Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

Billion Dollar Boy, an influencer marketing agency based in both the U.K. and U.S., publishes the pay rates of its influence campaigns broken down by ethnicity on its website. This bold act of unabashed transparency is a stark flag in the landscape of an industry challenged by the influencer pay gap and how influencers of color are treated by agencies and brands. CEO Edward East joins Winfluence t...

One of the topics I explore throughout the book Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand is that everyone can be an influencer. In fact, the whole point of the book is to say that we need to focus on influence marketing (without the R) so we don’t fall into the trap of thinking we’re only talking about people with big follower counts on Instagram and YouTube. In the book we...

When you get down to the core of what an online influencer is, these are people who leverage self-publishing tools like blogs, social networks, photo and video sharing sites to create content. Those that create compelling content or engage an audience of people around that content, or both, accumulate a following of people they have some degree of influence over.  One of those platforms where peop...

The book is officially launched and for those of you who have your copy of Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand, you’ve probably started in on the book and know the name Tiffany Mitchell now. Her story of the now infamous motorcycle accident opens the book.  To catch those of you up who haven’t yet read her story in the book, Tiffany is Tifforelie online. Her Instagram...

The official launch date of the book, Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand - is Tuesday! This is technically the last episode of the podcast before the book is officially out — though Amazon has already started shipping it, so you can get it before then — but that launch date brings us to another book sneak peek episode and today we’re going to talk to Daniel Lemin. He...

Word of Mouth has been called the holy grail of marketing. Some of the world’s best marketing case studies center around brands with great word of mouth, or WOM programs. The Harley Davidson Owners Group, Maker’s Mark Ambassadors, Fiskars Scissors, Pabst Blue Ribbon’s hip resurgence—all classic Word of Mouth case studies.  But Word of Mouth is still a bit of an enigma to many brands. The output is...

It's hard to dig deep into social media marketing or influencer marketing and not come across the name Jim Tobin. He started one of the first social media agencies at Ignite Social Media in 2007. When he saw influence marketing becoming its own thing, he launched a second firm called Carusele which helps brands and other agencies drive performance-based influence marketing programs. Jim and Erin L...

Nick Bilton's HBO documentary Fake Famous portrays influencers as superficial, purposeless and purveyors of staging their lives, followings and engagement. The film is compelling and certainly exposes the worst practices of social media influencers trying to just create fame. But it leaves out the rest of influencers, I would argue most of them, that build genuine trust and engagement with real fo...

One of the perspectives we haven’t touched on nearly enough on Winfluence is that of the talent manager or influencer agent, if you will. At some point in an influencer’s growth, they may look to a talent agency, manager or agent to help them manage or grow their business. The talent manager, however, presents a bit of perception issue. Many agency strategists and even brand-side marketing manager...

Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand is set to hit shelves February 23. In the coming episodes here, I'll interview some of the experts and practitioners that are highlighted in the book. Today’s sneak peek guest is Lisa Joy Rosner, the senior vice-president for brand and digital at Oracle. She was the chief marketing officer at NetBase in 2009 when I was building Socia...

Is a celebrity an influencer? By that, I mean someone that falls into the category of influencer marketing? Or is celebrity endorsement a category in and of itself? I tend to classify celebrities as different because they’ve earned their influencer for something other than being an influencer. Even if a content creator illustrates expertise or talent, they are building influence themselves, not th...

Is Facebook set to kill the influencer economy? That question arose during my recent conversation with Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere and the Everything Everywhere podcast, and it’s a question we seriously have to consider and contend with in the coming year or years. He explained every time a brand or an agency, or one of the influencer marketing platforms, pays an influencer to post content...

One of the first jobs I tackled when I began focusing on social media marketing in the mid-2000s was to arm wrestle with a room full of corporate lawyers about what a client could and couldn't do on social media. Fortunately, I was working with attorneys who had an attitude of possibility, not risk-aversion. They tried to find ways within the rules and regulations to say "yes" rather than "no." Mo...

Dr. Karen Freberg is heading into her 11th year of teaching public relations at the University of Louisville. She also teaches a master’s level course for one of my alma maters … West Virginia University. Dr. Freberg started teaching a new version of public relations as the 2000s were winding down and social media had started to work its way into businesses and brands. She is one of the pioneer co...

If I were to describe a person to you who had built a large following for themselves online, parlayed that into a job at one of the biggest companies in the world in a given industry, fell ill with cancer, beat that cancer, then started his own agency which is winning national and international awards for its work, what’s the picture in your mind of that person? My guess is it doesn’t look anythin...

There's a reason Winfluence often features people representing the influence marketing software solutions and it isn't sponsorship dollars. These are the people working in and thinking about influence marketing every day, so they have great insights and perspective to share. I thought I knew most of the players in the software space until I recently stumbled upon Find Your Influence, an end-to-end...

Arik Hanson offered up a theory on his excellent PR and communications blog Friday. His theory is that older public relations professionals, "completely detests and doesn't trust the influencer culture." He then proceeded to prove the theory with fairly trustworthy facts and statistics, convincing me it's more than a theory. The key statistics he used to illustrate the problem were ones I'm very f...

Rachel Clay of Matter of Form says Influence Marketing is essentially Social SEO -- That is, making sure when someone looks for your brand or type of product on sites like Instagram, there's plenty of great content there to surface you. It's a smart way to translate influence marketing strategy to brands that perhaps think in terms of search. She shared that opinion during an interesting conversat...

Welcome to our first episode of 2021. Happy New Year! You know an industry has come to some level of maturation when trade organizations begin to form. Last year, the American Influencer Council was started by a group of creators and brand marketers to try and bring some advocacy for creators to the industry. And one of the key players in that happening was AIC co-founder Qianna Smith Bruneteau. ...

C.C. Chapman knows a thing or two about influence and influence marketing. He was a pioneer of podcasting back in its first wave in the early to mid-2000s with a show called Managing the Grey. He had the advantage of being in the middle of the social media and tech boom in Boston then, and became a noted blogger, photographer and content creator. Chapman first came to national and international pr...

Several of our recent episodes have focused on business to business, or B2B influence marketing. The last couple of conversations we’ve had -- one with Carter Hostelley and another with Mel Carson -- talked about the concept of creating influencers from a company’s executives.  In this episode of Winfluence, we focus on building influence for a company -- the company itself. Marc Meyer created a b...

Online influencers have evolved in the short 15-20 years that social media sites have been around. When I got into the industry in the mid-2000s, the notable people online were people who had authority and followers as bloggers, or were vote-jockeys on content promotion sites like Reddit and Digg.  One of the first influential people in that world I made friends with was Tamar Weinberg. She had a...

There’s really no question that the more personal the relationship, the more powerful it is. In the business world, the big trend for everything from email marketing to e-commerce websites is personalization. In the influence marketing world agencies and brands hope to break through the inbox clutter and get influencers or media members to respond to their pitch. Personalization here is almost req...

The world of influencer marketing in the context we typically think of it today dates back about 15 years or so to the emergence of blogs. Jeremy Wright co-founded and was the first CEO of B5 Media, one of the original blog networks that eventually sold for millions of dollars. He sees parallels and has advice for today's influencers based on his own experiences, but has also spent his professiona...

AspireIQ is about to unleash a new version of its software that is an evolution with the market. The enterprise level software has been one of the great campaign management solutions out there that enables and agency or brand to discover, engage, manage and measure influencer partnerships. Its new version shifts the mindset from online influencers to anyone who can influence your audience. With pl...