Credible Brands in an Un-Credible World

Gartner analysts released a study last week that found that between 10 and 15 percent of online reviews will be fake by the year 2014. That’s right. The social currency people use every day on Amazon, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, IGN and elsewhere to make or break purchasing decisions are only going to get more and more unreliable as fake reviews proliferate.

The Quest for Meaningless Metrics

This could be avoided, but it’ll be on marketers to change their mindsets.

Too many brands are too obsessed with how they stack up to their competitors. This has led to a market of fake Facebook Page likes and Twitter followers. Now, businesses are offering a few dollars for a fake review from people who have never experienced the business and without appropriate disclosure.

There’s a segment of marketers who don’t care about value. They just want cosmetic numbers to reflect success or hide a lack of it.

They’re driven by meaningless metrics. They want more likes, followers and positive reviews online, even if it means they aren’t legitimate. The result is analysts predicting that fake social media ratings and reviews will result in “at least two Fortune 500 brands facing litigation from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the next two years.”

This is Our Fault

Marketers have proven that they aren’t necessarily ready for transparent third-party reviews, which led the FTC to create a guide for online endorsements and testimonials in advertising, which required bloggers and any online influencers to disclose anything they received in exchange for a review.

As a group, we’re tempted by the fact that with a few thousand dollars, we can turn what is a rather mediocre social media effort into what appears to be an astounding success by paying for fake reviews, likes or Twitter followers. It’s lazy marketing.

The risk of giving into that temptation is too great for the industry. Third-party reviews are one of the most credible forms of advertising at our disposal. Traditional advertising has lost a lot of credibility in the minds of consumers. We can’t afford to let this happen to online reviews as well.

Trusted Brands Will Win

The good news is that brands building legitimate consumer trust will stand out and win out.  

Brands that are able to encourage others to transparently share brand content and points of difference without being paid will stand out in a world of fake reviews. Unbiased brand mentions carry a lot of weight and can truly sway a consumer’s opinion one way or another.

Give people the reasons and the means to talk about and share a brand. It’s often not an easy task, but if it was, marketers wouldn’t see the need to buy fake credibility. The brands that put in the work will benefit from it.

The more brands adopt this mindset, the less likely Gartner’s prediction will come true. Brands can’t buy credibility. It has to be earned. That credibility comes from authentic third-party endorsements, not fake ones.

Motivating Advocacy

Advocacy is one of the most valuable results of social media marketing. It can’t be delivered or nurtured by mass media. Those channels do other things and play a different role in the marketing mix, but social media allows marketers to identify, motivate and aggregate advocates then mobilize them for business objectives.

Brands have advocates at varying levels as it takes a variety of forms from following a brand on Twitter to leaving a review to actively recommending a product or service to friends. And advocacy is a growing behavior, according to eMarketer. For many, it’s something they’ve never really done before.

Advocates Take Many Forms

There’s a fine line between reach and influence. Many marketers approach influencer marketing by evaluating the number of people reached by a person. In reality, influence should be evaluated on the ability of an individual to affect the behavior of someone else, and that person may not have a massive blog or YouTube channel with thousands of subscribers. That person could be as average as average can be. That may mean going after many advocates with quality connections versus fewer with high reach.

Motivate Behavior

Brands need to start mobilizing advocates by first identifying who they are, what they’re saying and what their motivations are. Marketers need to understand what fires up their audience to talk and share.

Then it’s about providing the reasons and the means to share, and this can best be done by opening the doors to creating a relationship with consumers and opening up the lines of communication with the brand. Brands can then think about what motivates its advocates and accelerate advocacy behavior by rewarding it with exclusive access, information and incentives. Reward the behavior you want by giving them something they want.

Don’t forget that they love your brand, so use their love to inform what you do. Brands have successfully created communities to connect advocates with each other and to create an emotional connection with the brand and unlock insights that wouldn’t otherwise reveal themselves. This can be done with forums as well as online/offline events.

The approach is fairly straightforward: identify, incentivize and aggregate. The execution is a bit more difficult, but it comes down to understanding who your brand’s advocates are and what motivates them.

Influence Isn’t Who, It’s What

There’s no question that the value of social media marketing is the power it has to give a brand credibility by leveraging a consumer’s closest personal connections. This is taken at face value, but it really isn’t as simple as that, is it?

Harvard researchers conducted a study that tracked college students’ Facebook relationships and evaluated how their connections affected their tastes in music, movies and books. The study found that, contrary to popular belief, friends really didn’t have too much of an affect on user tastes. This was focused on college students and can’t be generalized across every type of consumer. However, it does mean that it requires a deeper understanding from marketers when it comes to taking the belief that consumer actions are spread through social connections at face value.

It’s Not Who, It’s What

There’s been a lot of discussion this year on who is and isn’t an influencer, and this conversation will likely continue. But that merely scratches the surface. “Who” is only part of the equation.

The true power comes from understanding what influences a consumer from the people they’re connected with, the groups they’re part of, the content they consume and the context in which a message is delivered.

