How To Leverage Today’s Consumer Influencers [SLIDESHOW]

Feel free to skip to the end for the powerpoint. I won’t tell anyone.

The hardest part about talking about influence is framing the conversation right. Many times people just want to talk about Klout or how to send pitch emails to bloggers.

I gave a presentation yesterday to PRSA Charlotte about “A New Influence.” And a big part of the presentation was to try and get marketers to start thinking in a more productive mindset on this topic.

Some people are getting a little tired of talking about “influence”. Especially those that live and breathe the insider baseball social media conversations every day. But for me, this topic is not going away any time soon. And of course it is nothing new.

PR professionals have been reaching out to bloggers for a while. And it is by no means something they all do well. And many businesses have not even considered reaching out to individual online influencers as a part of their marketing mix.

What exactly is an influencer?

When we say “influencer” online today, we are talking about bloggers, but we are also talking about a new class of influencer that may not be a blogger or may be more than a blogger. They are new media influencers, with impact on platforms like Twitter, Youtube, Myspace, forums, email newsletters, and more. And new media relations presents even more unique challenges than blogger relations.

Flip Your Perspective

Any marketer looking to take advantage of relationships with online influencers needs to make sure they are framing how they define influence first. And typically they need to reverse their thinking from “Influence is when one person causes another person to take actions” to “How is a consumer influenced to make a buying decision?”

Another great question to ask: Who does your typical customer look to online to help them make a buying decision? The answer is typically many people and many resources, not just one expert or one blogger.

Influence, for the consumer, is about building an internal database of trusted information. The more trusted information, the higher quality the buying decision.

Many of the slides from this presentation will be pulled out and made into blog posts in the coming weeks. They can all be bigger conversations than a few words and a photo.

Take a look and let us know which slides interest you the most.