Measuring the Unmeasurable: Influencers

One of the most important ways to "get the word out" and have your message discovered is to have good relationships with key market influencers. However, while this is important, it can be notoriously difficult to measure.

We need a new way of measuring how engaged we are with each influencer in the market. Whereas historically, there may have been only a few influencers (the major analysts and media outlets), and maintaining relationships with them was the purview of the PR and AR groups, now there are a broader set of influencers and maintaining those relationships is the purview of everyone on the team. Measuring this effort, however, can prove challenging. The following framework is a starting point for assessing your ability to influence the market influencers.

1) Value of a Publication

The first step is to assess the publishers and publications you would like to influence. I use the term “publication” and “publisher” very loosely to refer to any writers, bloggers, thought leaders, and content contributors online. These are the individuals and outlets where influence is useful and interesting. Each publication that is of interest should be assessed (subjectively) and given a rating of one to three stars. This is based on their readership, reputation, presence, and whether they appear in the search results for key terms your buying audience is looking for.


2) Relationship Activity

With this step complete, and knowing which publications you are hoping to influence, you next need to track how active you are in maintaining those relationships. As most, if not all, of these individuals are online writers, this activity can be tracked very objectively. Each blog comment, each Twitter conversation, each LinkedIn discussion that someone on your team has with an influencer is a relationship activity. Each is an opportunity to build awareness, convey messages, introduce new perspectives, or develop a deeper level of trust. Tracking this activity, across your entire team including subject matter experts, gives you a clear metric on whether those relationships are being actively maintained.


3) Relationship Strength

For each relationship, it’s important to also assess whether you feel that the relationship is a strong one. This is a subjective measurement, and can only be done by the people involved in each relationship. Use a similar scale of one to three stars to show your assessment of the strength of each relationship.


4) Mentions

Now, with these relationships understood and assessed, you can look at whether this effort is bearing fruit in terms of mentions of your company, your solutions, and your views on the market. This metric is only useful when viewed as a trend over time, as different publications with different niche focuses will naturally mention company and product names in a wide range of frequencies. An upwards trend in mentions is generally a good thing and shows a positive influence.


5) Sentiment

However, mentions are usually only good if they are neutral or positive mentions – that highlight your strengths, key aspects of your reputation, and your views on the market. Although there is some good progress happening in the realm of technology solutions for sentiment analysis, this is often quicker and easier to do in a B2B environment using a subjective assessment.



With each of these dimensions analyzed, you can begin to gather a picture of how your overall team is influencing the key influencers in your market. Over time, these relationships will develop and grow, and can become an extremely effective way that your message reaches your intended audience.

It's not perfect, by a long stretch, but this framework at least provides a way to look at the challenge of measuring influencers and efforts to work with them. How are you approaching this challenge? Any different measurement frameworks you use?

Brand Choice: “vision of perfection” or “perfect visibility”

A "Goof-up" can be a great social media marketing opportunity.

The transparency required of us in a social-media led world causes a number of fairly wrenching paradoxes. One of the clearest of these is the difference between marketing’s goal of being a “vision of perfection” and social media transparency’s goal of “perfect visibility”.

The reality is, none of our organizations, our products, or our services, are perfect. However, it was historically very possible to present a “we are perfect” aura to the outside world, through tightly controlled marketing communications, and careful hiding of any issues. That is no longer possible, as social media ensures that anything noteworthy can be highlighted by communications outside of your control.

But is the goal the opposite – one of “perfect visibility” and total transparency. That is equally unachievable, as there are so many things happening within any organization that it would be impractical to present them all to the outside world.

What is the Goal of Transparency?

So what are we as businesses trying to achieve with transparency efforts? I would suggest that transparency efforts are really company branding efforts. By being a transparent organization, and becoming known as such, we build the following 3 key brand messages in the market:

- No Denial: We’re human, we will make mistakes. Every organization does. However, we will not waste anyone’s efforts in denying those mistakes, we will put all our effort into fixing them.

