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Is online popularity equal to online influence?

Today a brands’ online strategy has become a critical component of its marketing mix. An obvious part of this online strategy is to reach out to influencers and engage with them. But how are these influencers found? This is an extremely difficult question to crack. Some might refer to klout or Hootsuite, some to paid tools like Virally or tools internal to their company that do the same thing as klout, some others to twitter followers and Facebook group members or blog hits. 



All of the above mentioned tools have some advantages and limitations to it. But all of the tools given above reveal data, and the question to ponder is, ‘is online popularity equal to online influence?’ For example, hypothetically speaking, if a 16year old kid on Twitter has over 50,000 followers on Twitter, is he an influencer for a wine brand? Similarly, if a 28year old guy on Twitter has an over 20,000 following, owing to his wise cracks on Twitter, can he be an influencer for computer manufacturer?

I’ve had several discussions around this topic and what I’ve realized so far is:

(1) It is not necessary that your brands influencers are online itself! For example, someone I spoke to about this commented, that Seth Godin, best-selling author and a marketing guru, is one of the world's leading influencers, but other than having his blog, he doesn’t have any social media presence.

(2) 2 brands from the same industry, selling products that are in direct competition to each other, may have different online influencers. This is because each of their business objectives may vary.

(3) Influence is fundamentally contextual. What Nicolas Chabot, VP, Traackr, says is very interesting and true “The relevant context to find influencers is unlikely to be your brand. Individuals build authority in communities on more general topics: it makes more sense to understand who is influential in the “hybrid car” topic and see what they say about Toyota than looking for influencers on “Toyota”, which does not make so much sense” Enclosed below is a presentation by him that is very interesting for this subject. It states something that says “Influence only works in context”




(4) Above all, finding influencers for your brand, online and offline, involves similar steps to be taken.
*Exhaustive market research
*Detailed competitor analysis
*Identify market opportunity
*Define target market
*Define product positioning
*Get to know your target market better through more research
*Identify influencers based on their relation to your product, market positioning, and status as trusted sources of information by your targets

In conclusion, I’d like to sum up this conversation by saying a big NO, to the fact that online popularity is not equal to online influence. Numbers are sure indicative, but not conclusive in any way. There are many other factors, like the ones listed above, that need to be considered below labeling anyone as influencers for your brand. 

karanbhujbal

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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2013 at 6:39 AM

    FYI, Seth Godin is on Twitter, and he has >236,000 followers. He also has a FB page with >178,000 followers. He may only use these sites to promote his blog posts (which are barely longer than tweets themselves), but it's probably misleading to say he doesn't have any social media presence besides his blog...

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