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My pal Arik Hanson offered up a theory on his excellent PR and communications blog Friday. His theory is that older public relations professionals, “completely detests and doesn’t trust the influencer culture.” He then proceeded to prove the theory with fairly trustworthy facts and statistics, convincing me it’s more than a theory. Arik termed these […]

Rachel Clay of Matter of Form says Influence Marketing is essentially Social SEO — That is, making sure when someone looks for your brand or type of product on sites like Instagram, there’s plenty of great content there to surface you. It’s a smart way to translate influence marketing strategy to brands that perhaps think […]

There are two points in an influence marketing campaign or program when scale is a question. At the beginning and in the middle. But for many brands and businesses, knowing how and when to scale influence marketing programs is a bit of a mystery. An easy recommendation or pneumonic shortcut isn’t possible. Every influence marketing […]

You know an industry has come to some level of maturation when trade organizations begin to form. Last year, the American Influencer Council was started by a group of creators and brand marketers to try and bring some advocacy for creators to the industry. And one of the key players in that happening was AIC […]

If 2020 were a guy at a bar, he’d be the sleaze bag groping any woman that passed by and then growling, “You gotta problem?” to anyone giving him the stink-eye for doing so. He’s drunk too much, smells too bad and is a general nuisance worthy of what the folks back home call, “an […]

C.C. Chapman knows a thing or two about influence and influence marketing. He was a pioneer of podcasting back in its first wave in the early to mid-2000s with a show called Managing the Grey. He had the advantage of being in the middle of the social media and tech boom in Boston then, and became […]

In case you missed my live stream presentation of the Not-So Technical Guide to Switcher Studio on December 17, I’ve embedded the recording here. This collaboration with Switcher Studio came from the notion that while I may have some technical knowledge on video and audio production — I do have a college degree in it […]

Several of our recent episodes have focused on business to business, or B2B influence marketing. The last couple of conversations we’ve had — one with Carter Hostelley and another with Mel Carson — talked about the concept of creating influencers from a company’s executives.  In this episode of Winfluence, we focus on building influence for […]

Online influencers have evolved in the short 15-20 years that social media sites have been around. When I got into the industry in the mid-2000s, the notable people online were people who had authority and followers as bloggers, or were vote-jockeys on content promotion sites like Reddit and Digg. One of the first influential people […]

There’s really no question that the more personal the relationship, the more powerful it is. In the business world, the big trend for everything from email marketing to e-commerce websites is personalization. In the influence marketing world agencies and brands hope to break through the inbox clutter and get influencers or media members to respond […]

The world of influencer marketing in the context we typically think of it today dates back about 15 years or so to the emergence of blogs. Jeremy Wright co-founded and was the first CEO of b5media, one of the original blog networks that eventually sold for millions of dollars. He sees parallels and has advice […]

AspireIQ is about to unleash a new version of its software that is an evolution with the market. The enterprise level software has been one of the great campaign management solutions out there that enables and agency or brand to discover, engage, manage and measure influencer partnerships. Its new version shifts the mindset from online […]