Influencer engagement is often seen as the cornerstone of this major transformation and we’re only at the very beginning of this shift and we have everything to invent about the way the $300B industry will restructure itself and fully integrate collaborative marketing.

We’ve observed very recently that we just passed an inflexion point in influencer outreach campaigns and moved from a place where most marketers had to be convinced of the value of influencer engagement to one where many see it as the silver bullet of “earned media” marketing. And though this is amazing news that could accelerate this major industry transition, we are now entering a danger zone in which peoples high hopes about influence engagement could easily be crushed by unrealistic expectations and poor execution.

So let me set the record straight: if you’re expecting magic from your influencer campaign, it won’t happen. Here is why:

Influencers can’t cure ‘suck’.

If your product sucks, if your marketing campaign sucks, even if your influencer targeting sucks, influencers won’t help save the day.  Good PR professionals understand this perfectly as this is not a new challenge to them. But this reality is completely foreign to many marketers who have been trained to control the brand message and throw media dollars at the campaign, the theory being that there is a dollar amount to spend past which perception trumps reality. Big Oil Inc. has an image problem? Let’s come up with a cool environmentally friendly looking logo, create TV ads about everything your company is doing for the environment, and run it enough times that people believe it. This is yesterday’s mass marketing reality. Try this in today’s new reality where  marketers don’t control the distribution of the message and you’re in for a treat – ask Toyota for example who tried to buy Mommy bloggers opinions $10 at a time.

Here are three simple rules that should help you leverage the power of influencers (and avoid getting burned).

1- Your product sucks? Fix it!

Here is the crazy part of this piece of advice, ready? More often than not, even when marketers are trying to convince the public that their product works just great (while it really doesn’t), the rest of the company is working very hard already on fixing and improving it. Why are we assuming that deception would yield better results rather than bring transparency on everything the company is doing right to fix issues?

In order for brands to gain trust and support among influential voices, they don’t even need to have taken care of their product issues, but simply to show good faith and effort in the process. Toyota, learn from Honda on this, who managed to get UK-based environmentalists on their side during the Insight launch by sharing their clean energy roadmap. Smart.

Something we’ve observed through our client work that I find fascinating is that when well-targeted influencers are prompted to review or discuss a product they don’t like, very very rarely do they publicly trash that product or brand. Instead they stay quiet and decide to not get involved. Not true if you offend them in the process or if your target is ill-defined. If you run your influencer campaign and don’t see much traction, make a point to still engaging individually some of the people in your target to get feedback. They may tell you something you don’t want to hear but guess what – you will have to face the music one way or another…

2- Don’t make influencer engagement an after thought in your campaign: the earlier you involve influencers, the better.

If you already have your concept and creative pieces for a communication campaign underway or done, and someone on your team says, “now that we have this great thing going, let’s get influencers to talk about it!” please just smack that person over the head because he or she is setting you up for trouble.

The beauty of influencer engagement is the idea that by bringing to your side a small group of people who have built authority in a specific community, they in turn will bring their following. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that the reason why these people have built a certain aura in that space you’re interested in is typically because they have expertise (or at least acute interest) and integrity. In order to sway them to your side as a communication professional, you will have to do better than, “hey here is 10 bucks, can you say something nice about my brand?” or “I built this really really cool widget, how about you stick it on your blog?” or “I’ll send you a free <insert your product name> if you write a nice review about it” (btw, all true stories). Real influencers care too much about their reputation and integrity within their community (that’s their social currency) to be lured like this.

If you want influencers to get involved, you need to speak inside their story, not yours, and build an engagement campaign that will resonate with them. Take for example NY-based marketing agency, Campfire, who sent survivalist influencers a personalized survival pack to introduce them to the new season of Discovery Channel’s show, The Colony. Some of our clients have even involved influencers in the conception stage of a new product to get their input and ideas early enough to influencer-source (a variation on crowdsource) the product design and features. What kind of coverage and endorsement do you think they will get when the product hits the market later this year?

3- Identify targeted influencers based on the desired outcome.

This may be THE most important thing of all and sadly the one that gets most overlooked… mommy bloggers, Klout, and (back in the day) Technorati have trained us poorly on the importance of context. There is no such thing as a list of influencers that will heal the world’s wounds. You will find influencers who can help raise money for cancer research, build awareness on the issue of occupied Palestinian territories, or even mobilize crowds in the streets of Cairo to topple the government, but you won’t find are influencers who can do all of these things…

The idea of finding the most influential voices on the web is as empty of meaning as finding Google’s top search results: they only exist in context of what you’re looking for…

A poorly defined influencer target will always result in wasted efforts and disappointing outcomes.  A great example is Tom Webster who wrote a piece recently on “the limits of online influence.” Tom wrote a blog post in support of the people of New Zealand in the aftermath of the earthquake they experienced in February. He managed to get social media’s ‘elite’ (people with lots of followers on Twitter and high Klout scores) to relay his message in the Ether, amounting to well over 500k impressions but a very disappointing 389 clicks, and, only 10 submissions (people acting on the post). Was Tom flirting with the limits of online influence as he suggests? Absolutely not. He actually discovered the hard way what online influence isn’t: ill-targeted popular social media users talking about a topic they have very little to do about to an audience that doesn’t necessarily care. Kudos to Tom Webster to even get these folks to relay his message as it was off topic and off brand for them.

If you want to get influencers to have an impact on your business, you need to pick people who have built trust and a following on the topic you’re involved with and have proven their ability to mobilize people in a way that makes sense to your campaign. Could Charlie Sheen’s over-night ‘success’ on Twitter (2.7M followers and counting) get people to chime in to support a cause (any cause)? Not in a million years, except maybe for endorsing recreational drugs… To be successful with influencer engagement, you need to find those people who care about your topic – people who are relevant to your business.

