Why Mombloggers are not Magic Beans
Assessing the myths of scaled digital influence
Assessing the myths of scaled digital influence
Recently I left the company that I co-founded and sold to pursue … I’m not sure. On any given day I see a new path, and new interests emerge. It’s been nice writing more
I’ve been encouraged by the reactions of friends and professional contacts who have reached out with ideas, or “something you should seriously check out.” In many cases, these are fantastic opportunities. In others I feel an irritation that isn’t fair to the proposer but that exists all the same.
I’ve been trying to identify the source of this irritation. One clue is that the offending opportunities are typically around helping someone grow a consumer audience really, really quickly via influencer outreach.
The reason I get these requests underlies a personal branding issue. Having been a co-founder of a start-up that served digital publishers — influencers, as we also call them — whose collective audience reached 100 million monthly readers before our exit — there is an assumption that I somehow hold sway over wide swaths of female publishers and their audiences. As if a call from me asking Top Momblogger to write about some product or service will cause her to drop everything and start typing, or as if I somehow hold a master key to thousands of Wordpress accounts. Or as if I EVER called an influencer to ask her to do anything.
I suppose this perception is a fair one. For the first five years of my company’s existence I evangelized digital influence, sharing best practices for optimal results to marketers, business leaders, and even to digital influencers themselves who wanted a leg up in the marketplace.
But I also evangelized how to partner with influencers, the need for contextual and sustainable methods of outreach. And most recently I’ve been ruthless about the need to address innovations in social and ad technology that has enabled us to scale influence.
Has all of my evangelism come back to bite me? Do I now have to take back the smacks upside the heads of clueless PR folk who liked to clog up bloggers’ email accounts? (Incidentally I still receive dozens of email pitches a week, though I have never written about a product or service in my 10 years with BlogHer).
Not quite. I think, instead, there needs to be a recalibration of expectations, and a decluttering of the beliefs behind consumer growth hacking. There are some key principles that apply NOW. And that no doubt will morph in three years.
The race for top bloggers is over.
Digital influencers are still powerful, but at the top of the Long Tail they are even harder to pin down, especially if you are cheap or a Luddite and still trolling Alexa or your blogroll for blogs with the name “Mom” in them. Bloggers have moved on from doing everything in their power to grow their blogs to focusing on growing their digital footprint. Today, a blogger is also a Tweeter, a Pinner, an Instagrammer, a Video Producer, a Podcaster, a media entrepreneur, or all of the above.
And she’s not all that flattered that you think she’s the PERFECT fit for your (insert name of product or service here). She’s seen every offer imaginable, and she’s done the math and looked at outcomes earned for her seemingly endless hours hand coding a custom skin with your brand embedded in it (Who am I fooling? We know she now pays someone to do that). In either case, she’s determined that it ain’t worth it.
Influence is a complicated business; everybody has a different definition of win-win. What IS worth her time varies by influencer, but a good place to start is to look at how you might help her continue to do what she loves — create content.
Content creation is time-intensive and expensive. How can you help a great publisher make a buck, or get more bang out of her buck, doing what she loves?
Digital influencer outreach is a tactic, not a comprehensive marketing strategy.
Before all of you marketing pros throw out a “No duh,” on this one, consider how many times you, with limited budget, opted to put all of your eggs in this basket in order to get traction with a target market. I recall a conversation with an MBA (Marketing Bad Ass) who upon sharing his ace in the hole component to growth hacking for a client, spat out, “I’m just gonna call (Uberblogger) and get him to come to the launch party.”
And how’d that work out for you?
I know a lot of digital influencers and have personal relationships with a few of them. But most of my interaction with them has been of the listening variety. Rather than talk them into something, or cash in social currency by asking for a favor, the goal is to understand what they want and try to build models for meeting those needs. That’s the best thing you can do for a client — enable them to have a conversation with relevant influencers and understand them better, with no expectations.
There’s nothing wrong with inviting Uberblogger to your launch party. But if he comes, don’t angle for tweets. Rather monitor the fray. In the thousands of campaigns we’ve run over the years with influencers, the bulk of the earned coveted product mentions/raves have come from the mid to long-tail. The folks who spontaneously had something nice to say about you and whose audiences responded with things like, “Omigod, really? Cool!”
And when you get this earned media, you can then promote it by plugging it into your paid media strategy and know that the more mentions you get, the better the effect on your SEO. And you can give influencers more reason to promote you via a content marketing strategy that enables them to easily pass along your content. You get the picture.
Earned media isn’t free. You must prime the pump with paid media.
Again, this one may elicit some “No Duhs,” but this wasn’t always standard operating procedure. PR purists who were tasked with generating “positive word of mouth” were discredited if they did so via paid anything. But eventually someone realized that even the best product plugs never happened if nobody read them, or if nobody was aware of the product to plug it. PR started to partner with the media side of the house to reach shared KPIs.
Many small or startup brands struggle with this one. They don’t have fat marketing budgets to supplement programs with paid media, so they develop delusions that largely female influencers will be so enamored with their product that they will break out into song on their social networks. Or they assume a blogger’s heart skips a beat when she hears the words, “We don’t pay, but we will offer you additional exposure.” Even influencers who are not interested in monetizing would want to understand the source and size of the exposure she’s getting before she associates her content with yours.
