At Lean Startup Machine the team that wins is the team that shows the most validated learning before Sunday afternoon. And the way you do this is by getting out of the building – both physically and digitally.

How can Awedience Help?

Awedience is a real-time influencer marketing platform. You can use it during your weekend to find key individuals via social media on whom to test your startup hypotheses. Whether they’re industry experts, local customers or global thought leaders, Awedience will help you find and engage them quickly. We all struggle with the extremely short time-scales on startup weekends so why not give your team a short-cut to customer development?

What are we offering you?

We’re offering our Pro Package, for FREE, to anyone taking part in this weekend’s Lean Startup Machine in London. Just sign up with your Twitter account, let us know you’ve done it and then we’ll immediately add a Pro Package to you profile. We love Lean Startup Machine (it wasn’t too long ago that we were sat in your seat!) so we’ll even throw in some free consultancy and help over the weekend to any teams that ask us nicely.

Good luck!

Token Gesture

This company is very well known so having their logo’d glass in my house doesn’t make me any more aware of them. I rarely, if ever, use their product and giving me a glass is, quite frankly, not going to change that. This approach will have a much bigger return on investment when employed by a new company looking to build awareness, but for an established brand I don’t think it does much.

Potential Big-Ticket Win

A flight on the jet will certainly get me talking about it – but NOT about their product. Giving away a high value item is not ‘wrong’ but it does need to have a close (if not exact) relation to the product that you want them, or those they influence, to buy. Richard Branson once gave a flight on Virgin to a random member of the public but that’s fine – it’s his product. Even if he gave her a 1st class ticket and she flies cattle class (like the rest of us) it’s not wasted. When she next flies anywhere she’ll remember her emotional attachment to Virgin and most likely fly with them again.

Conjecture

Unless I have an immediate, desperate need for your product, giving me gifts is not going to convert me to an advocate for your brand. And if I do have a need, the level of influence is a function of the size of my problem and the value of your solution.

Real-world Example

A number of years ago I won a top spec racing bike. I cannot begin to tell you how awesome it was. Barring hypercars, it was the fastest, most angry piece of living machinery on the roads. I’ve hung up my leathers now, but you can probably still hear the excitement in my writing. In the context of biking this gift was almost unparalleled in value, but what about my need? I’d sold my previous bike a month or 2 before winning the new one and I was starting to feel a bit lost. So, yes, I had a problem that this company solved – and it solved it in style. Suzuki remains a brand and product I talk about and it’s still the bike I notice most when I’m out and about.

Take-Aways

Giving away high value gifts can have a profound effect on the receiver, but a greater effect can often be seen by giving a smaller gift to someone with a big problem. Don’t give gifts, give solutions.

There are a number of ways to eliminate these from your search results. The quickest is just to filter out those accounts that have only just started tweeting and, therefore, have no followers. The ‘attack’ seems to be automated and accounts are only created as and when needed. Here’s what our search results look like after a 2 second tweek…

The reason brands court influencers is because they amplify positive messages. What we often forget, however, is that the word ‘positive’ is optional. Effen failed to give some invited guests a great evening and, guess what, they made their displeasure known to their own engaged followers.

Update

I’ve been talking with Jason Metz, CEO of Brand Influencers who organised the event. He rightly points out that the evening was a great success for around 500 influencers with 50, unfortunately, turned away at the door. OK, so something went slightly awry on the evening. The point I was trying to make with this post is that we have to be careful. Influencers need to be handled as if they’re dynamite! It takes a lot of input to get somebody highly positive about your brand, but it takes a lot less to make them equally negative. It’s human nature to want to share a bad experiences and innate to be able to spot these few mentions in a crowd of positives. I say that because it’s exactly what I did this morning.

So, here’s a sample of some positive and negative responses…

From the rooftop -beautiful view of the #NYC skyline #EFFENAOD twitter.com/one_savvymom/s…

— One Savvy Mom!™ (@one_savvymom) September 26, 2012

#EFFENinfluencers “blogger” party at @theempirehotel. What a poorly planned event. They shouldn’t have overbooked the party.

— Triszh Hermogenes (@triszhermogenes) September 27, 2012

When the door guy is rude because the event is closed due to overcapacity you have to laugh cc @effenvodka #effeninfluencers

— Deanne (@dreamsequins) September 27, 2012

I mean I used to work for a PR agency and that is not how you do it. Quelle disaster! #effeninfluencers

— Deanne (@dreamsequins) September 27, 2012

Having fun at the #EFFENAOD with @only twitter.com/MsCherrieAmore…

— Cherrie J (@MsCherrieAmore) September 26, 2012

Well I got to taste 2 drinks but this event falls short – running out of cups & voting marbles? #notcool #EFFENAOD #EFFENInfluencers

— Michelle (@RadBrownBeauty) September 27, 2012

Soooo going to this #EFFENINFLUENCERS event was an EFFEN mistake…

— CeCe Olisa (@thebiggirlblog) September 27, 2012

Welcome to fail – over-inviting people. Slow clap. @mktginfluencers @empirerooftop #EFFENAOD #EFFENinfluencers

— Barb Leung (@barb_leung) September 27, 2012

Rooftop Wednesday with @johnsimonjsd & @jonathanvaldez at @empirerooftop for #EFFENAOD #EFFENInfluencers twitter.com/ExclusiveKat/s…

— ExclusiveKat (@ExclusiveKat) September 26, 2012

What kinda EFFEN® party is this? There’s a line for a line. #EFFENAOD #EFFENInfluencers #notit

— Eileen (@MissWhoeverUR) September 26, 2012

Wow, wish we weren’t waiting in this line for the past hour. #EFFENAOD #EFFENInfluencers

— Foodies@work (@foodiesatwork) September 26, 2012

Were you there last night? Have any comments about how the event went? We’d love to hear your feedback.

