Influencers & Marketing Guidelines:

Using Influencers as a powerful marketing tool for your brand or Company is very much in vogue at the moment,  however they can all to easily be misinterpreted or worse still cause real offence if not carefully managed from the outset, so when you decide to use them to publicise your brand or product you should always very carefully and strategically plan out there implementation first.

The following is a set of best practice guidelines for word of mouth programs that target or include influencers.  Although totally optional, I assure your trying to work to them will really help to ensure your programs continuity, as well as positive results for both your brand/company and most importantly for your customers.

1. Always abide by a personal code of honesty that you draw up before you get started and always try to stick to it whilst engaging influencers to participate in brand marketing activities, honesty from the outset will always make things easier down the line, IE "don't ever build your campaign on Pillars of salt"

2. Make an effort to listen to and understand an influencer's point of view about your brand before and during their engagement in a brand program or marketing activity or simply, in their role as a customer of my brand. 

3. Understand the savvy nature of influencers and commit to personalizing your invitations for brand participation. Make a pledge to respect the rights of influencers as individuals and agree to maintain a level of personalized or individualized interaction with them separate from automated or mass-customized communications. Furthermore,  understand that if an influencer does not reply to your request for participation, you will respect that individual's privacy and cease to solicit them. Finally, agree and make it strict policy not to share their personal information without their express permission. 

4. Make an effort to build a respectful and open relationship with your brand’s influencers, where collaboration (instead of expectation) is the guiding nature of communication. Additionally, you should communicate with influencers in a timely manner. 

5. Ask influencers to transparently represent the source of their information when communicating about or representing your brand to others, whether on or offline. Also proactively provide influencers with guidelines for transparency and actively support this transparency within your company, the media, and the marketplace.

6. Invite and respect the opinion of participating influencers, even if this is contrary to your brand's position. Fully agree to share or make available these opinions throughout your organization as is appropriate. Furthermore, allow influencers to evolve or remix messaging so as to be relevant to how they communicate with their community. 

7. Never ask influencers to falsify or "hype" any product claims, make usage claims without direct experience, or back claims that neither they nor your brand can substantiate. Never request an influencer to undertake on your behalf a task that they are uncomfortable with or do not believe in. 

8. Provide incentives for participation in brand programs, Fully disclose the nature of the program so as not to give the appearance of a conflict of interest or shilling. Fully understand that your not establishing rewards as a payoff for opinions and am ensuring transparency of any marketing efforts.

9. Don’t manipulate advertising or affiliate programs to impact influencer involvement or income derived by your brand from influencer programs. Do not falsely manipulate program findings or influencer opinions in any way, nor manipulate or falsely communicate a program’s progress or result to any party internal or external. 

10. Thank influencers who have participated in brand-initiated programs.

If you try to use this set of guidelines you should be able to initiate an influencer program for your brand or company and maintain and ethical outlook at the same time.  I hope that this has helped you get a better idea of how to ethically and productivly use influencers within your company.   Next week I will be dealing with how to actually initiate influencer programs in more specific ways, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Ignoring Social Media at your own Peril:

As I am continuously trying to tell people and companies, we are now living in a very brave new world of Social Media and Word of Mouth viral marketing, which we ignore at our own peril, transport for London have just been involved in a Classic Case/Example of this, which I really do feel needs highlighting.

A London Underground worker who was seen yelling at an elderly passenger in a video was forced to resigned from his job because of a have a go citizen journalist and his very slick use of Social Media and word of mouth marketing, it is a very real story the we all should be now taking notice of ,  just in case our companies fall foul of the same set of circumstances, do you know what your staff are Facebooking or Twittering let alone what they are posting on YouTube.

Transport for London said Ian Morbin, a customer service assistant, handed in his resignation over the incident at Holborn station on 15 October.

Mr Morbin has apologised but TfL said the behaviour was "unacceptable".

The video shows him calling the man "a jumped up little git" and "little girl" before apparently threatening to "sling him under the train".

The statement said: "Mr Ian Morbin, a Customer Service Assistant at Holborn Tube station, has advised London Underground that he wished resign because of the incident.

Arm stuck

The incident was captured on video by businessman Jonathan McDonald, a fellow commuter at the central London station.

Describing his version of events leading up to the scene, Mr McDonald said the elderly man had got his arm stuck in the door of the train.

When the victim told the Tube worker what had happened, he was sworn at three times in an attempt to make him stand behind the yellow line, he said.

Mr Morbin can be heard threatening to call the police to deal with the passenger, who is understood to have done nothing wrong.

Mr. McDonald posted the video on YouTube and then put up a Tweet about it and the rest is history as they say, 203,421 views later and god only knows how many Re-Tweets and the game is up so to speak.  I can see this type of thing, happening again and again from now on,  after all we have already seen the damage when  a pop star or country and western singer from Nashville gets caught doing cocaine, once that goes viral in this day and age that is his career effectively finished before it even gets started.  Well now it can happen in the general world of employment.

