Marketing Roadmaps -

Two Truths and a Lie: Instagram!!

July 19, 2018 by Susan Getgood

In episode 2 of Two Truths and a Lie, we talked about Instagram.

Instagram is the most popular platform in many, but not all, markets. EMarketer reported this week that its “rising popularity for influencer campaigns goes hand in hand with the platform’s strong user growth, as marketers tend to go where their customers are,” but in some countries/areas, other platforms are as or more popular.

Instagram’s popularity has also lead to some crazy and unsavory behaviors — from people getting killed or injured for the sake of a photograph (just recently a woman was bit by a shark just to get a photo) and more than a few people have fallen to their deaths from buildings, mountains and waterfalls for the sake of a selfie, to fraud — bought followers, fake followers, buying engagement to boost the numbers.

We tried to get some perspective in our conversation.

Truth — Platform should always follow purpose. Just because Instagram is growing in popularity, doesn’t mean it is the ONLY platform for influencer engagement. In some countries, it lags behind other platforms and tools, and even in the US, it may not be the best place for your program, depending on your goals and content.

When making platform decisions, understand where YOUR customers are, where they are actually engaging with content. This also means:

doing your due diligence about the influencers you are working with, and evaluating whether they truly have influence on the topic, whether they have the right audience for your offer or product.
developing tasks and storytelling opportunities optimized for the platform. Don’t just use Instagram Stories — think about how to use them effectively, natively. And honestly, don’t use things like Stories (that disappear) without some other more permanent social storytelling to supplement it.

Truth — Reach is a delivery metric, NOT a performance metric. In order to understand the performance of Instagram influencers, we need to look at engagement with content, not just reach. Our metrics tools of choice — whether platforms like Hootsuite, Sprinklr et al, influencer platforms or simply spreadsheets into which we record data from our influencers — can’t be satisfied with just reporting and rewarding reach. We need to look at impressions and at a minimum engagement rates — what percentage of the followers engaged with the content.

Metrics are complicated by the way Facebook and Instagram are set up — personal profiles have relatively little in the way of metrics, whereas business ones are relatively rich. This is less of an issue for businesses’ owned social accounts, since they were likely set up as business accounts, but influencers — especially ones that have been around for a while or who don’t want to use Facebook Pages (for whatever reason) run into complications with this.

As an example, if you want to convert your Instagram to a business profile, you need to link to a Facebook business page. If you don’t have one, you need to make one. This is a personal bête noire since I have a personal profile on Facebook, and never really bothered with a page, even for the business, because I largely use LinkedIn for professional posting. I’ve now got a “stub” page for my business, solely for the purpose of converting my Instagram to a business profile to take advantage of the richer native metrics.

Your takeaway from all this? Make sure your Instagram influencers are using business profiles so you can get the rich data available on the platform. You should already have limited your Facebook programs to influencers with verified pages using Facebook’s branded content tools to post. Expect that whither goest Facebook so too shall Instagram.

Also – do not compensate based on reach. Start moving toward results oriented compensation models.

Myth: “Organic” social content is better than influencer marketing because the person sharing it wasn’t compensated for his/her work. It truly comes from the heart. We wouldn’t have all this fraud and problems in Instagram if it we weren’t paying people to post.

Um no.

That is a load of organic material. Because advertisers WOULD — in the pursuit of scale — pay people to post. They just wouldn’t disclose it. Which is why we have the FTC Guidelines for Advertisers in the first place. Think about the Lord & Taylor dress debacle of a few years ago.

The truth is, there are very few brands that can incite excitement at scale without priming the pump in some fashion. Apple. Harley Davidson. Star Wars. Marvel. And THOSE brands invested deeply in the development of their communities from GO in order to have the natural fanbases that they do.

The rest of us have to kick things off if we want any sort of scale, versus just the occasional naturally occurring spontaneous mentions (that hopefully are positive!)

You should:

Pay your influencers for the work they do;
Mine your social feeds for organic mentions to find new content, new influencers;
Boost the best performing content.