Internal

This activity revolves around a company’s existing customer base. Using historical transaction records it’s possible to do some smart maths gymnastics and figure out who influences whom and who has the greatest influence. It’s a superb way to engage and energise known customers.

But what if you don’t have this transactional history? What if your customers never interact with you in such a direct way? What if you’re a startup with no transactional history yet? This is when external influencer marketing is useful.

External

This involves targeting individuals that aren’t necessarily existing customers. The idea is to go to an external channel with the aim of attracting new customers to your business. Taking an influencer marketing approach allows you to focus your finite resources on individuals most likely to give you the best return on investment.

Which of these methods have you tried? How effective did you find it? How can either of these approaches be improved?

In the article Christopher talks about 3 types of influence:

1. Compliance
2. Identification
3. Internalization

As we read down the list the level and depth of influence increases from shallow to potentially belief-changing. What I’d like to add to Christopher’s article is an understanding of which influencers promote which type of influence.

There are many types of influencer: billboards, magazines, celebrities, journalists, colleagues, friends and family (to name just a few). Although celebrities have a huge reach they only ever manage to promote Compliance. We’ll wear Justin Bieber’s jeans for a few weeks, but only until Bieber 2.0 shows up and promotes shorts. At the other end of the scale we have colleagues, friends and family. These are the influencers that can promote Internalization and, potentially, instil a deep change of belief. This is how brand advocates are born – people that will tell everyone about BrandX and be loyal for years.

So, why does this only happen with citizen influencers? As in the film, Donnie Brasco, it’s all about trust. You might say this to friend:

“Hey, you should try BrandX, it’s amazing!”

What they hear you say is different:

“Hey, I tried BrandX and it was amazing! BrandX is a friend of mine and I’ll vouch for its greatness.”

So, you’ve taken a risk. If it turns out that your friend doesn’t like BrandX, they think:

“Wow, my friend has no taste. How could he possibly rate BrandX. I trust my friend less now.”

Because we value our reputations, we tend to only recommend events, products and experiences that we genuinely believe are great. These are the people that Awedience is built to find – because we know they have the biggest impact on potential customers.

As individuals, we want our own score to be as accurate as possible. Firstly, because we want to make sure that those-that-measure are squeezing every ounce out of our social activity and, secondly, because we’re damned sure that we’ve got a bigger score than that guy sat next to us. The implication here being that if we don’t, then the score must be inaccurate.

However, if you’re dipping your toes into influencer marketing do you need hyper-accuracy?

Maybe, but you won’t get it.

For low value propositions these inaccuracies don’t really matter. You can afford to give away a free latte to the ‘wrong’ person. But for high value propositions you have to do something to make up this shortfall in accuracy yourself. Lending a Ferrari to the ‘wrong’ person will have a significant impact on your campaign’s RoI.

“The level of accuracy necessary is proportional to the value of the proposition.”

This shortfall can only be bridged by manual work. You have to examine a potential advocate’s activity and make a judgement as to whether it’s worth engaging them. It shouldn’t take too long to identify those that shouldn’t be in your campaign, especially if you use a service like Awedience to help eliminate 90% of the possibles.

How do you deal with inaccuracies from these companies? Does it matter to you?

Specifically considering Twitter, an automation process can certainly find influencers and, say, auto-follow them. It can even auto-DM them if they follow back. This is a great first step in raising the awareness of your brand. But, it will not create advocates.

Advocates are born from personal interactions. Nobody becomes passionate about your brand simply because of recognition that they exist. Only by personally engaging these potential key influencers can a relationship be created, trust built and advocacy promoted.

Want to try influence marketing yourself? Follow us for free upgrade codes to Awedience.com.

I say should because it’s not that straight forward; as some companies are already discovering. If you haven’t stumped up significant amounts of cash you’re not allowed to advertise at any of the events or claim an association with the games. That’s OK, I understand that that’s necessary in order for the organisers to attract significant funding. However, this protection is reaching further this year than in any other.

According to Berry Davies LLP the Olympic Symbol (Protection) Act 1995 stops the word Olympic (and derivatives) from being used in the course of trade. The newer London Olympic and Paralympic Games Act 2006 introduces “Listed Expressions”. Use of any two words in list A or any word in list A with one or more of the words in list B is not permitted.

So this begs the question “How are you going to attract new customers during the Olympics?”. After all, one of the main tenets of the games is that local residents, consumers and industry should benefit from this amazing event. You can’t advertise your ‘Olympic Special’, your ‘Games Package’ or even your ’2012 Edition’.

Let us know what you’re going to do to take advantage of this momentous event.