Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

I’ve been working with and tinkering around on social media software, including influencer marketing platforms, for the better part of 20 years. I started cutting my teeth on content management platforms, social media management platforms … then in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I became somewhat established as having a degree of expertise with social listening platforms. For some time now, I’ve...

This shouldn't come as a surprise to you, but I have a day job. At Cornett. It's an ad agency. And I love it there. What may come as a surprise to you is Christy Hiler, the owner at Cornett, is very rare in the ad business. And by that, I mean less than one percent of all advertising agency owners are women. Read that one more time. Yeah ... I know?! Today, Christy is launching an industry change...

I waxed poetic a couple of weeks back about the Metaverse. It is part of the larger grouping of new technologies and opportunities that fall under the umbrella of Web 3.0. The Metaverse, which is largely virtual worlds, is all about experiences.  Then you have crypto currency, which my best explanation of is the coins and virtual currencies you might be used to earning in video games, only they’re...

I attended my first in-real-life conference last week. Social Media Marketing World happened with actual, physical people in an actual physical place – the San Diego Convention Center – and mostly without masks, though the hugs and enthusiastic closeness is still faint compared to what they once were. Ironically enough, the buzz was all about the Metaverse and NFTs … the fake worlds where the prog...

About three or four years ago my daughter Katie came home with a gallon jug of borax and another of Elmer’s glue and announced she was going to make slime. As you can imagine, I was more than thrilled to have a 10-year-old playing with chemicals and food coloring all over my house.  But she and a couple of her friends had fallen into the slime craze and wanted to make it. A similar thing happened...

How many of you would call yourselves a gamer? Well, if you play Wordle, you’re a gamer. If you got sucked into Angry Birds, Candy Crush, or Trivia Crack … gamers all.  I have 3-4 games I have on my phone to pass time waiting at a doctor’s office, or to watch while I sit with my family watching a show I’m either not into or can listen to rather than watch. That makes me a gamer. The demographics a...

Many of you know I host another podcast on the Marketing Podcast Network called Digging Deeper. Occasionally on that show, we interview someone that has a perspective or focus on something that either is, or is related closely to influencer marketing. When we do, I like to share that interview here as well. Why not make sure you get the good intel, too. Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting wi...

The Metaverse has been on the top of minds and conversations of most people in the marketing space in the last few months. Ever since Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, ne’ Facebook, went all-in on VR to inflate stock prices because they had Oculus headsets to sell now, this seemingly new virtual world as a consumer and business reality has produced an explosion. Unfortunately, the explosion as been one of...

You may recall our episode from late January in which I adopted an exaggerated satirical stance responding to a podcaster who had taken exception to my answer to a question on Twitter. The question, from my fellow Marketing Podcast Network creator Seth Goldstein, was whether or not podcasting was a modern form of busking, or a street performer playing for change. I said no and Tanner Campbell, a p...

If you’re an influencer or a talent manager, today’s commentary might make you a little uncomfortable. I’m just going to throw that out there as a warning. But bear with me … I’m going to dish some harsh realities to our brand and agency side friends, too.   We’ve been talking a lot lately about when to pay influencers. Last week’s commentary answered a listener question about when to transition f...

I have been a student of stand-up comedy from my earliest memories. I would stay up late when I was little to watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson just to see the monologue, then hope beyond all hope one of the acts that night was a comedian. Later, I fell in love with David Letterman, who had more comedians and introduced me to a broader love of the craft. I bought cassette tapes of Dennis M...

A couple of weeks ago a marketing executive with an online retailer in the United Kingdom reached out to ask for my feedback on something. Her situation was not dissimilar to many people who email or message me with influencer marketing inquiries.  The company sells sporting goods and apparel, has grown nicely over the last few years and is trying to find ways to drive more revenue and growth thro...

We talked last time about the influencer pay gap and new data from IZEA that gives us a look at progress made … or not … in the breakdown of how women are paid compared to men and how various races and groups are paid when compared to white counterparts.  One of the surprising pieces of data there for me was the vast gap in the number of influencers by gender. IZEA’s numbers showed that 83 percent...

