++ was designed for professional programmers, who work with very large amounts of text. I don’t even use 5% of its features, but the ones I do use save me at least an hour or two of work each week. Some of my favorites:

• Notepad++ takes about two seconds to start and consumes a tiny amount of memory.
• It’s blazingly fast. A search-and-replace operation takes less than a second to complete, even if there are hundreds of occurrences of the text string involved. This is a great way to strip out the HTML formatting code that make cutting and pasting from one authoring system to another such a pain.
• It can search and replace across multiple documents. This was a godsend when I was hit with a WordPress virus this spring and had to strip rogue code out of hundreds of PHP files. Notepad++ completed the task in about 10 seconds.
• The search-and-replace function understands spaces and tabs, which sometimes throw Word for a loop. This means I can paste a text table from a website and convert it to a comma-delimited CSV file that opens in Excel in a few seconds.
• Did I mention that it’s blazingly fast?

Developers have created lots of plug-ins for useful tasks like word count, auto-capitalization, file comparison and more. I just can’t say enough good things about this extraordinary tool. Best of all, it’s free.

Just for Fun: Free (Or Really Cheap) Stuff

Want silver jewelry for a gift, sheet music, cookbooks or Spanish lessons, but don’t have lots of money to shell out? No problem. Check out the links in this Woman’s Day article and you’ll find you can get stuff for cheap or free that you probably never thought possible. Some items are particularly nice to have for business travelers — free WiFi spots, business classes, business cards, radio service with your favorite types of music. We won’t call you “cheap,” but rather “thrifty.” And there is a recession on, after all.

Secrets of Blogger Relations

Since embracing social media two years ago, Dell Computer has learned a few lessons. One of its key blogger relations people shared some secrets last week in a keynote interview at the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Richard Binhammer is charged with monitoring and engaging with the active ecosystem of people who blog about Dell. In a keynote interview with John Cass, Binhammer talked about negativity, a concern often voiced by PR people. Dell has had its share of blogger criticism, going back to the famous Dell Hell incident of three years ago. But by methodically reaching out to complainers, the company reduced negativity from nearly half of all online posts to about 20% in a little less than a year. The secret? “Just talk to people,” Binhammer said. Most of the time, all they want is to be heard. Demonstrate that you’re listening and you can resolve most complaints.

But here’s an interesting fact: After reducing that negativity factor to 20%, the Dell team has been unable to bring it consistently below that level. Binhammer, whose background is in politics, theorizes that 20% is a natural floor, in the same way that 20% of the population always votes for the same political party, regardless of who runs.

This is worth remembering. Even the best businesses have a few unhappy customers. Your mileage may vary, but you should never expect to achieve 100% satisfaction. It’s more likely that your blogger relations program will get you to a manageable yet stubborn base level. That’s your floor, and you probably can’t do much to break through it.

Finding Resources

Binhammer also shed some light on how Dell allocates its communications resources. With so many tech bloggers out there, you’d think the company would have a small army of communications folks monitoring and responding to conversations. In fact, it has just two people sharing the job. The reason? Dell is lining up the whole company behind the effort to get more engaged with customers. PR monitors the airwaves, but doesn’t try to resolve every issue. Most comments are forwarded to the appropriate group for response.

I wish more companies would do this. Bloggers tend to be well-informed and passionate, which means that their inquiries and comments demand knowledgeable responses. Companies that simply delegate the response to PR are failing to benefit from the really rich conversations they can have with their most informed customers. Everyone from sales to engineering should want to speak to customers whenever possible. Why let marketing have all the fun?

Courting Online Influencers

In the previous articles in this series, we talked about how our hypothetical Quebec resort can find online influencers. We’ve seen that the process involves more than just a Google search. Now that you’ve identified people to engage with, you need to craft an approach and an incentive that’s right for them.

Influencers aren’t reporters. First, make an effort to understand the influencer. In a case of a blogger, scanning a few recent posts, reading a biography and noting the categories or tags that the person uses can give you a quick idea of what motivates him. For someone who contributes to a group blog or recommendation site such as TripAdvisor.com, consult her profile and list of recent posts to learn this information.

Make your initial contact meaningful and positive. If the e-mail address isn’t on the site, use Zoominfo.com, Spock.com or LinkedIn.com to find it. Even if you don’t like what the writer is saying, find something you do like and post a positive comment on her blog or Flickr portfolio. Bloggers love comments and links.

Offer something of value. This doesn’t have to be expensive; it can be a discount, free sample, trial offer or just a link from your web site.

Follow through. Drop a writer an e-mail or make a comment on his site every so often to show that you’re engaged.

Treat influencers the same way you would the media.Some companies worry that this is a slippery slope: if they legitimize bloggers by treating them like journalists then there is no going back.

You don’t have to treat all influencers the same. Decide what criteria a person needs to meet in order to merit special treatment and be prepared to explain those criteria to people who object.