So, if your product sucks, if your engagement campaign is ill-conceived, or if your targeting amounts to finding the loudest voices on social media, don’t blame influencers. In fact thank them, because they are forcing you to take a hard look in the mirror. It’s up to you to act on what you see and fix it.

Mass media has dominated marketing for so long that many of us have forgotten that marketing is not about painting the pretty picture of an ugly dog, but rather to build a company’s products and values to respond to the aspirations of its customers. So let’s reclaim marketing for what it should be and have influencers help us do that!

PS: This blog post and its title have been inspired by Mark Schmulen from Constant Contact who said at #MSM10 about marketers’ expectations for social media: “there is no cure for suck.” Thanks Mark!

It’s that time again! The Traackr team is excited to highlight the Influencer of the Month for the “ho-ho” holiday month of December. Read on!

Who is Anthony Padilla?

Most 22-year-olds are finishing up college and getting ready to enter the grueling work world of 9-5 jobs, but not Anthony. Instead, he has led the path of the new celebrity in entertainment – YouTube Celebrities. Ask most tweens, teens and even 20-something’s and they will probably know of Anthony’s humorous antics and good looks from his comedy duo YouTube channel, Smosh, which he co-creates with childhood friend Ian Hecox.

We first spotted Anthony in his number one influencer spot on our teen male influencers list. Since then, we have been amazed by his dedication to the online space and his communities, his clever comedy skits – one of which was awarded YouTube’s Best Comedy Award in 2006 – and his keen sense of knowing exactly what it takes to become an online super star.

Since Smosh’s beginning in 2005, it has become the third most subscribed to YouTube channel and continues to rise in popularity among the younger generations. It was this popularity that landed the duo among YouTube’s initial participants in their partnership revenue-sharing program in 2007. Interestingly enough, one of the revenue generating agreements that came out of the program was a sponsorship deal with Live Video – one of YouTube’s competitors. It’s not everyday you can say you got paid by one of your host’s competitors with everyone in agreement!

In addition to the more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube and almost 300 million views of their videos (that’s right 300,000,000 views!), Smosh has large amounts of followers among their multiple social media platforms, some of which include more than 45,000 followers on Twitter and more than 150,000 friends on MySpace. Anthony and Ian have even been business saavy enough to build what some might call an empire with the Smosh name, including t-shirts, posters, gift cards, games and contests.

Most importantly, however, is that aside from the Smosh name, Anthony has done very well with his own name by creating a fan base that is happy to follow his funny attitude and charming smile anywhere he pops up. Proof is in the numbers – he has been able to accumulate over 30,000 followers on

A bit late on our end, for which we apologize.  We will definitely get them out on time in the future (last Friday of every month).  However, please do not allow our tardiness to devalue the talent of our Influencer for October: Brett McKay.

Who is Brett McKay?

We had no idea until he showed up on one of our recent Authority Lists for online DIY influencers. Brett appeared on the list because of his work on his primary blog —  The Art of Manliness (apx 150k monthly unique visitors).  Brett’s blog is a smart, fun portal for all things Man-ly.  He’s done a tremendous job building a brand around the Art of Manliness — as well as a loyal audience.  He furthers his work on his blog through two twitter accounts, @brettmckay (1,500+ followers, 700+ re-tweets) and @artofmanliness (5,800 followers, 1,100+ re-tweets); a YouTube channel; two Facebook pages, his (631 friends) & Art of Manliness (7,800+ friends); LinkedIn; and a StumbledUpon account.

One of the reasons why we’ve selected Brett this month is for his skills and use of multiple social media tools/platforms.  That is important for any influencer we consider.

Another reason we like Brett is because he is in the midst of translating his online success to additional offline success with the release of his first book – The Art of Manliness (what else?).  From all accounts the book is doing well.  For us at Traackr, this is a very exciting trend that we continue to see…and celebrate.  More and more, people are building their brands online, through social media, and creating value, enterprises…empires offline.  Brett is one of the early ones and we’re very happy to see it happen!

With all that said, the real reason we chose Brett for our Influencer of the Month for October is that the Art of Manliness wasn’t his first successful online endeavor.  Not at all.  While a law student at the University of Tulsa, Brett started and built a very successful blog, The Frugal Law Student, which was named the top student blog by the ABA Journal in ’07.  This is what we call a true online talent.

Our decision to select Brett as our Influencer for this month is not really about his current online endeavor and success.  We’ve selected him because he personifies one of Traackr’s fundamental beliefs in this whole new world — the idea that the individuals who generate influence online are talented people.  The content they create is very much secondary to that.  It doesn’t matter if they are talking about Ramen noodles or straight razors, knitting patterns or new marketing strategies.  It’s the person doing the talking which is where the influence is derived.  It’s why we started Traackr.  Brett (and many others) is proving our point with every post…

Thanks and congratulations to Brett McKay for being named Traackr’s Influencer of the Month for October!

DS

*by the way, here’s a good post from Chris Brogan (Content is Not King) which helps illustrate this last point.  The comments for this post are great as well…

We found this reason to step back from the day-to-day craziness and think about our work after being invited to speak at Pecha Kucha 11 in Boston.

I personnally love Pecha Kucha in all its aspects: 1- the format of the presentations is extremely constraining (20 slides 20s per slide) and forces presenters to be very articulate and clear on the ideas they want to communicate. 2- the brief is “no business pitch” which brings a tremendous variety in the interventions and forces businesses to think about the value of what they do to the community.

Tonight’s talk will be the first brick of many to come for Traackr to articulate its theoretical framework and how we see ourselves: Traackr is an agent of a marketing revolution leading to the emergence of collaborative marketing.

What the hell am I talking about? Come to Mantra tonight to attend Pecha Kucha  and you’ll know!