You may have heard by now the Word of Mouth Marketing Association just released the “Influencer Marketing Handbook,” which has sections including Influencers – Defined and How to Work with Influencers. It ties a nice bow around the concept of Influencer marketing which it seems more and more companies are exploring.

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m on the board of WOMMA, so I support the organizations efforts when it comes to leading the way in the WOMM space. And this is a great step in the right direction.

Having said that, influencer marketing has its place in WOMM. But it’s just one way. And certainly not the only way. Many companies find that it’s much easier to “seed” conversations with these already established (so-called) influencers. And while these efforts with the influentials might get a quick spike in attention, the buzz soon dies away while the company is left to look for its next quick fix. Not exactly sustainable, is it?

As you can probably tell, we don’t necessarily subscribe to this model when it comes to reaching out to people to lead a movement.

You may remember Geno’s post a while back about The Passion Dial.  It sums up our experience and successes when it comes to influencers vs. passionate people. It also goes hand-in-hand with what we’ve learned about word of mouth movements: people and their passion aren’t an on/off switch that can live in a “campaign” mentality. Instead, their passion is like a volume dial - which has no zero - and those super passionate folks are the “elevens” out there.

The nugget here is that instead of looking for those “influential” folks in a category, we look for those regular, everyday people that just happen to have a deep passion about that category. Not the divas. Not the super bloggers. Not the influencers that everyone else is trying to get a hold of. Since most people trust the opinions of people “just like” themselves, why not empower those people in the first place? We’ve learned that these everyday people have more sway and more credibility because they are, in fact, “just like me.”

When we are doing our insight, we DO, in fact, go and talk to the influencers and let them know what we are trying to do, but we don’t necessarily want them to lead the movement. We gain information and insight from them to help us determine what a sustainable movement looks like. And then we look for those that have the potential to BECOME influencers. By doing this, the brands success is their success and vise-versa. They grow together. They lean on one another. It’s a joint journey.

I’ll take passion over influence any day and twice on Sunday. Because influencers can be MADE. But passion can’t be manufactured.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 6:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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