Create an incentive. New influencers appreciate being taken seriously, so think of how you can get the people on your short list involved with your business. This doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does have to be special. Here are some ideas:

Photo weekend. Your research has shown that photo and video enthusiasts are an important constituency, so consider hosting a weekend gathering of top photo bloggers. Invite 10 key people to bring their cameras for a weekend, with accommodations on the house. Don’t require them to publish their photos online, but ask them to tag any images they publish with your resort name and ask to feature the best work on your site.

Contest. Raise the stakes a little and sponsor a photo contest. Winners will have their work featured on your home page and win a weekend trip for two. Or offer to feature the winning photo on your brochure. You can even have the community vote on entries. The cost is negligible and the payoff in prestige is substantial.

License content. Sponsor a ski weekend and invite key ski bloggers and videographers to attend. Offer to incorporate their best work into your collateral for a small licensing fee. Offer to introduce them to some of your travel industry colleagues in the area, too.

Free trials. Contact a few influencers and offer them 50% off the price of a weekend stay. Make it clear that you chose them because you admire their work. Flatter them. It’ll get you everywhere.

How to Find Influencers on Photo and Video Sites

In the first four parts of this series on finding online influencers, we focused principally on blog search. However, a variety of other social media outlets can point us to people whose preferred medium is photos, video and the spoken word. These people can also be important influencers. It’s just that their chosen media isn’t text.

As in our previous examples, we’ll pretend we’re a mythical resort in Quebec, Canada that’s looking to promote itself through influencer marketing.

Start by heading over to Yahoo’s Flickr, which is one of the largest photo-sharing sites. Type Quebec resort into the search box and select “Tags only.” This returns 272 results. Scroll to the list of photos and look for the photographers whose names come up most often.

One of them is “ash2276,” who’s submitted more than 1,100 photos and who belongs to more than 100 groups. Look at a sample of ash2276′s photos and note the large number of comments. This is someone with a following. Look at the photos tagged “Quebec” (there are 98 of them) and click on some of them. Note the enthusiastic comments. Ash2276 is an accomplished photographer, the kind of person you might want to invite to your resort for a photo weekend.

Flickr has over a half million groups, and while some are small or inactive, others are very large. Search for groups about Quebec and you get about 1,800 results. Most aren’t about Quebec specifically, but if you sort by group size and scroll down, you come across a group called “Canadian Beauty” with nearly 1,800 members, another called “Photo Quebec” with 144 members and a group titled simply “Quebec” with 483 members. Wade into the discussion forums and photo galleries for these groups and look for user names that appear frequently. These are also potential influencers.

Of course, there are plenty of other photo sharing sites on the Web, including Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photobucket and Kodak Gallery. They all have different features and nuances, but they all do basically enable people to categorize and share their photos.

Video and Audio Connections

We’re not done yet. Go to YouTube, the premier video-sharing site, and type Quebec resort into the search box. You’ll get 29 results. Looking at the user names, you note that “zenwaiter” has posted several videos. Click through to his profile and you read, “In the winter I travel all over Quebec…and I shoot video clips.” He even has a link to his website, zenwaiter.com.

Remembering our earlier search techniques, we look up that URL on Technorati and find 131 posts linking to it. Some of these bloggers might be good targets for you. The activity certainly indicates that zenwaiter is a promising influencer.

While we’re looking at multimedia, let’s check out whether there are any good podcasts in this area. Podcasts are Internet audio and video programs that you can download and play on computers or portable media players.

The Who’s Who of podcasting is Apple’s iTunes. Searching on Canada travel podcast, we come up with 150 results, which iTunes lets you sort by popularity. The service will also tell you which programs are explicit or clean, which is something you want to know.

The trick with podcasts is to identify programs that are still active. Many series go dormant after just a few episodes but they aren’t removed from the iTunes directory. The only way to tell, unfortunately, is to click through to descriptions or websites and see when it was last updated.

Podcast Alley lists 200 results for the same query, but they’re in no particular order. You need to look for promising titles and click through to the details page, where Podcast Alley provides a nice summary of popularity and recent episodes.Beware: many podcasts are produced by businesses – even your competitors – and probably aren’t good targets for you. We do quickly find a couple of good candidates, though, including Travelrific and The Travel Advice Show. Most podcasts have accompanying websites, so it’s pretty easy to find contact information.

We’re almost through the process of identifying influencers. Next week, we’ll look at social networks and social bookmarking sites.

Putting Specialized Search Into Action

In my last issue , I introduced two useful blog search engines. Now let’s put them to use on our test case: a Quebec resort. You’ll find that these resources do a pretty good job of scoping out possible influencers, but they also demonstrate that the search engines alone aren’t enough.

We start at Technorati, where we go to advanced search and type Canada resort into the search bar. We then specify that we only want blogs that the authors have identified as being about travel. We get a list of “44 results for canada AND resort in blogs tagged travel.”

