How do you find influencers?
What are some strategies and tactics you use (or could use) to find and identify influencers for your company or product?
Answers (13)
Shaun A
Organizer & Investor
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Been chatting about this a little recently - in terms of what would be nice. Link below to a post by Daniel Tunkelang Chief Scientist at Endeca, which provides some direction. Also working with folks from Social Amp to figure out some approaches for FB which look very promising. Other nice to have would be a unified view of profiles across various social media sites - for example FB-Twitter-Yelp-Wordpress-LinkedIn-Friendfeed would be nice to get a better feel for activity across currently fragmented identities.
Currently though, feels very clumsy. Using a mix or search tools to find people talking about keyword phrases I care about - in particular using www.daylife.com, www.socialmention.com, search.twitter.com, google blog search etc. Answers like linkedin answers, yahoo answers, fluther, can be good too. FB groups are good an select occasions, too.
Links:
Pieter D
Head of Telecommunications Services & Solutions at T-Systems
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The grapevine. Talk to your contacts, exchange gossip, infiltrate through direct and indirect contacts to learn more about the workings of a company. Influencers are usually people with limited visibility.
Ari H
Online Media Strategist and City Councilor-Elect
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Simple, Sam: Run a blog search for some keywords that describe your brand or product. Randomly ask your customers in advance for those keywords. Based on the top 10 bloggers who rank for those keywords, contact them individually and ask if they'd be willing to promote you.
Links:
Josh C
General Manager at Web Industries; Itinerant Writer; and Decent Little League Coach
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Hi Sam,
In our case, we simply ask. We ask our best customers to serve as references for future (non-competitive) customers....they are the best influencers for us, because they are often well known within their industry. We also ask for referrals, both within their own companies (some of our customers are very large and have many divisions), and also to other folks they know inside or outside of their industry. Again, the only caveat is to be careful about competitive situations.
Josh.
We are providing similar kind of service to find and identify influences for a company or product.Please check the below link.
Links:
Alex G
Online Marketing Professional
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If they're influencers, they will find you.
Hi Sam, there are currently some cool new tools available to help dive in and find influences.
Unbound Technologies is one of those services along with Rapleaf.
Erica F
Social Media Optimizer, Publisher at ALC Publishing, President of Yuricon
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I've been a professional researcher for decades and one of the things I specialized in was finding Key Opinion Leaders or Influencers or Cognitive Authorities. It's really just a matter of researching the online space and know where people are talking about the topic, then finding the folks who are referenced and/or deferred to the most.
A few hours of research using some of the simplest tools out there won't get you the full list of influencers in your area, but it will get you some. Hiring a training researcher, someone who knows what an online space analysis is and how to understand and explian it, is a worthy investment, if you don't have expertise in the field.
As for me, I do an online space analysis to identify the KOLs. It's some thing I've done since before there was a name for it, so it's second nature to me. As a result, it's hard to explain simply. Like asking an accountant to explain how they do taxes simply. The expertise is what you need, not the brief explanation. :-)
Cheers,
Erica Friedman
Yurikon LLC
Intelligent Business Promotion
There are lots of techniques and tools out there to help you find influencers, but that's the easy part. Getting them to spread some of their influence your company's direction is where it gets tough.
Influential people are influential because they have credibility amongst their peers. Others trust them for unbiased, honest opinion. As soon as they become a shill for an organization - POOF - their credibility disappears along with their influence.
Having said that it's possible to get influencers to mention your company, but you have be to willing to relinquish control and be transparent about the relationship. Too long a subject to explain here, but if you're interested send me a message and I'll expand on it.
Alex and Josh's answers were bang on. Basically spend more effort on building your own community. Provide your best customers with the tools to become your advocates. Be open, listen to your community, respond in a timely and truthfully manner, and participate in the conversation. If you focus your efforts there, influencers will find you.
Best of luck!
Finding good influencers is somewhat of a Zen trick: you have to bring them in but without expressly trying to do so. It's a bit like the one hand clapping paradox.
Today, the best influencers are the ones that promote your product without being affiliated in any way to your company: they would not want it most of the time, and those people that you want them to influence would not like it either.
The trick is to have a brand that naturally appeals to them and that they freely want to be an advocate for. At BOXX, we enlisted many cutting edge digital artists, film compositors, film editors as advocates for our unique hardware just because we were the un-Dell, the underdog, the cool niche player.
You need to be visible to them and let them come to you, then delight them with the toys or the access that makes them gush about your offering.
Alison M
Technology PR - Media Relations, Analyst Relations and Social Media Strategy and Consulting
Best Answers in: Starting Up (1)
The best way to identify key influencers is to take a look at who writes about products and services in your industry. Start with the media and analysts who are covering your competition.
Links:
Mike V
VP Inbound Marketing at HubSpot
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You can find influencers on Twitter by using the search function on Twitter Grader. Just search for relevant terms to your industry, the most influential people show up first.
Links:
Dan R
Tools Czar at Lextant
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Well you'd want to know who your customers are first. Then look for pain, places in the experience of whatever you have that exudes some sort of pain. With pain comes problem solvers and healers. They dive on that pain and work to solve it with or without your brand. These people are the influencers. Eventually if they go unnoticed they spark new trends and services without your connection, eventually skipping right over you and bringing along with them a whole host of consumers in tow.
So start with just figuring out who you customers are. Segment them, persona them, and figure out who in your followship is the influencer- then dive into everything they are, how they work, how find peace, what irks them, etc, you need more than just influencers you need all the catalystic points in the process that make them influencers.