We ended with some personal advice: You don’t want to be the Darwin Award winner in the Instagram category. Always exercise caution when creating your masterpieces. You matter more than a like or share.

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POSTSCRIPT: IMO a well-rounded strategy uses at least 2 types of content or platforms to reach the intended audience. Don’t JUST do Instagram, no matter how hot it is. Diversify into at least one other avenue to reach your consumer on social. I also think it’s critical to set a baseline, especially for awareness oriented programs, using a pre-campaign / post-campaign survey or brand lift study.

So you want to be an influencer?

July 7, 2018 by Susan Getgood

Last winter, I recorded two video workshops about best practices in influencer marketing for genconnectU, a course for Brands, Tapping into Social Trust, which was released in late May, and for influencers, Charting Your Path, which is available now.

A reality about making a course that includes tech is that anything too specific about platforms or tools will always be overtaken by changes in the marketplace. For example, when we recorded the courses, Klout was still in business and Google called its advertising products AdWords and AdSense.

This is why I focus on strategy, process and tactics rather than specific tools in my courses. Even though things have changed in the marketplace, the best practices have not.

In addition to the video lessons, there are additional materials in both courses, including a Scope of Work outline in the course for brands, and Guidance for Setting Rates in the course for influencers.

If you use the code Susan10, you can save 10% off the list prices of $119 for the Brand course and $29 for the new Influencer course.

From BOTS to BOUGHT: The “crisis” in influencer marketing

June 29, 2018 by Susan Getgood

Today, Digiday published the confessions of a former influencer describing widespread fraud in the influencer marketing space, focusing largely on bought followers on Instagram, where influencers regularly amassed followers literally overnight in order to compete for coveted fashion and beauty deals. All to meet the demand of advertisers and their agencies for scale. Reach was the de facto result. This is absolutely 100% true, I have no doubt.

It’s also not influencer marketing. We have to be REALLY careful to not throw the baby out with this admittedly nasty AF bath water.

As I wrote last week, this fraud — and it is fraud — stems from the ad industry’s relentless pursuit of scale without a similar commitment to authenticity and performance metrics.

Influencer marketing works because it is human-centered, and humans beings don’t scale neatly with algorithmic and predictable precision.

In the 90s, anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that humans can only sustain a limited number of stable social relationships; 150 is commonly cited as the upper limit. While modern communication has changed how this dynamic works, as we are able to move more fluidly from group to group, online and off, and may participate in multiple networks of people with whom we share common interests, we should always keep Dunbar’s number in mind when thinking about how influence works. The ripple effect of a recommendation matters just as much as the initial impact. Much harder to measure of course, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean we should not strive to do it.

Influencer marketing done right is building relationships with customers over time, who serve as the advocates for your brand to their friends, fans and followers. You know and trust them. Their audience knows and trusts them. You work together to achieve a common goal. Kumbaya and all.

Influencer marketing works because we do move in and out of different groups online, and when we share a recommendation from one into another, we form a ripple on the pond. What’s been missing is way to independently assess the audience of influencers to verify that they do have the right audience. Independent of and across the platforms, independent of the agencies. It’s challenging, and even more so if you respect individual privacy rights. I’m working on some things in this space. More to come.

In the meantime, the best approach is to understand that the best results from influencer marketing don’t come from scale. They come from trusted relationships over time.

The other issue exposed in the Digiday Confession is poor measurement practices.

Reach is a delivery metric. It tells us whether we executed our social tactic successfully. It is not a performance metric. Performance is engagement with content, and your objectives dictate whether you are working toward likes, shares and comments, or driving all the way down the funnel to conversion. Reach is not a result.

The Digiday piece also shared that boosting posts, at least in this confessor’s situation, was just as fraudulent, reaching folks not even remotely in the audience target purely to shore up the numbers. This is just straight up bad practice. Boosting posts simply to increase the reach is a waste of money. You should ONLY boost your best-performing content, the content that is getting verified engagement, to expose it to a larger or different audience. Do not boost your turkeys. Let them fade away.