We see that the top results are all from a site called TravelPod, which describes itself as “The Web’s Original Travel Blog.” Going to the home page of this rich site, we type Quebec into the search box. Our top result is a traveler named “Cobi” who has posted more than 100 entries and whom the site identifies as a “Top pick.” We also see that 39 of those entries are about a Canadian trip. Even though Cobi lives in Great Britain, she could be a good candidate for a repeat visit. We bookmark her profile page, where we can send her a message later.

Our search yields another top pick named “kevandsian” who has traveled to over 21% of the world and logged over 190,000 views from visitors. We also bookmark this traveler’s profile.

Returning to Technorati, we see that the second page of search results lists Jaunted, The Pop Culture Travel Guide. Technorati assigns it an authority of 670, which is very high. This site has many contributors and there are quite a few articles about Québec, so we hunt for people who have written a lot about the topic. One of them is Alex Robertson, who describes himself as “Senior Features Editor at EuroCheapo.com, as well as a freelance travel writer.” There’s a link to EuroCheapo.com. A Google search on alex robertson site:eurocheapo.com takes us directly to a staff listing and an e-mail address for Alex.

Not all our searches are as successful. Ask.com points us to AndrewLog, a blog written by a Canadian which has several posts about travel. But how influential is Andrew? If we enter the blog’s URL into Technorati, we find no links and the link: weblog.andrewcorp.com command in Google turns up just five. This blogger probably isn’t a good target for us.

Back at Ask, though, we stumble across SmartCanucks.ca, a Canadian site that features deals and discounts for Canadian consumers, including travelers. There’s a page of editor profiles here, too. A Google link: search turns up 113 citations. That isn’t bad. It’s probably worth offering some kind of coupon or other incentive.

As you can see, there’s nothing fast or easy about identifying influencers. Even though a clutch of services has emerged to handle some of the dirty work, it’s still up to human beings to assess whether an influencer deserves attention.

Our task doesn’t begin and end with search, though. There are elements on each site that may lead us to other influencers. Blogrolls, for example, are links to sites that bloggers find useful. This can be a quick way to discover new resources. You should also look at the profiles of the authors themselves. Frequently they list other sites to which they contribute, and you can often find other enthusiasts there.

That takes care of blog search, but there’s a whole new world of social networks that still need to be mined. Next week, we’ll continue the hunt through a few of those.

Use Online Tools To Find Influencers

One of the most common questions I hear is how to identify social media influencers. In particular, people want to figure out who are the most important sources of influence in a given market. So over the next few issues, I’ll outline some tactics you can use to do this.

These are strategies that work for me, but they are by no means the only ones you can use. Please let me know what works for you by posting your comments on this article’s permanent page. I’ll include your recommendations in the conversation as we go along.

For the purposes of demonstration, let’s assume that you’re marketing a resort destination in Quebec, Canada. You need to identify people who are interested in Canadian travel and who have an audience of regular readers or viewers. These people may turn up several different venues, including blogs, video- or photo-sharing sites and social networks like Facebook. Let’s start with the bloggers, and specifically with blog search.

Advanced search is your friend

Most people go to Google when they want to find something on the Internet, but there are plenty of other options to consider. In addition, there are capabilities buried within Google and other search engines that most people don’t know about. These can save you lots of time. For example, you can cut down the time you spend waiting for results pages to load simply by registering with a search engine and specifying in your preferences that you want to display 50 or 100 results per page instead of 10.

Don’t forget about the vast universe of search engines that aren’t Google. Wikipedia has a pretty good list of these. One of my favorites is Dogpile, which is a meta search engine. Meta search aggregates results from multiple search engines. Many search engines use Google, Ask, MSN or Yahoo! as their core technology, adding value on top. The results you get from these engines won’t differ appreciably from those of their technology providers, but the added features can be useful.

You should also know about the power of advanced search. Most search engines have an option to specify all kinds of search conditions and results options. Google’s advanced search page, for example, lets you specify sites that originate in a particular region or pages that were first found within the past day, week, month and so on.

This latter capability is particularly useful because you often want to strike while the iron is hot. If you can identify someone who is writing frequently about a topic, chances are that person or organization will be more interested in hearing from you.

There are gems buried in other search engines, too. Excite advanced search, for example, lets you specify a date range for when a Web page first appeared. Yahoo has Search Assist, which suggests alternative search terms that might get you closer to what you’re looking for. Ask.com has a similar feature and can also give you thumbnail previews right in the search results.

For mining the blogosphere, the options expand. There are dozens of blog-specific search engines (you can find a good list here), but the most popular ones are Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Blogdigger, Blogpulse and Bloglines. Zuula is a new meta search engine that just does blog search.

These alternative engines each have unique features. Blogdigger, for example, can organize results by date and has an option to find only multimedia results like video and podcasts. IceRocket searches MySpace.com. Opinmind has a “Sentimeter” that calculates a rating baseded upon the relative number of positive and negative opinions it finds. It’s limited, but can be useful if you have a big brand.

So we’re at the end of our first chapter and we haven’t even entered a search term yet! We’ll get to that next week. In the meantime, please post your own suggestions at this article’s permanent address here.