Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

There’s been an evolution in business-to-business (B2B) influence marketing lately. Both software companies and agencies are pushing the idea of brands creating influencers out of company executives. Mel Carson was an early company-based influencer, long before we were talking about all this. He was a digital evangelist at Microsoft in the mid-2000s whose whole job was to become known in the marke...

The landscape of influencer marketing tools is wide and varied. We’ve talked to some of the software company executives here on the show. The IZEAs, Onalyticas and Mavrcks of the worlds are large databases with a high-touch managed services that sit on top of them. I’ve used several of them and they’re great. There are others, like ApexDrop, that are more about product distribution and micro-influ...

Aaron Anastasi has one of those faces you think is very familiar, but you can’t quite place it. Until you do. He’s a working actor who has played parts on shows like Bosch, 9-1-1 on Fox and others. But if you have ever searched YouTube for singing lessons, you definitely know him. Aaron is the creator of the Superior Singing Method, a training program and YouTube channel with almost half a million...

Influencing people isn't just creativity and content mixed together. It's the by-product of the way our brains function. As we experience that content or creativity, hormones release into our system that make us feel safe, happy, sad, angry or any of the other range of emotions. People are subject to their own brain chemistry and cognitive reactions to their environments. When marketers and influe...

For years now, one business-to-business, or B2B, marketing tactic has been to build executives of the company up as thought leaders. Reframing that purpose you could argue what B2B companies have been doing for years is building their executives up as influencers in their industries. Carter Hostelley and his team at LeadTail have been building thought leadership for B2B clients for years, but with...

If there is a beat writer for the influencer marketing industry it has to be Joele Forrester from Talking Influence. Her whole job is to interview the movers and shakers, break the news about new software product launches and industry trends, analyze the implications of influencer unions and legal interpretations for the industry and beyond. And she does it brilliantly. Talking Influence exists to...

A few weeks ago on the show, we talked to Emily Ho, the marketing strategist behind Authentically Social and a fashion influencer in her own right under the monicker Authentically Emmie. In that episode we talked about influencer fraud, comment pods, buying followers and the like. I even mused, “When is someone going to create a software to detect comment pods?” Well, low and behold, I found one t...

We’ve talked about a handful of books on influencer marketing here on Winfluence. While we await the publishing of Winfluence (the book) in early 2021, Jason Falls couldn’t help having more great discussions with smart people in the space, even other authors. Justin Blaney is a professor at the University of Washington and the chief innovation officer at Principal Advantage, a lead-generation firm...

Kroger was the first company to launch a branded TikTok challenge. They have also successfully engaged influencers for events like Hispanic Heritage Month and partnered with publishing platforms like Funny or Die to product share-worthy online content. But the brand also has built incredible social media success in its own right and much of all that success can be linked to Casey Smith. She is the...

If you’re not doing video today online, you’re not getting much traction. And that goes for brands, but also for influencers. Video content is more engaging. It draws people in, makes them stop in their feed and pay attention.  P.J. Taei is the founder of UScreen. His platform provides just that -- a place for influencers and brands to house video content that can only be accessed through a fee …...

Few people have been intimately involved in the influencer marketing industry since before it was called influencer marketing. Crystal Duncan is one of them. An early hire at IZEA before it because the behemoth influencer marketing platform, she is now the Senior Vice-President for Influencer Marketing at Edelman, the world's largest public relations firm. Crystal joined Jason Falls on Digging Dee...

As of February of 2020, Twitch has 3.8 million unique broadcasters. As of March, it registered an average of 1.44 million concurrent viewers … that’s 1.44 million people watching all at the same time … on AVERAGE.  So, if you haven’t yet explored Twitch as both a viable platform for reaching consumers via advertising or as a place rich with influencers and opportunities for collaboration, this epi...

Can influence marketing save broadway? Or how about arts organizations in general? Save might be an inappropriate word. Certainly, COVID and the pandemic restrictions of 2020 have had a huge financial impact on the arts, as would any economically challenging time. And broadway theatres, along with arts centers, theatres, community troops and groups are going to have to resort to some scrappiness i...

Carlos Gil’s latest book is called The End of Marketing. In it, and in this podcast episode, he claims Influencer Marketing is Bullshit. This is ironic coming from someone who not only advises companies and brands in the marketing space -- where influencers are a hot channel for discussion -- but has built a bit of a career as an influencer in his own right. Carlos and I have sparred on a topic or...

Amanda Russell's new book, The Influencer Code - How to Unlock the Power of Influencer Marketing, is out now. You can find it on Amazon. She wrote the book because as a college professor at the University of Texas, and before that at UCLA, she felt like a college text on the topic was missing. The book give good advice to businesses and brands and is well worth the read. Amanda and I share a lot i...

Rani Mani at Adobe formerly led that enterprise company’s influencer relations across company’s marketing department. But she was then promoted to take on the role of employee advocacy. Her role is to help Adobe employees to be the voice and face of the brand, much like the role of doing that with influencers. This is a significant sign from one of the world’s most successful companies -- the pers...

Fashion influencer Emily Ho has a unique perspective on influencer marketing. She's not only one herself, but leads influence and marketing campaigns for clients with her marketing agency. One battle she continually fights is influencer fraud. We dive in a bit to talk about the not-so-ethical influencers out there, how they hurt a brand's marketing and how to combat the practices. If you haven't h...

Scott Harward is an SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Affiliate Marketing guy. What does he have to do with influencer marketing? Well, he can not only help influencers understand how to better monetize their online presences, but report back metrics that brands care for most. He also works with brands and clients to help them design measurement strategies to prove the worth or programs like influencer marke...

Few people have as much experience in driving B2B influence marketing than Lee Odden. His company, TopRank Marketing, not only drives programs for some of the top tech companies in the world, but conducts an annual survey to report on the B2B space. TopRank’s latest research into B2B influencer marketing is out and very interesting. Lee joins the show to dive into the survey responses and better q...

This is a special bonus episode. Many of you know I host a weekly live stream for Cornett called Digging Deeper that is also a podcast. Before we launched this show, Winfluence, we had a few interviews specific to influence and influence marketing I wanted to make sure were available to you here. The first one of those I’ve pulled together is with author Neal Schaffer. His new book The Age of Infl...

Pierre-Loic Assayag is the founder and CEO of Traackr, one of the more sophisticated influence identification platforms on the market. His technology analyzes influence not by reach, but by relevance, often surfacing influencers brands would never realize were worth reaching. As a global platform, Assayag also has insights into the differences in influencers and influence strategies in different m...

Michael Brito is one of the more experienced business-to-business (B2B) influence marketing practitioners in the world. He is the executive vice-president for the Zeno Group and has spent almost two decades building relationships for technology and SaaS companies in the Bay Area and around the world. Michael and I dive into some of the granularity he uses in finding influencers for his clients, bu...

Onalytica evolved from the public relations and communications side of the marketing world rather than the advertising side. As you might expect, its head of product, Alistair Wheate has a decidedly comms-side view of the practice. I visit with him to tackle that difference, talk about how influencer tool algorithms work and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Fiorella co-authored one of the first books on influence marketing in 2013. He then used that research and smarts to re-shape his agency to reverse engineer influence marketing using branded communities. These walled gardens give brands the opportunity to research and identify pain points in the consumer journey to know exactly who, what, why and how needs to be triggered to influence everythi...

The biggest challenge influencers often face is figuring out how to monetize their content by partnering with brands. Brands biggest challenge is finding influencers who understand the business of influence marketing. Tabitha Hawkins founded the Association of Influencers and Content Creators to bridge that gap and help influencers be more attractive to brands while also advancing equal representa...