Don’t want influencers to ignore you? Focus| Marketing

Don’t want influencers to ignore you? Focus

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

I have had a few strange experiences recently that made me reflect about how companies often abuse social media marketing. Here are two:

The organizer of an event I believe in and have been promoting on Twitter called me and asked me to tweet about hotel rooms available at a discounted price, something unrelated to the event
An affiliate company has repeatedly emailed me asking to review their products on my blog for pay. They say that payment is not contingent on whether the reviews are positive or negative but until I become a partner I don’t have any visibility into what products I will be promoting

In both cases I politely declined as neither requester has been able to help me understand how these things are related to the people that really matter–you guys, the readers of this blog and my followers on Twitter. I am surprised that clarity on what I write/tweet about and what my audience likes wasn’t something they sought to obtain before making such requests. Especially since if I do promote them they are more likely to have a higher return if what they are offering is related to what my audience wants.

These situations are delicate, I have to explain why I am okay with promoting certain things and not others. I have to repeatedly explain why certain things are a no go. And this can be very time consuming. A general understanding of how to reach influencers and help them stay authentic to their voice and audience would really help all of us get what we want easier and faster.

Some quick tips on reaching out to influencers

Know the influencers’:

audience–are you clear about who they are reaching or who they say they are reaching. Be very sure that their audience is one you want to reach. Don’t try and cast a wide net and hope to catch anyone you can. If you are a game developer you wouldn’t speak at a small business conference would you? Well the same applies when you ask others to speak for you on social media
key message and voice–what do they generally write about? Does this relate to what you are offering? If yes, reach out to them and be clear on how this will help their audience. Do they make sure that they are consistent about the general direction in which they are headed? Blogs like people evolve overtime but the evolution when authentic is generally slow. Bloggers that flit from one unrelated topic to another generally don’t have a consistent audience that trusts them either. Engaging with them will not lead you the most return for your time or money.

What do you think? Are there other things that should be kept in mind when identifying and reaching out to influencers?