Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

Happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2022 as many podcasters, bloggers and prognosticators are … by looking ahead and anticipating what may come. But, I’ve got a couple things working against me in that regard. First, I’ve been observing and commenting on the social media space for over 15 years now. I’ve seen many a prediction post. I’ve written a few myself.  That means I know most of them are noth...

Today is a special episode of the show. I thought between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays I’d give you a treat and introduce you to one of our sister podcasts on the Marketing Podcast Network. For those who may not recall our episode from December 2nd of 2021, I have launched a network for marketing podcasts that serves two purposes: Allow like-topic podcasts an easy way to support and promo...

As I browsed the headlines from around the influencer marketing industry this weekend, something I do daily to keep up with all the things, I stumbled upon another of those Top Influencer lists. Now, we’ve covered my disdain for them before. The episode that published on September 20 of 2021 said it was time to do away with them. Alas, the content managers for many of the software companies still...

If you’re a regular listener to Winfluence, and I know you are, you know that podcasting itself is a medium I consider a big part of our territory in the influence marketing space. While you may think of influencers as primarily social media stars with lots of followers – like Instagrammers and TikTokers – podcasters are also social media content creators. And many of them have big audiences. So,...

Research hit the wires last week that shows the racial pay gap between white and BIPOC influencers … that is those who are black, indigenous and people of color … is 29 percent overall and 35 percent between white influencers and black influencers. To put it another way, for every $100 a white influencer is paid, a black influencer is paid $65. I’m tempted to end the podcast right there and just a...

If you’ve listened to this show for any length of time, you’ve heard me recommend the podcast of Scott Guthrie. He’s the consultant and industry thought leader behind the Influencer Marketing Lab. He has a great podcast that I recommend periodically to you here. He’s also been named one of Talking Influence’s Top 50 people in the industry, which is an annual recognition, but he’s been on it probab...

For the last probably year or year and a half, the conversation about the value of influencers has reverberated with the opinion that micro- and nano-influencers are more effective than the big stars with millions of followers. Logically, that makes sense. You have to spend a lot of money for one post with a big celebrity. You can get multiple posts from multiple micro-influencers that, over time,...

I’ve never really considered myself an entrepreneur, even though technically and by definition, I’ve been one a few times. When I started Social Media Explorer as a blog in 2007, my hope was to use it to publish my thoughts on an emerging industry trend and perhaps position myself as a thought leader. A couple of years later, that blog was the shingle I hung out in the consulting world. It then be...

A couple of weeks ago, we had an interesting conversation about race with talent manager Johanna Voss. She represents almost exclusively women of color, though she is not one herself. And most of her clients are of the Hispanic-Latina variety. The natural next step in this conversation for me, anyway, was to dive deeper into the African-American perspective, too.  It just so happened that Lindsey...

There’s an agency owner I know out there who listens to this show. He reads the articles I write. He follows my posts on social media. When I recommend a software or a tactical idea, he tries it out. By his own admission, I influence him. I reached out to him recently via email to try and convince him to join a new little venture I’m starting that I’ll talk more about with you soon, but he was one...

Influence marketing is truly a global phenomenon. We’ve talked to guests on this program who practice this craft all around the world. But we don’t spend a lot of focused time understanding how influence marketing works in various countries and cultures. Fabian Fernando Guevara Juarez, who goes by Fabian Guevara for a shorter version of his name, reached out to me recently to trade best practices...

Thursday evening I opened up my feed reader to browse the world wide web looking for the latest updates from the various blogs and websites I subscribe to. It’s always good to catch up on what’s happening in the industry.  Once I read the blogs and websites I know and trust, I have a folder of feeds that are essentially Google Alerts for certain topics I want to keep a finger on the pulse of so I...

It’s always fun for me, and I hope for you, when I run across someone who has multiple perspectives on the influencer marketing industry. I feel like I bring that to the table a bit. I work at an agency, Cornett, and devise and manage influence marketing programs for a number of our clients. But I also have a modest network of B2B influencer as a social media and social technology person, plus a n...

Not long ago, a client informed me they were moving their influencer marketing budget to their media agency. As in those who plan and buy advertisements.  Previous to that point, my team and I managed the growth of several valuable and productive relationships over the course of several years. There were about five or six content creators we worked with consistently. We would mix in new ones to ex...

There’s no doubt that the environment around influencer marketing and race, culture and diversity has undergone an incredible amount of change in the last two years. While the issues of pay gaps and brands ignoring influencers of color have always been present in the industry, the combination of social unrest in the United States and other countries, the Black Lives Matter movement, and a more voc...

For those of you who listen regularly, have read my book or follow me on social channels, you know the difference between influence marketing and influencer marketing. One is focused on the noun. When we say “influencer” marketing, your brain is conditioned to think about Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. The other, is focused on what you’re trying to accomplish. The verb. You wish to influence. You d...

Influencer marketing software is, in many ways, the backbone of our industry. Sure, you can feasibly find influencers manually by browsing social networks, snooping around hashtags or doing some Google searches for link-bait posts about the top influencers in one category or another, but that’s time consuming and laborious.  Influencer marketing software platforms like IZEA, Mavrck, CreatorIQ, Ona...

The stereotypical influencer is someone who has a topic, industry or talent. They create content around that and create an audience to build a platform. If they’re lucky, they monetize it in a way that supports them. If they’re real lucky they become famous and sign entertainment deals and such to spin off into more traditional show business or media roles. But there are different paths for influe...

There’s always been an unspoken attitude in the world of social media and now in influence marketing that advertising, or at least its philosophies and priorities, does nothing but muck everything up. Social media, and it’s immediate by-product of influencers and thus influence marketing, was, in essence, a way for consumers to push back against advertising. We were tired of brands just yelling th...

One of the industry resources I lean on to keep up with what is happening in the influencer marketing space is the Fourth Floor Newsletter, an email newsletter from an influencer marketing firm based in the United Kingdom.  I came about it because it’s authored by Scott Guthrie, a counterpart of mine, of sorts, in England, who has a finger on the pulse of the industry there and around the globe. I...

If you whittled down the biggest questions and problems brand managers are asking about today in influencer marketing, two of the top couple would be, “What’s the deal with TikTok?” and “What does this influencer marketing jazz even get for me?” The TikTok issue is layered, but one problem area has been related to the other. With no direct access to TikTok’s API, no one can really quantify success...

NIL is short for name, image, likeness, and is the short expression that defines an important legislative move by the NCAA and NAIA, the two main college athletic associations in the United States. The maneuvers relax the definition of amateurism in those organizations to finally allow college student-athletes to capitalize on their name, image and likeness. Until the NAIA passed an NIL move last...

The first thing many brand marketers do when they’re trying to find the right influencers for their upcoming campaigns is the first thing many of us do when trying to find something. They search. As in Google. Naturally, the query they often start with “top influencers in” whatever the industry is. And there they find listicles. Blog posts with a list of the top 10 influencers for this or the top...

Most of you know I am from and live and work in Kentucky in the United States. And if you know anything about that state, especially the eastern part of Kentucky where I grew up, you know it has spent the better part of the last three or four decades trying to figure out how to overcome the economic void left by the downsizing of the coal industry. Both automation and regulation have forced coal m...

Can you achieve influence marketing traction, then success without having to pay influencers? We’ve asked that question several times on this show and it’s a bit of a controversial one. One perspective is you might be able to, but you shouldn’t. You are, after all, getting not just access to someone’s audience, but also their talent in creating content, plus the content you can then negotiate to u...