Accidental Spokespersons and Influencers: the Unidimensional Mistake

Rohit Bhargava

Identifying and engaging so-called influencers is one of the major activities in business that use social media. Unfortunately, it is often for the wrong reasons: defensive brand reputation management or engaging influencers in completely irrelevant ways, blinded as we are by the term “influence”. Businesses also often don’t see how they can use a multichannel approach to identify real influencers. People use many media and channels. To identify influencers, it doesn’t suffice to look at their social presences on networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or FourSquare (the latter two will be added to Klout, one of many unidimensional services in a very immature industry and multidimensional reality, eventually).

Influencer identification should be a cross-channel activity. Imagine that you have integrated your email marketing and your social media presences in a clever way. And imagine that you are able to see which subscribers to your newsletters have forwarded your email in a traditional way (FTF or Forward to a Friend) or have shared content via social buttons (SWYN or Share With Your Network).  Technically, this is not difficult, and if you make your email content relevant enough it will get shared. By the way: remember that relevance is a matter of perception and emotional triggers.

Influencer identification is a cross-channel process

Who is an influencer? The person that forwarded the content in the mail to several friends who have forwarded in their turn? The recipient who shared your email content on social networks and has a mass of followers? The answer is obvious: both are influencers and, still, this way of looking at it, is not sufficient! It is possible that a subscriber to your email has shared your content over social networks, and that he has just a few followers or fans but very influential ones. You can take this several steps further: the fans of the followers of the friends of your recipient etc.

However, you also should look at it from a cross-channel perspective: the sharing, forwarding and engaging activity, in reality, happens over a combination of channels, including email, that services such as Klout can impossibly follow. Did you know, by the way, that email is the channel that is used most to share content among users of AddThis as I described in this post? People are multichannel and thus so should influencer identification be.

Influence is passion: the accidental spokesperson

Furthermore, influencers are not always the usual suspects. That’s where Rohit Bhargava‘s famous accidental spokesperson, he talked about at the annual IAB Belgium Think Digital congress, comes in. Accidental spokespersons can work in your company or can be a huge fan of your business, without you even realizing it. What sets them apart is their passion, openness and willingness to promote your business or brand. Accidental spokespersons often don’t have many followers or fans and can be absolutely unknown to the public. If you define influence in terms of numbers and ‘popularity’, you will miss out on opportunities to engage, involve and even celebrate these accidental spokespersons. Highlight them and show your appreciation. Their influence, when properly emphasized and integrated in what you do as a brand, is worth gold.

It’s a mistake to look at social only to identify influencers. Cross-channel is the way to go, and it’s absolutely possible to do it from the solutions’ perspective. However, there will always be elements you can’t take into account. Especially offline, where influence happens every single day. If you really have an integrated communication and tracking approach and are smart, you can measure a lot but not all of it. Still, don’t only look at social and even digital. Take offline into account.

The invisible accidental spokesperson and how to identify him: a personal case

I am a big fan of a company that is active in the tourism business. It is present in surrounding countries and virtually unknown in my country. It’s called Landal Greenparks. I have visited several of their destinations with my wife and four kids over the last few years but it’s the first time I mention them online.

I am very much in love with one particular destination they have and where I spend the necessary time when I need a break. Over the years, I have been telling about the company, advocating several destinations and expressing my love for that specific one to friends and even business partners. I know for a fact that this way, the company at least had over thirty (30!) reservations because of my passion. Who knows how much bookings they got through word-of-mouth? Friends of mine who have told someone else “You know that break you needed? I have a friend who told me about this holiday park group etc….”. Or the recommendations of those thirty that booked because of my being an accidental spokesperson? Or because of the simple fact that I mention them in this post?

I often say to my wife that by now we probably have earned ourselves lots of free holidays and that the company would probably have to spend less on search engine advertising (an expensive activity) if it had good cross-channel influencer programs.

The question obviously is how do you identify accidental spokespersons like me and many others that are brand advocates in an offline world? The answer is simple: be creative and smart and don’t only look at “social”. Again, be cross-channel. Landal could, for instance, have a special referral program. And it doesn’t even have to be online only. When a business works in an integrated way, using all customer touch points, it can easily set up some smart initiatives. Bookings basically happen two ways: online and via a call center. It’s very easy to ask first-time visitors how or via whom they got in touch with your business, in exchange for a small gift, for instance. It enables your business, in my example Landal, to use all channels to identify advocates. The same thing can easily be done during the call center booking process.

All you need is a single customer view and a cross-channel approach. Will you be able to measure everything? Maybe not but chance is that you will be much smarter if you use a cross-channel influencer approach than when merely looking at “social”.

People are not unidimensional. They are multidimensional and multichannel. As a business, you should always approach them in that way. That’s customer-centricity, the basis of a social and efficient business.