- No Stalling: We recognize that you rely on our products or services, are happy to shine a light on anything that you, the customer, believe needs to be improved and fixed. It will be in the public eye from the first moment, so you don’t have to worry about delay tactics, misdirections, and stalling. It’s in our best interest to quickly and clearly give an answer (even if the answer is not the one you’re hoping for).

- No Surprises: Rather than being surprised, after the sale, as to what the realities (both good and bad) of the solution are, those things will be communicated upfront.

Most buyers, when looking at providers, would ideally find a provider who doesn’t deny problems, doesn’t stall on solutions, and doesn’t surprise them with disappointments after the sale. Having those perceptions as part of your company brand can be a very good thing.

So how are Goof-ups a good thing?

We all make mistakes – those little errors that are painfully embarrassing, but generally don’t cause significant damage. Things like inviting people to an event that took place a month ago, or is on another continent. When we do this, we often cringe, and want to hide from the world. However, this is a great opportunity to display the transparency we want our customers to see and in doing so build our brand and reputation.

When a mistake happens, be the first to publicize it proactively and apologize – on a company blog, in your community, or via a follow-up email to those affected – whatever is appropriate given the mistake. There’s no need to add extra drama to the situation, but describe what happened, how broad the effects were, where people can find more information (if relevant), and what you’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again (even if that is just having an extra coffee in the morning). Over time, your audience’s trust in you will grow as they realize that you are truly running an accountable, transparent organization.

Not only will your audience appreciate the transparency, but your own internal organization will realize that shining a light on the topic wasn’t as bad as feared. Developing this culture of transparency takes time, but is immeasurably valuable in a time of crisis. Don’t let the opportunity pass when a small issue takes place.

Here’s an example from a recent goof-up that we made (Jim suggested I write this post to talk about the topic), where we (as experienced as we are in all things email marketing) left a hard-coded email signature personalization in a communication. Sure enough, there were no major negative effects as a result of this...

Do you have any interesting stories of well-handled goof-ups?

Text “WhoCares?” to 66863

Is Text Messaging Relevant for B2B Marketers?

(this post first appeared on Destination CRM)

There is a lot of discussion about whether text messaging is relevant in a B2B marketing environment. We’ve all seen the stats on the use of text messaging within younger generations, and there is a sense that this will lead to an inevitable rise of the relevance of text messaging for B2B marketers. I would, however, contend that the opposite may be true, and that text messaging may never become relevant in a B2B environment.

Why Text Message?

First, let’s look at why text messaging is popular. It is a simple, quick form of communication that is readily available on any device, and usually is very economical. It does a tremendous job of being both real-time (you can get a message right away) and also asynchronous (but you don’t have to respond right away). This, combined with the desire to constantly communicate, has made text messaging a dominant communication mode for teenagers and twenty-somethings everywhere.

Does this Translate to B2B Marketing?

The question though, is whether this form of communication translates to B2B marketing well enough to be relevant. It helps to look at three main differences.

1) Devices: your average executive or manager in a business does not use the same devices as a person in Generation Y. Often, they will be using a Blackberry, an iPhone, or another smartphone. These devices are enabled with many forms of communication, including email and the web, as well as often being full-featured application platforms in themselves. On this application platform, a variety of other communication mechanisms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare continue to evolve.

2) Communication Style: in a B2B marketing context, the communication is significantly different from the personal communications of Gen Y on their mobile phones. First, in the vast majority of cases, the individual is interacting with an automated system developed by the marketing organization, rather than a person. Second, the communication is usually about requesting information or entering a contest – a point in time interaction – rather than the back-and-forth of teenagers planning an outing or gossiping on the day’s events.

3) Content Richness: with this style of communication, we also see a richer style of content being used. When a business buyer is compelled to enter a short code, it is often to receive an interesting and valuable piece of content. It is very rare that an offer of sufficient value only requires a few hundred characters of text.


Each of these differences removes a major reason to use text messaging in a B2B marketing environment. The audience can, in today’s environment, usually be expected to have a mobile device that is capable of significantly more communication capabilities than just text messaging. Likewise, the point-in-time interaction with an automated system, combined with the richer content experience desired, further push us to leverage the richer capabilities of our audiences Blackberrys, iPhones, and iPads.

