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?

Dynamics of Influencers

One of the most important uses of social media in a B2B environment is to build and maintain relationships with influencers in your space. There is much agreement with that, but there is also the sense that this is somehow new within the world of social media.

An Old Challenge

Managing influencers, however, has long been a part of the role of marketing – analyst relations and public relations have long had this as their main goal. By carefully managing and cultivating good relationships with influencers such as analysts, journalists, and editors, you would find your perspectives known and understood by the writers, you would be included in mentions, and you might even find a slightly more positive perspective on your company than without such a strong relationship.

Influencers in a Social Media World

In today’s world, this core dynamic is still there. Good relationships with influencers can lead to being present in mentions, having perspective understood and appreciated, and having a slightly more positive bias. However, while the core dynamic remains, the approach that we need to use to manage influencers has changed significantly.

More But Smaller

The first major change is that the influencers have changed in number and in size. Whereas historically, there may have been a few analysts worth focusing on, and a similar number of publications, there are now many, many more blogs, lifestreams, content sites, and magazines (let’s call them all "publications" just to keep things simple). This is brought about by the fact that the cost of infrastructure needed to publish information has gone down to nearly zero. This explosion in the number of publications is matched by a corresponding decrease in their individual size. Many only have a few thousand viewers, or focus on a highly specialized niche that would have been unprofitable for a major news outlet.

Changing Relationships

With this change in size comes a change in how relationships are maintained. Major news and publishing outlets forced structure on the process in order to keep things under control. This led to formal briefing processes, embargoed news releases, and the use of news wires for the release of news. Now, with an explosion of publishers, each of whom influence a niche area of the market, this process is not necessarily as formal – it is a much more social process of relationship building.

However, these new publishers – bloggers, independent writers, and niche experts – do not want to follow the formalized briefing processes of yesterday. What they want are the direct relationships with the key people of relevance to their area of interest or writing. These are often the subject matter experts who truly understand the content that is relevant to the topic at hand.

To build and maintain these relationships, the same rigor we applied to building and maintaining relationships with analysts and journalists over the past few decades, but with two new twists:

- the relationships must be maintained in larger numbers

- they must be maintained by many key people on your team, executives, subject matter experts, and thought leaders, rather than just the PR group


Easier Relationships

Making this easier, however, is the fact that the dynamics of these relationships are changing quite a bit. As Chris Brogan and Julien Smith discuss in Trust Agents (link is to Kathleen Schaub's discussion on this specific topic), the technologies of social media make it easier to maintain relationships with “half strangers” – and in doing so it is easier to maintain a larger number of relationships.

These relationships can be maintained through much more scalable interactions – interacting on Twitter, good conversations on blogs, discussions on LinkedIn, and various other forms. Many relationships are developed this way while only meeting face-to-face once or even not at all.

New People, New Influence

This change, while seeming small, fundamentally changes the dynamics of how we as B2B organizations manage how we influence the influencers in our spaces. The number of influencers has increased dramatically, while their relative size and the formality of their briefing processes had decreased a comparable amount. At the same time, the people they are interested in having a relationship with are the subject matter experts in our organizations. This is the reason why it is critical to have more people in your organization “join the conversation” – each of them maintains a number of relationships with a few key influencers, and in doing so, broadens your influence in the overall market.

Influencers, Advocates, and the Mainstream

We've all heard the hesitations on social media - "I don't use it", "my peers don't use it", "our buyers don't use it", etc. Even if these statements are taken as true, the need to engage in social media in a B2B marketing context is just as great because of the effect of influencers and advocates, and their effect on the mainstream audiences.

On this blog, much of the discussion has focused on the ability to get an idea, message, or piece of content, based on its own merits, to be discovered by an intended audience. This is indeed the main challenge of today’s marketers. However, there is often a core audience of influencers, advocates, and fans who can be of significant assistance in this effort.

With the decline of the mass publishers, and the advent of micropublishing online, whether through industry sites, social media, communities, or discussion forums, marketers are faced with a highly fragmented set of audiences to deal with. Each individual who writes has a unique set of motivations, ranging from building their own audience and reputation, to being seen as an expert in a community, or developing a business.

By carefully building relationships with this set of influencers over time, and understanding how you can help them achieve their goals, you can develop a friendly crucible for each of your messages. Each of these individuals influences an area of the market , and collectively may influence a larger area of the market than you can influence directly. Many of the key influencers in a particular market space are also watched closely be the mainstream media.

As B2B marketers, involved in social media, we are all aware of the commonly stated goal in social media to "join the conversation", "help others", and "contribute to the community". However, it can occasionally be challenging to see how these philanthropic actions tie back to the metrics that we are all measured on by the companies we work for. It is with this audience of influencers that this connection becomes clear.

The value of contributing to, helping, and engaging with this audience of influencers and advocates is in forming a friendly launch pad for any of your messages. Each story, and each message, must still stand on its own merits and be appropriately non-salesy, but an audience of advocates and fans, carefully nurtured, will give each message a more open-minded look, and may be among the first to share it with their own audience.

When explaining the value of social media to individuals who do not participate, and believe that their peers don't participate, this "indirect" model is the important one to explain. I have seen more than a few "aaaah, I get it" moments on social media, when this indirect model is explained.