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.