Mobile Thinking vs. Mobile Devices

This is not to say that mobile marketing is not relevant, it very much is. However, a separation needs to be made between “mobile thinking” and “mobile devices”. Mobile marketing is about having a compelling offer that can be presented to a business person where they are at that moment – at a tradeshow, an event, or just passing by a billboard – and compel them to take an action. This is both challenging and highly relevant in today’s marketing world. However, nothing requires the marketing thinking in that mobile campaign to use specific device technology such as text messaging and short codes. In today’s environment, there are much better ways to accomplish all the required goals with the modern devices we all carry.

But what about the Teenagers?

Each generation who enters the work force brings with them new ways of interacting, new norms, and new approaches. This generation will be no different. However, much of the change that impacts the business world is in a way of thinking, rather than a specific technology. MySpace demonstrated a new cultural norm in how we communicate and keep in touch with friends, but the underlying technology quickly lost ground to Facebook. A similar trend is to be expected with mobile. A cultural norm of always being connected, and interacting with the world through a mobile device is clearly part of the current generation, but exactly what devices and what technologies can be expected to change quickly.

Rather than associating mobile marketing with text messaging and short codes – its current incarnation – better to put effort into mobile thinking. In all likelihood, the best and most effective technology a person will used to respond to the offer will be a shortened URL, Facebook fan page, or a technology yet to be popularized.

The Sales Team as a Content Testing Crucible

It's been a while since we've talked much about the topic of sales enablement, so I wanted to loop back to some interesting peripheral points. Marketing teams generally work hard to provide not just content and messaging that is available online, but also content and messaging that can be used directly by sales teams as they guide buyers through the buying process.

This usage pattern is very powerful, in that it allows the sales team to use their intuition, insights, and judgments in deciding what content to provide to what buyer at what moment in time. This human judgment can often provide more insight than digital body language alone, and if looked at carefully can provide the marketing team with a good understanding of what content is most valuable.

This direct use of content by the sales team provides a valuable content testing crucible for understanding both which messages are being used and which are effective in guiding buyers. For example, in the following chart, you can see that the Product Spec Sheet is not being discovered by the sales team, while the ROI calculator is being discovered by sales, but is not being used. The Video Testimonials content is being used frequently, but is not connecting with the buying audience, while the Technical Specifications, while used less, are well received by the audience they are sent to.




This ability to assess content from a sales usage standpoint, as well as from a market reception standpoint enables marketing efforts to be directed at only the most highly leveraged investments.

Buyer Roles, Buying Stages, and Perception Challenges

We looked earlier at the evaluation of existing content assets that can be done at each stage of the buying process, and for each buyer role involved.

A similar exercise needs to be done to assess where the need for content is greatest. For each stage in the buying process, and for each role, a list of the perception challenges we face in the market can be created. From here, we will know the ideal messages for buyers to absorb.

These "messages" can be facts that are actively or passively sought by buyers. Actively sought examples are messages that are searched for, such as the specifications for integrating with a specific third party system. Messages that need to be delivered passively, however, are not actively searched for - such as corrections to misconceptions such as the idea that your solution is not appropriate for larger organizations.

Evaluating Messages

To begin, much like the evaluation of current content assets, a matrix can be created that has buyer roles along the y-axis, and buyer stages along the x-axis. In each box, the messages, information, and perceptions that need to flow out to the market can be listed, along with an assessment (red/yellow/green) of whether you are currently being successful in getting those messages out to the market. The value of this exercise is in its ability to shine a light on areas where you may have a significant messaging gap.

Successful marketers are able to inject these messages, perceptions, and criteria throughout the overall education process of a buyer, slowly altering perceptions, guiding the way in which solutions are evaluated, and ensuring that needed information is discovered.

The need to get this broad variety of messages out to buyers, now that buyers are in control of their own buying processes, is what has led to the growth in nurture marketing, as well as the business use of social media as a publishing platform. At each stage, a failure to successfully get these messages out to prospective buyers can quickly lead to buyers failing to progress in their buying process - the three types of leaks in the funnel covered in an earlier post.