What about the BOTS?
The other article that caught my attention this morning was a piece on CNN about Lil Miquela, an influential CGI (computer generated image) that amassed quite a following before it was revealed that she was a CGI.

My opinion? If CGIs advocate for brands and someone is compensated for the endorsement, it is advertising, straight up, and should be disclosed. Ethically, I think it should be disclosed even if they are not doing brand or cause related work, because they are a construct, and consumers should know.

Personally, I’m not sure I love the idea of people modeling themselves after, being influenced by, robots, but as long as it is fully disclosed as CGI advertising, I don’t see why brands shouldn’t have the option to use CGI tools to deliver their message. They can dictate the message and don’t have to worry about the opinion of the CGI. Likewise if they use BOT accounts to manage message flow or respond for the brand in place of human CSRs. It’s okay as long as you tell people they are engaging with a BOT.

But CGIs and BOTs are not influencer marketing. They are simply innovations in advertising.

On Cannes and the marketer backlash against influencers

June 20, 2018 by Susan Getgood

The early news out of Cannes, where the glitterati of the advertising world have gathered to rub shoulders, quaff rosé, do deals (or at least talk about doing deals) and generally celebrate their own creativity and business acumen in the hopes of snagging business from the legion of CMOs taking advantage of what has to be the best boondoggle on the planet, is that a marketer backlash against influencers is growing. At least according to Digiday’s piece on June 20th.

The basis for the argument is the announcement by Unilever CMO Keith Weed on Monday that the company is pushing for greater transparency in influencer marketing to combat fraud, create better consumer experiences and improve measurement.

In a prepared statement, Weed committed the company to not working with influencers who buy followers, to never buy followers itself and to prioritize partners committed to increased transparency and eradicating bad practices. He dramatically concluded with:

The key to improving the situation is three-fold: cleaning up the influencer ecosystem by removing misleading engagement; making brands and influencers more aware of the use of dishonest practices; and improving transparency from social platforms to help brands measure impact. We need to take urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever.”

This is noble, and I commend Unilever for taking a position.

HOWEVER,

I take exception to the idea that we can have backlash against our customers. Influencers, true influencers, are our customers. People who love our products and want to share their opinions with their friends, family and fans.

So let’s reframe this accusation before we go too far.

What we are reacting to is fraud, perpetrated largely by automated systems in the search for scale. Yes, people bought followers to make their numbers look better. But the root cause — and this is true for many digital fraud issues —is the holy grail of scale over all else. Reach as many people as you can at the least possible cost. The volume ensures a certain percentage of buyers. Except at some point, the volume becomes the goal, not just the means to the goal.

We’ve been seduced by delivery metrics, taking shortcuts that promise to deliver more, for less. It’s a cycle of inflation that “looks good” but doesn’t actually deliver to our objective.

Why are we always so surprised when the shortcut turns out to be a dead end?

The problem isn’t influencers, who are, after all, your customers. It’s the never ending search for scale without a similar commitment to authenticity and performance metrics.

I suggest (and have for years) that we think about consumer to consumer marketing differently.

Relationships
Ground your influencer marketing strategy in authentic relationships with customers who want to advocate for your brand. Don’t neglect those with smaller follower numbers; sometimes they are your most effective evangelists.

A good influencer marketing strategy activates customers with all degrees of influence, using tactics that take best advantage of both the customer’s passion and her platform.

Performance metrics
The performance that matters is conversions. Everything else is a delivery metric. Even engagement. Although it can be a conversion metric for some objectives, for the most part, it too is simply a way to measure the delivery of a program.

Make sure your program has a conversion metric, and a way to get there. You can’t convert without a call to action.

Link back to sales. You can be super sophisticated using modern marketing platforms. Or you know, simply start tracking sales over time against marketing activity, including influencer.

How de we avoid fraud in influencer marketing?

Stop chasing scale and start working with your friends.
Measure what matters, not everything that moves.

Cheers!