After the footage emerged London Mayor Boris Johnson put a response on Twitter saying he was "appalled by the video".

So if your now worried about how this Brave new world of Social Media, and how the rise of the citizen journalist could effect your company, please get in touch with us so we can advise you on how not to fall foul of it, our legal dept is expert and has long term experience of social media policy and contract writing to protect your company from any little incidents like this.  Anyway have a look for yourself and see what you think, the actual video is posted below, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Smartphones & Social Networks are making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?

As Senior parter here at IT Bloke I get asked all the time two very important questions, (1) actually what is an IT Bloke, this I will address another time and (2) why has IT Bloke London, become the over night Success it is so quickly?,  well the answer is really very simple, but I thought I would take the time to answer it anyway, just to lay the matter to rest for good.

As long as eighteen months ago I realised that there’s was and will be a relatively sudden change taking place  in the way in which we interact with the Web.

It is one that not many of you where aware of but to be fair should have been, as it directly effects the way in which you should market yourselves in the future and will now eventually render most of the conventional forms of marketing and advertising almost totally impotent.

If you do not start to working with Social Network Marketing and WOMMA I assure you one of your competitors will and will leave your business simply standing by the Roadside it is seriously that powerful and not to be ignored.  It is one that relies exclusively on totally honesty, transparency and your ability to fully take on board and publicise any all public chritasism  of your business.

While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.

Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like Google's Android, will ultimately herald a new frontier  in the way in which we all work with our IT systems and mark a direct end to the exclusive strangle hold Web Designers have had on the market for so many years now.

The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.

That’s not to say that direct usage of the Internet (loading up and using sites and apps via the traditional Web browser) is going away. It’s still far and away the most common way to interact with the Web today and will likely be that way for quite some time, if not forever.

But real shifts in both online platform alternatives and in the mobile market are beginning to usher in foundational new usage patterns by users. These new channels — of which the latest generation of mobile apps and social networking platforms, which are often tightly integrated with the Web but are not truly one with it, are just the two biggest examples — demonstrate what is probably a generational transformation of the vital border between us and the Internet.

And this is the crux of the point: Where the point of user attention and interaction resides and who controls it is one of the most important conversations between us and our “preferred intermediaries”, a fancy term for who we like to work with to interact with the Web. This in turn has significant implications for enterprise intranets, our often clunky yet essential local “Web” in our organizations.

IT Bloke London did not only immediately recognise this fact but totally and actively fully emraced it without question, debate or argument, this was our strength, as  to debate challenge  it simply hinders and somewhat blurs your WOM marketing message, you cannot stop Word of Mouth Marketing so simply fully embrace it because if you don't, "it could finish you".

The Secret is, don't be afraid to say "I don't understand this new media and way of doing things and need a little help to move forward with my own word of mouth marketing campaign" and do not be afraid to fully admit your ignorence of the subject and ask a Word of Mouth Company for a little support most of us will be glad to talk to you about it F.O.C. (this really is a case of pride coming before a fall, believe me we have seen to many cases of this now, to debate it), after all, starting positive conversations is what we should be all about and to be fair all over.

I hope that this has further served to answer some more of your questions as regards Word of Mouth marketing, should you have any more please do not hesitate to contact me ( ashe@itbloke.net ) I will be delighted to help you and please check back for my next tutorial on Friday, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

TYPE'S OF INFLUENCER:

Here at IT Bloke we really understand the modern power of Influencers and the hightened effect they now have on brand awareness and marketeering, mostly due to the speedy roll out and consequent enormous popularity of such easily available social networking platforms like, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace, not to mention the titanic and ever upwards rise of personal Blogging.

However the truth is that academics and marketers have been talking about influencers for more than five decades, going back at least to 1955 when Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz wrote about a “two-step” communication process in their landmark work, Personal Influence (Free Press). Their concept, which has stood the test of time, is that some people have a disproportionate degree of influence on others and can be effective communications channels.

Like word of mouth marketing itself, influencer targeting can come in many forms -- differences in who they are, how they are reached, and what they are called. While it would probably be impossible to inventory every conceivable type or name, what follows is a framework that demonstrates the diversity of targeting options for influencer marketing. Whether aiming at the highest ranking, formal, or institutional leaders, prominent talking heads in the media, grassroots influencers on the internet, or influencers in your neighborhood, all types of influencers can provide the basis for an influencer marketing strategy.

In the table below, we identify five broad categories of influencers based on varying degrees of formal/institutional roles to less formal influencers whose value stems from more personal characteristics -- social networking, personality, and inclination to share opinions. Numerous researchers and marketers have developed names -- some trademarked -- for the various influencer types.

