Social influence is nothing without relevance

Posted on | January 23, 2011 | 3 Comments

Influencer marketing is one of those established buzzwords amongst digital marketers. For many an “influencer” is defined almost solely by numbers. An influencer is an individual with a large number of people reading their blog for example and therefore a large number of people being “influenced” on what this individual thinks and does.

Assuming getting an influencer, in this narrow sense of the word, talk about you automatically leads to their followership take action on something is not so simple. It can happen, but if you only look at numbers, you forget something that’s even more important: Relevance.

@robinsloan wrote about The science of the hashtag which quite simply demonstrates how important relevance is. The information-action ratio is low if you fail to find the right group of people who are attentive and engaged enough to care about what you are saying and more importantly take action on it. The social influence in addition to the relevancy of the topic within the audience is the magic formula that every marketer seeks to find.

When talking about relevance there has to be relevance for both the audience and the company. Relevance from a business perspective means that the effort has to be relevant to what the company wants to achieve strategically and tactically, be it improved customer service, brand affinity or sales.

A while back I was helping out a friend to get started with marketing their shoe brand, a collection of uniquely designed high-heels. I made quite similar observations to those in the above mentioned post. Even if some rather popular fashion bloggers with a large followership took on a pair of shoes and mentioned them, we couldn’t see much correlation in sales on their online store. However, when a couple of people who are spesifically into high-heels started talking about this particular shoe brand, we saw an increase in sales.

The important learning for us in this was that even if the fashion bloggers had a huge amount of people following them, it was the less-famous high-heel enthusiasts that made a difference in terms of the crowd taking an action. The topic had more relevancy within that niche audience and led to a bigger information-action ratio. Like Brian Solis put it, popularity does not equal influence.

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