Identifying Influencers
Fans, Hecklers, Crowd Members and Brand Evangelists
There are plenty of ways to categorise the people involved in dialogue about your brand. We liken them to the people you find at a rock concert or sporting event:
- Fans: the people who love your brand and are quite vocal about it. They're always in the front row and they listen to everything you say. If they get to meet you, they feel incredibly special.
- Hecklers: the people whose conversations detract from your brand. They're quite vocal, and don't mind telling others about your shortcomings (whether they're true or not). They like attention and if you show them you respect their opinion they might very well turn into fans one day.
- Crowd Members: They know about you but they only turned up to the conversation because they had nothing better to do. Most people fit this category and your goal should be to turn them into fans by impressing them.
- Brand Evangelists: We could have called them groupies to continue the analogy, but we didn't like the connotations. Brand Evangelists love you so much they will do anything for you and will actively go out and recruit new fans without even being asked.
Joining the conversation is the first and most important step in building a relationship with your customers but you need to approach it the same way as you would spending Christmas with your new flame's extended family for the first time. There will be a bunch of wildly different characters doing the talking and all you'll know about them is that the only thing they have in common is the new love of your life. If you don't remember anyone's name or at least pretend to be interested in crazy Aunty Beryl's greyhound's eczema, you're definitely not going to be on anyone's Christmas list next year, and your new squeeze isn't going to want to take you to any more family functions. Which is fine.
Until crazy Aunty Beryl wins the lottery.
The Internet is full of crazy Aunty Beryls. Sometimes they win the lottery, most of the time they don't. Marketing used to be about befriending people after you knew they'd hit the jackpot, social media marketing is about making sure you're on as many Christmas lists as possible.
"The best way of getting on someone's Christmas list is making sure they're on yours."
Putting together a database of your own customers is a great start, but if you want to be really effective in social media marketing, you need to know who your customers are before they buy anything from you. You need to know who is talking, not just about you, but about your industry, your competitors, your products and your customer service. Your customers are a highly-influential group of people when it comes to recommending your products to their friends, but there is a whole other group of people out there who you've never heard of. We know who they are.
In online conversations, most companies will have relatively few vocal fans, a bunch of hecklers and a whole lot of crowd members watching what's going on. Before you can engage these people and really start turning fans into brand evangelists, crowd members into fans and hecklers into crowd members, you need to know where to concentrate your efforts and how public opinion about your company is shaping up.
Using a range of proprietary software tools, search applications and contextual human analysis we can tell you exactly who has influence well beyond your existing customer database. We put you in touch with them and we help you develop strategies to help you build mutually beneficial relationships that last a lifetime. You never know when crazy Aunty Beryl is going to win the lottery.