Grant Leboff: Danny, influencer marketing is really key to making digital marketing work, but if you want to start looking at that as a route to market, how would you go about identifying who the influencers are for you?
Danny Bermant : Well it depends on which platform you’re using. If you are on Twitter for example, you can type in particular hashtags, you can type in particular keywords, and you can see who’s coming up in the discussions. There are tools, for example, for Twitter that enable you to spot influencers. There are tools like Kred Story or Klout and Commun.it. With all of them you can enter in a topic and it will bring up people who have got a high level of influence. On LinkedIn, you can go into your network and actually see who is well-connected. So if you are, for example, looking to be introduced to people with new businesses you might know already about your market. You might know that accountants are good influencers for me, so then it’s a matter of going onto search on LinkedIn. You can search your network, and it will tell you ‘LinkedIn has returned results, we found 125 accountants in your network’, and then you can see to who they are connected to. So it’s a case of going on Twitter and doing some research for conversations. On LinkedIn it’s more about knowing who is talking to your customers, and actually searching to find those people
Grant Leboff: Let’s say that you have identified who the influencers are and you have got some on Twitter or LinkedIn, or whatever, and you think these are people that it’ll be good to work with. How do you monitor them on a more consistent basis? What are the tools that you would recommend to monitor those, so then you can start to see what they’re talking about and engage them in the right way?
Danny Bermant : On Twitter you have a great tool called a ‘list’. What you do is you can add certain Twitter users and you can create your own separate feed, so you can just monitor them. Say, for example, you are interested in high-tech. You can create a list of all the journalists who write about high-tech products, because you want them to review your product, and when you click on that list it will just show you what those people are saying. Usually when you go on to Twitter you can be following 500 people, how do you monitor 500 people? With a list you can focus on those exact people.
Grant Leboff: So once you’ve got that, and you’ve created that list how do you then use that list to then go back and engage with them?
Danny Bermant : There are two ways, you can use tools like commun.it which will actually monitor conversations and flag up if this is a discussion in which you should be joining in, and there are other tools out there to do that. Another thing is that there is a bit of manual work. You need to go onto Twitter, maybe once a day, maybe a couple of times a day, and actually monitor the conversations and see what is this person saying, whereby I can actually get involved in the discussion. Similarly, with LinkedIn you have a similar sort of tool. You have LinkedIn groups where you have contributors who are regularly creating discussions or joining in discussions. You can actually follow those people, so again you can search for and flag up discussions that you think – right! I can join in this discussion, and that’s the way I can leverage those influencers to connect to people.
Grant Leboff: And of course once you’ve connected with them and you can see what they are talking about, it’s not about broadcasting but adding value to the discussions they’re having. Do you have any tips or hints about the way to approach that to make sure that you are adding value?
Danny Bermant : Yes I think it’s always about asking questions and asking the right questions. So if somebody is a travel writer who specialises in travel in France, you might actually ask them a question; ‘If I’m interested in battle sites in northern France, what would you recommend as the five best places to go to?’ You’ve just got on that person’s radar because you’ve asked them some specific questions. They’re going to be intrigued. Why has that person asked me those questions? What do they want to know? So then you can open up a discussion with them.
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