I’ve recently worked with several clients on influencer marketing campaigns. These are  proving to be popular new complements to traditional PR programs that approach media relations from a completely different perspective. Influencer relations is gaining popularity as the media landscape shifts and domain experts gain prominence.

The media industry is slashing and burning its way through a wrenching transition. There have been more than 5,300 layoffs in the U.S. newspaper industry just this year, and three major dailies, with a combined total of more than 400 years of continuous publishing, have closed just last month.

The situation is just as bad in b-to-b publishing, where more than 275 business magazines have closed since the beginning of 2007, according to BtoB magazine.

Shifting Influence
With mainstream media dwindling at the same time the number of citizen publishers is rising, it’s not surprising that individual influencers are becoming a promising target. Even professional editors and reporters are increasingly turning their attention to the blogosphere and Twittersphere as a source of expertise and even news. The first place a reporter goes when looking for sources these days is Google. As a result, popular bloggers are suddenly inundated with media inquiries. This is an opportunity for marketers. Some publications are even recruiting bloggers to contribute to their branded sites. These financially driven actions are having the effect of amplifying the volume of individual voices.

An influencer relations program seeks to strike up conversations with these domain experts on the assumption that their opinions are reaching increasingly large audiences, both through their own websites and the amplifiers I just described. This is quite different from a conventional PR campaign, which starts with analysts and journalists on the theory that they are the influencers. We are beginning to rethink this dynamic. Conventional PR will be harder to do in the future as the ranks of staff journalists shrink and the shrinking number that is left struggles with an overwhelming volume of PR pitches.

In contrast, most bloggers get very few inquiries from marketers and are more likely to spend time listening to what they have to say. This is a pretty appealing option for marketers who are frustrated with being one of the 300 or 400 daily inquiries an already seriously overworked reporter gets.

The Human Touch
So how do you find influencers? There are a number of commercial services that attempt to perform the task programmatically, but my experience has been that they only get you halfway there. It’s not difficult to find someone who writes, podcasts, or tweets about a topic, but assessing that person’s biases and style is an entirely different issue.

For example, in a recent project for a company with a novel approach to weight loss therapy, we discovered that the topic was more controversial than we thought. Some people have very strong opinions about the subject, and pitching the client’s novel approach to them would have been the equivalent of sticking our hand into a beehive.

You also can’t assume that domain experts necessarily want to talk about their domain of expertise. In a recent engagement that looked for pharmaceutical researchers, we found that people with Ph.D.s in that area blog about everything from cooking to environmentalism. In fact, only a minority paid much attention to pharmaceuticals at all.

At this point, there’s no way to ascertain the agenda, biases or voice of influencers without digging in and reading what they have to say. If you don’t do that critical homework, you risk alienating the very people you’re trying to reach. Bloggers expect you to know something about them. Unlike the mainstream media, they don’t understand how the pitch game is played and they don’t care. They know a lot about their subjects and they tend to regard clueless come-ons with disdain.

For now, there’s no substitute for the human touch when it comes to influencer relations campaigns. Next week I’ll talk about some of the nuances of dealing with these new audiences.

Learn more about my influencer relations services

• Influencing the New Influencers: How PR Can Harness Social Media to Build Brand, Buzz and the Bottom Line –- Bulldog Reporter webcast, March 27
• PR Lifelines in Healthcare — keynote presentation, Indianapolis, April 10
• Social Networks: The New Architecture of the Web — a KDMC webcast with Poynter/NewsU, April 14
• World Without Media: What Will Fill The Void? — New Communications Forum, San Francisco, April 28
• Inbound Marketing Summit — San Francisco, April 28-29 **Use discount code VIP50 to save 50% on the registration fee.**

Have you ever come up with a Tweetable idea at 11:00 p.m. and realized that none of the people you want to tell about it are likely to be on Twitter? Then get yourself an account at Tweet Later, a service that lets you create Twitter messages and schedule them for delivery hours or even days later. You can also create a standard message to deliver automatically to people when they start following you. The pricey premium service offers all kinds of options for scheduling tweets at different times and in different combinations, but the basic free service is useful if you simply want to make sure the largest number of people read your message.

My Newspaper Death Watch blog is my labor of love, and is also garnering attention from large news organizations like El Mundo and, most recently, CNN (keep an eye out for the story in the coming week or two). So I have a soft spot in my heart for blogs that keep tabs on the newspaper industry. Criggo keeps tabs on stories, picture captions and classified ads, among others, that tickle your funny bone or just make you wonder why on Earth anyone would put this stuff into print in the first place. PLEASE NOTE: Some of the stories on this site are not appropriate for all audiences. If it were a movie, it would be rated R.

The Travel Media Association of Canada recently brought me out to the lovely city of Vancouver, B.C. to talk about new media. Its industry is going through some big changes: Traditional publishers are cutting back on freelance expenses or going out of business. Lucrative writing assignments are harder to come by. The travel journalists in the audience were looking for new ways to make a living with their blogs while still pursuing the work they love.

In last week’s issue, I talked about the opportunities available in advertising sponsorships, but few bloggers make a living from ads. The bigger opportunity is to build service and licensing revenues around expertise. The blog is really a showcase for other skills. Here are some ideas I shared with the group for making money from their blogs:

Books – Nearly one in 200 Americans has now published a book. A new crop of Internet self-publishers is making this easy and relatively cheap. Sites like Lulu, iUniverse, Blurb, AuthorHouse, CafePress and UBuildABook can publish books for single-copy prices starting at less than five dollars. Books don’t need to be 70,000-word tomes, either. They can be pocket guides. What’s more, the self-publishing process at some of these sites is almost totally automated. The author doesn’t even need to speak to a person. Many self-publishers now have their own bookstores and agreements with online booksellers.

Self-publishing has much better margins than traditional publishing. However, there are significant trade-offs. The author is usually responsible for all marketing and publicity, some publishers require a minimum order volume and Amazon doesn’t carry many self-published titles. Still, an entire industry of motivational speakers thrives on this model, so it can’t be all bad.

Custom publishing — If you’ve taken beautiful photographs of ski areas in Banff , offer to sell them to a local tourist bureau or resort hotel to use in a promotional calendar. Or offer to create a video travelogue of that same hotel that can be posted on a website or delivered via CD. Even if your skill is strictly in prose, lots of businesses would gladly buy copy written from an expert with demonstrated ability than risk their hand in at the freelance market. Travel companies aren’t publishers, so use your publishing skill to make their work easier.

Consulting — Blogs are a great way to strut your stuff. If you’ve been to 25 Swiss ski resorts, why not promote yourself as the expert on creating a European hospitality experience? Or maybe your experience visiting hundreds of great wine cellars can make you an expert consultant in that area for startup restaurants. By search-optimizing your site for these very specific skills, you can make the short list when businesses begin their search.

The future of publishing will be less about institutional brands and more about personal brands. Blogs are a great way to create and promote personal expertise. It takes some work, and not everyone is comfortable with the idea of self-promotion. But if you look at a blog as a window on bigger business opportunities, there really are lots of choices.

I never really “got” Second Life. I spent a few hours messing around with it, but I found myself frustrated and perplexed by its complexity. I could never understand why so many businesses spoke so highly of it. Maybe my instincts weren’t so wrong after all. In the past year, Second Life has all but faded from view as it has been eclipsed by a community that is its polar opposite: Twitter. I think the contrast is fascinating, and I remarked on that in my latest column in BtoB magazine.