In the golden age of branding, several guests at the party held sway: brand, PR, marketing, external relations (ER), research, and the agencies. On top of that, we had a few occasional attendees, such as consumer affairs, investor relations, and community relations.
Today, in the golden age of consumer empowerment, we have the same party guests, but their sway is being challenged in a very big way by an aggressive, sometimes rude and abrupt new guest at the party: the consumer influencer.
I'm talking about the loudmouths everyone hears and reacts to. These folks really move the needle when it comes consumer generated media creation and spread. They write the power blogs, lead the communities, organize the forums, create the boards, upload the most viewed videos on YouTube, lead mini-revolutions on Facebook, and more.
They may have accrued influence over time or have situational influence (e.g., they were first to try and review the iPhone, hence setting off a broader chain reaction). That influence often spills from the online zone into the offline or vice versa. Indeed, today's uber-influencers are largely platform agnostic, except they tend to have a more quantifiable digital trail of results online. Put another way, if you search their names, you'll find evidence of something they said.
Who manages and converses with these influencers?
Is there a defined person, department, group, or entity within your organisation charged with influencer management? Should there be? Equally important, what are the risks of too many folks going after the same constituency?
Our advice is to engage a partner like shifted pixels to monitor, engage with and report on thesee internet conversations. Engaging a blogger or high profile forum members requires a very different set of techniques than traditional PR. Keen to know more, call us for a quick chat.
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Update: 11 July 2007
Ok so we must confess we have been caught out for copy pasting (see comments) from one of our favourite websites for the majority of this blog post. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and whilst that is true, if your gunna copy other people stuff, you really should to give credit to your source.
We were in the wrong, and we definitely were not practicing what we preach. Sorry readers...
Thanks Richard (http://richardstacy.wordpress.com), sorry bud, sometimes we just get so excited with the ideas out there we cant help but publish them, and its very easy to want to own that idea for yourself.
Labels: communities, consumer, Marketing, pr, reputation
Posted by Nick HaC @ 12:34 AM
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I think it would only be polite to reference the fact that this article is a pretty much a direct lift from Pete Blackshaw's Click Z article of June 12 http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3626120
As also discussed in his blog
http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/2007/06/who_owns_the_in.html
Except of course that Pete didn't advocate hiring Shifted Pixels.
There is nothing wrong with circulating ther people's stuff, its what this new game is all about after all, but one of the rules is that you need to give the source its due credit. Its also a sensible thing to do in this instance because Pete Blackshaw and Click Z have a much higher profile and more cedibility than you, and you could have used that to lend more credence to your assertion that this means you should hire a monitoring agency - i.e. Shifted Pixels.
Richard Stacy
http://richardstacy.wordpress.com
i like yopu))