Category

Who they are

Channels of Influence

What they are called (Partial list)

Category	Who they are	Channels of Influence	What they are called (Partial list)
Formal position of authority	Political/government leaders/staff Business leaders	Laws & regulations  Decision & spending authority  Top-down directives	Opinion Leaders  Decision makers  C-suite
Institutional/ recognized  subject matter  experts & advocates	Academics/scientists  Industry analysts  NGO leaders  Consumer activists	Academic journals  Traditional media  New media  Social media	Experts  Mavens  Analysts  Critics
Media elite	Journalists  Commentators  Talk show hosts	Traditional media  New media  Social media	Talking heads  Columnists  Politicos
Cultural elite	Celebrities  Designers  Artists  Musicians	Traditional media  New media  New styles/products  Social media	Trendsetters  Fashionistas  Taste makers  Creators  Starters
Socially connected	Neighborhood leaders  Members of community groups Online networkers Business networkers	Personal relationships Email lists  Social gatherings  Social networking websites Social media	Mavens  Starters  Connectors  Soccer moms  Spreaders  Hubs  Alphas

I hope this article has gone a little way to explaining what an Influencer actually is, next week I will be actually dealing with how we can use them to enhance to image of our company or brand and in turn use them to facilitate greater orders, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.

Unethical Word of Mouth Marketing Strategies:

Any practice intended to deceive people is unethical and should not be used.

"A Good Word of Mouth Marketing campaign does not use and in essence is absolutely opposed to any of the following unethical word of mouth marketing practices or tactics"





Stealth Marketing: Any practice designed to deceive people about the involvement of marketers in a communication.

Shilling: Paying people to talk about (or promote) a product without disclosing that they are working for the company; impersonating a customer.

Infiltration: Using fake identities in an online discussion to promote a product; taking over a web site, conversation, or live event against the wishes or rules set by the proprietor.

Comment Spam: Using automated software ('bots') to post unrelated or inappropriate comments to blogs or other online communities. 

Defacement: Vandalizing or damaging property to promote a product.

Spam: Sending bulk or unsolicited email or other messages without clear, voluntary permission.

Falsification: Knowingly disseminating false or misleading information.

Word of mouth marketing cannot be faked:
Artificial word of mouth marketing is dishonest and ineffective. Word-of-mouth marketing must be based on the honest opinions of real people. We strongly oppose any practice that tries to fake word of mouth. 

* Ethical and responsible word of mouth marketers do not… 
* Impersonate people, shill, or hide their identities 
* Manipulate or corrupt honest opinions Infiltrate, invade, or violate online or offline venues

Marketers must work to oppose and eliminate unethical practices. 

All marketers should be aware that unethical practices are currently used by unscrupulous or uninformed companies. The standards of ethics and consumer protection are evolving rapidly, and many marketers have not yet learned about the current standards (or choose to ignore them). Regardless of intent, such unethical practices jeopardize consumer trust and ultimately harm both consumers and honest marketers. 

We strongly recommend that all companies aggressively review their practices and always insist on the highest level of ethics, and make sure that all of your campaigns comply with a stringent Code of Conduct and Honesty, if you need a hand developing such strategies for your company or Brand, then please get in contact with us we would be delighted to assist, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London...

Positive Word of Mouth Marketing Strategies:

"Good word of mouth marketing strategies involve finding ways to support satisfied customers and making it easier for them to talk to their friends."





1. Encouraging communications:
* Developing tools to make telling a friend easier 
* Creating forums and feedback tools 
* Working with social networks

2. Giving people something to talk about:
* Information that can be shared or forwarded 
* Advertising, stunts, and other publicity that encourages conversation 
* Working with product development to build WOM elements into products

3. Creating communities and connecting people:
* Creating user groups and fan clubs
* Supporting independent groups that form around your product 
* Hosting discussions and message boards about your products 
* Enabling grassroots organization such as local meetings and other real-world participation

4. Working with influential communities:
* Finding people who are likely to respond to your message 
* Identifying people who are able to influence your target customers
* Informing these individuals about what you do and encouraging them to spread the word 
* Good-faith efforts to support issues and causes that are important to these individuals

5. Creating evangelist or advocate programs:
* Providing recognition and tools to active advocates
* Recruiting new advocates, teaching them about the benefits of your products, and encouraging them to talk about them

6. Researching and listening to customer feedback:
* Tracking online and offline conversations by supporters, detractors, and neutrals
* Listening and responding to both positive and negative conversations

7. Engaging in transparent conversation:
* Encouraging two-way conversations with interested parties
* Creating blogs and other tools to share information
* Participating openly on online blogs and discussions

8. Co-creation and information sharing:
* Involving consumers in marketing and creative (feedback on creative campaigns, allowing them to create commercials, etc.)
* Letting customers 'behind the curtain' to have first access to information and content

Well I hope that has given you a few positive idea's on how to use WOM, if you need any more or some help on how to implement them with you company or brand, please start a conversation with us and we will be glad to assist.  My next post is more on the the Negative, basically a 'What not to do with WOM' and the ethics of WOM, however I will endevour in my usual way to make even this as positive as I can, see you next time, Regards….. Ashe, IT Bloke – London.