There are platforms that shall remain nameless who have also been perpetrators of the “hey you posted here so I get to monetize your stuff as I see fit” argument, and they may be legally justified in doing so as stated in their Terms of Service. However, influencers are becoming more and more aware of receiving (or not receiving) attribution for their pins, posts, and tweets. If you don’t have HuffPo-size traffic, a super-relevant audience, or strong utility, content creators are not going to post on your site for the sheer pleasure of it. There needs to be more skin in the game.
For every time that I say this I will hear from someone who managed to corral a few influencers to post a widget/write about their product/do something for free. To these folks I ask: And what did that yield for you? Are you promoting that post or widget? In most cases this adoption is a one-off with no follow-up. The effort is dead in the water.
Attribution is a bitch, but attribute we must.
Back in 2009 that meant supplementing an influencer marketing campaign with paid media. Today that definition has expanded to also mean partnering with a content creator who influences advertising or commerce on your platform, via rev share, content licensing, real promotion, or something I haven’t yet thought of.
And beware the “Bounty” business model. Parties that offer up a bounty say it as if they are offering up a bounty of compensation. But by definition a bounty is a one-off payment for what could be an ongoing revenue source for the partner; it has diminishing returns for publishers. Many won’t go there. And I personally counsel publishers to avoid them. Have some bloggers made good money off of them? Sure. Some bloggers have also made good money off of having a virtual tip jar, but that doesn’t make it a sustainable business model.
And for the record: I don’t necessarily believe that there’s a place in hell for those who don’t compensate influencers, unless your definition of hell is being blacklisted by a bunch of influencers.
Having influence and selling influence are two separate things
I’m just going to come clean: The 100 million uniques that BlogHer (and now 185+ million uniques under SheKnows Media) attract do not actually touch my personal blog platform. No it’s true. In fact, I was kicked out of my own ad network nine years ago because I didn’t keep up a blog, and you can’t get paid for a platform you don’t maintain.
Why the confession? Because I can’t take the pressure anymore of the requests to “just give a shout out on your personal platform” by various friends’/colleagues’/former bosses of ex-nannies with something to promote, and the looks of disappointment when they see that it only garnered a like from my Mom (she’s the best, seriously).
Somewhere along the line of starting a Web company that supported OTHER influencers, I seemed to have stopped building my own platform, ironically becoming much more of a consumer of social media than a publisher of it. I actually think this is a good thing because it enabled me to eat the dog food I have been evangelizing for over a decade. And you know what? I’ve found I’m a pretty picky eater.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take your swag. I haven’t bought my own lip stuff in years. And yes I’ve worn your fake eyelashes and fall line onstage at a BlogHer conference because your sponsorship supports the event. But I don’t personally shill. I don’t have that kind of influence. I’m the Mr. Miyagi of developing a following: I know you should wax on, wax off, and paint the fence, but my house still looks like shit.
And no, I can’t force people to like you. I can only provide an environment for them to get to know you. And I might have some thoughts on how to have an effective conversation. I recall hosting a branded press event with influencers that my company sent and some who were invited by the brand. The brand spokesperson, a celebrity, said something in jest to the bloggers that if I’d repeated it would have resulted in my mouth being washed out with soap. Some of the bloggers audibly gasped and started thumbing frantically on their mobile devices. The brand marketing director tapped me on the shoulder and with desperation whispered in my ear, “Fix it!” Because, you know, that’s what I do: Control other humans with my telepathic powers and Untweet things.
Having Spreadsheets of Influencers is about as useful as having Binders Full of Women.
The implication is frightening to an actual, effective influencer. Most established influencers would prefer to be taken off these lists and only engaged with on custom opportunities that pay them for their time, provide them with more coveted exposure, or both.
I pity the poor marketer who has hired the “influencer specialist” whose primary competency is cutting and pasting email addresses into lightly customized mass emails. It does work sometimes — I mean, Veruca Salt did get a golden ticket by engaging in mass tactics. And I’ve had my moments of envy when I see a perfect influencer-brand match and think, now why didn’t I think of that one? But like I said earlier, I still get emails asking me to write about stuff and have never followed up on one. Marketers, is this really what you want to be paying for? Save your chocolate.
Data is the name of the game — you need to be able to reach out to the most relevant influencers, not just the biggest, and that data cannot live inside the head of someone in PR who doesn’t get out much. It needs to be systematic (automated) and indicative of platform-specific performance as much as of demographics and psychographics.
One of the smartest moves we made as a business was when we started capturing all kinds of data on our influencers, including traffic across all their active platforms of course, but also conversion metrics, viewability of the advertising on these platforms, and time spent on these platforms. And then we implemented campaigns based on this data. And we sold on estimated performance.
This scared the bejeezus out of bloggers initially, some of whom didn’t see the same level of revenue that they once did when they were paid for just having a lot of traffic. But then, Flash ads used to scare us too. And then we got over it. Getting paid, and then not paid, and then paid again (even if less), does that.
Growth hacking ain’t magic.
It took ten years to learn the intricacies of influence, and a lot of work by a lot of people, to capture “lightning in a bottle”. You perform targeted outreach, make good on that outreach, report on performance, refine your product. Repeat.
I think for my next act I’ll hang up my imaginary magic wand and get back to what matters — what has always mattered for growth hacking — associating with great content and telling a great story.