Blog

There’s no doubt that the environment around influencer marketing and race, culture and diversity has undergone an incredible amount of change in the last two years. While the issues of pay gaps and brands ignoring influencers of color have always been present in the industry, the combination of social unrest in the United States and […]

For those of you who listen regularly, have read my book or follow me on social channels, you know the difference between influence marketing and influencer marketing. One is focused on the noun. When we say “influencer” marketing, your brain is conditioned to think about Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. The other, is focused on what […]

Influencer marketing software is, in many ways, the backbone of our industry. Sure, you can feasibly find influencers manually by browsing social networks, snooping around hashtags or doing some Google searches for link-bait posts about the top influencers in one category or another, but that’s time consuming and laborious.  Influencer marketing software platforms like IZEA, […]

The stereotypical influencer is someone who has a topic, industry or talent. They create content around that and create an audience to build a platform. If they’re lucky, they monetize it in a way that supports them. If they’re real lucky they become famous and sign entertainment deals and such to spin off into more […]

There’s always been an unspoken attitude in the world of social media and now in influence marketing that advertising, or at least its philosophies and priorities, does nothing but muck everything up. Social media, and it’s immediate by-product of influencers and thus influence marketing, was, in essence, a way for consumers to push back against […]

One of the industry resources I lean on to keep up with what is happening in the influencer marketing space is the Fourth Floor Newsletter, an email newsletter from an influencer marketing firm based in the United Kingdom.  I came about it because it’s authored by Scott Guthrie, a counterpart of mine, of sorts, in […]

If you whittled down the biggest questions and problems brand managers are asking about today in influencer marketing, two of the top couple would be, “What’s the deal with TikTok?” and “What does this influencer marketing jazz even get for me?” The TikTok issue is layered, but one problem area has been related to the […]

NIL is short for name, image, likeness, and is the short expression that defines an important legislative move by the NCAA and NAIA, the two main college athletic associations in the United States. The maneuvers relax the definition of amateurism in those organizations to finally allow college student-athletes to capitalize on their name, image and […]

The first thing many brand marketers do when they’re trying to find the right influencers for their upcoming campaigns is the first thing many of us do when trying to find something. They search. As in Google. Naturally, the query they often start with “top influencers in” whatever the industry is. And there they find […]

Most of you know I am from and live and work in Kentucky in the United States. And if you know anything about that state, especially the eastern part of Kentucky where I grew up, you know it has spent the better part of the last three or four decades trying to figure out how […]

Can you achieve influence marketing traction, then success without having to pay influencers? We’ve asked that question several times on this show and it’s a bit of a controversial one. One perspective is you might be able to, but you shouldn’t. You are, after all, getting not just access to someone’s audience, but also their […]

One avenue of conversation we haven’t really explored here on the show is diving into the nuances of influencer marketing within different social networks. A great creator on Instagram may not be very good on Twitter. A strong YouTuber may not help you at all on Facebook.  YouTube is the first avenue I think it’s […]