Go Deep With Understanding Influence

It’s easy to base influencer marketing efforts on influencer scores (Klout, Kred, etc.) by sending influencers products to try out or inviting them to an exclusive event. However, it may not be effective because the understanding of what influences the consumer is focusing on the “who”, not the “what.”

What truly influences a consumer can only be understood with extensive research, but as marketers, we can execute some key strategies to influence purchase decisions through social media.

• Identify the purchase path. What causes a consumer to want or need a product? How do they get from the beginning to the purchase to the post-purchase stage (when they refer their friends). This can partially be uncovered by monitoring online conversations for mentions related to a product category or brand.
• Find out what does have influence. Maybe peers have the most influence over the consumer when it comes to certain products. For others, it may be the professional opinions that matter. There may also be third-party resources that need marketers’ attention. Set up monitoring to understand who is being referenced in referrals for products and services.
• Be present at the crossroads. Understand the story the brand has to tell and the consumers who want to hear it. Then be present on the platforms to provide value in the form of information, support and entertainment. Being present may not mean the brand actually has a presence. It may be a blogger writing a review, for example. Identify the presence that will have the most sway over the consumer. 

Post-Blogger Event Reflections

Last week, following weeks of hard work, an Empower team and I helped our client Michaels execute a blogger event just outside of Dallas for some of the biggest and most influential craft bloggers out there. The event couldn’t have been better, but success is rarely an accident.

There is power in blogger events. It allows businesses to bring influential individuals into the brand fold and allow them to build real relationships with the people behind a brand, hopefully opening the door for an ongoing relationship.

An event can’t follow a formula. Each one will be different depending upon the brand, the attendees, the location and the content, but there are still best practices to put in place to make sure any event is deemed a success.

Get the Right People. The event will fall flat if the right people aren’t there. This, of course, means inviting the right bloggers. The list of invitees needs to be developed by evaluating content. Having a good grasp on each blogger’s content means you can make sure the right people attend, but it also ensures you’re not wasting someone’s time who wouldn’t be interested in attending. It’s also best to emphasize quality over quantity. Inviting fewer people to make the event feel more intimate and customized may mean it sticks with them more and they have a better time.

The group of bloggers isn’t the only group that needs to be right either. The people representing the brand need to be the right fit to. They should be open to answering questions, friendly and genuinely interested in bloggers and aware of the value they can bring to a business.

Bloggers are the Stars. The attendees are taking time out of their very busy schedules to attend your event, so it’s important to always keep that in mind and make the bloggers feel like stars. Make sure they have a great time and never feel the need to worry about anything. This allows them to focus on the content. Don’t be afraid to go out of your way to make a good impression.

Use Content to Tell a Story. The content is integral to the success of an event. There needs to be a lot of it, so the bloggers walk away with multiple post ideas and inspiration. A wealth of content means everyone will focus on something different, so you don’t have a situation in which all of the attendees write about the exact same things.

With a lot of content, it’s easy to let it get jumbled, but the goal should be to tell a story. Align on what you want the big takeaway to be, and then figure out the RTBs you can focus on to bring that takeaway to life. Those RTBs are your content.

Don’t Stop When the Event Ends. Look at an event as the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Keep the dialogue open by inviting the bloggers to provide feedback and always think of them as being in the brand fold by providing insider access.

Not Exhaustive, but It’s a Start.

This list isn’t exhaustive, but these pieces should be entwined into the DNA of any event. Every aspect should make sure you’re telling the right story to the right people in a way that makes them feel special and more invested in the brand than they were before they arrived.

On that note, I have to say that seeing one of these pulled together is awesome because you walk away with a lot more than a successful marketing effort. I walked away with some great relationships and new blogger friends. You have to love that.

Influence is Niche, Not Mass

Influence has risen as one of the topics of the times. With Empire Avenue, Klout and others gaining attention and significance for their promises of determining just how much sway an individual has on the thoughts and opinions of others, the right way to determine influence will be a topic of conversation for some time to come.

Size is Not Strength
Traditional media has given us a mass mindset. The value of a platform is in the number of consumers it can potentially reach, but when it comes to measuring influence value isn't that superficial.

The power of an influencer isn't the number of people he or she reaches (although, it may be part of it). It's more his or her ability to have weight when it comes to a consumer's decisions. Influence is a combination of specialization and trust, which most of the platforms and individuals with mass reach don't have.

Tap the Specialists
It's a bit of mind shift, but focusing on specialists within a vertical who have prioritized earning trust over mass numbers is how marketers can win.

The issue is that this isn't as easy as taking a look at the numbers. We must join communities and be a part of them to identify the big players and why a brand's message might be relevant to them. This is an analysis with the brain, not an algorithm because the right fit is rarely at the surface.

Be Picky
Tools are simply that, resources that allow us to complete a task, but they aren't the answer. Language is too complicated, and the nuances are endless. Influence is far too complicated to be taken at face value.

Know your audience, how they gather information and the communities they're a part of. Then it's a matter of identifying those community thought leaders who have the unique ability to talk and have others listen.

They may not be massive in reach, but they have power with those that matter. What they lack in numbers, they make up for in power over the hearts and minds of potential customers.