You can’t be involved in the influencer marketing space without hearing about, talking about or considering the influencer pay gap. When the topic first emerged, it referred to the disparity in pay between men and women who are content creators. Quickly, however, the influencer pay gap issue focused on the gap between white and non-white or BIPOC creators as well. For a while in early 2021, it was...

Despite my best efforts, the world of social media continues to migrate to … some might say devolve to … short form content as the most desirable type. Forgive my contrarianism about TikToks, Reels and Stories, but I’m a podcaster and a blogger. I’m also a B2B content creator myself, which tends to lean toward longer-form content as the preference.  So my nature is simply the antithesis of 15-seco...

Whether you’re an influencer or a brand, the concept of the creator marketplace brings with it some appeal. For the content creators out there, the opportunities to work directly with brands can be a lifeline. That’s especially true when you’re growing your audience from micro- to mid-tier or mid-tier to mega influencer. For brands, creator marketplaces mean simple integrations to support creator...

For those of you who have been with me on this journey through influence marketing for a while, you know that I get really excited when we can zero in on the concept of influence rather than influencers. The whole theme of my book Winfluence, and a lot of what we talk about here on Winfluence, the podcast, focuses on the fact that removing the "R" from the term means we have a more holistic approa...

My pal Seth Goldstein asked an interesting question on Twitter last week. He posed this: “Is podcasting just a form of busking?” For those who don’t know, busking is a term used mostly in Britain to describe street musicians and performers. The root of the definition is people who perform publicly for tips. Seth is not only a friend, but one of my fellow Marketing Podcast Network hosts and creator...

In influencer marketing, and certainly in marketing overall, there are generally two types of focus. The one we talk about more often is consumer marketing, also know as business-to-consumer or B2C. Then there’s business-to-business, or B2B. B2B brands sell software, equipment or services to businesses, sometimes for price tags far too high for an individual purchase. So think of complex IT system...

What did you want to be when you grew up? I waffled between professional baseball player and fighter pilot when I was really young. Then I went through a phase of wanting to be an architect or to anchor SportsCenter. The latter of those indirectly led me here, which is at least in the right industry. I’ll guarantee none of you ever said you wanted to grow up to be a YouTuber. Or a TikTok star. But...

We’ve been spending some time on the show of late talking about the future of the creator economy and how influencers can plan for monetization either with or without the big social networks where much of their audience may lie today. Two episodes ago, we talked to Ramiro Canovas from FanBase, which is a lot like OnlyFans only without the stigma of everyone there being adult content creators.  Be...

Influencer marketing done right can be quite the task for a marketer, or even a marketing team. It takes time and thoughtfulness to select, engage, manage, execute and measure influence marketing campaigns, just like it does for any other type of marketing. For many businesses, influencer marketing is just a small piece of their overall marketing puzzle, so they need help. Enter the influencer con...

Is the future of the creator economy and influencer marketing in subscription based content? If you read the tea leaves in the industry, one may think so. Content creators face potential problems when they put all their content and audience eggs in someone else’s basket. If the Instagram servers go berserk one day, some content creators will take a hit in revenue. If the rules on TikTok or YouTube...

It doesn’t seem to matter where, how or how often I talk to people about influence marketing, I inevitably get questions and seemingly confused looks and frustration from people about measuring what we do. Hey, I get it. Measurement can be confusing. It’s often an afterthought. But it shouldn’t be and it shouldn't be hard or intimidating. Back in September, my friends at Tagger asked me to contrib...

We’re now in 2022 and are within 12 to 24 months of a cookie-less world. Google announced in February of last year that sometime in 2023 it will no longer support third-party cookies for behavior tracking of is browser users. Safari and Firefox had already headed down that road, so it was rather inevitable. That poses a significant challenge for brands as advertising targeting and retargeting has...