We can divide influencers into several categories.

1. Statutory authorities – These people are linked by the fact that most are among the so-called decision-makers. They may be company directors, managers of individual company branches, but also office managers or politicians
2. Experts – ex. developers, designers, film critics, doctors, etc.
3. Media elite – ex. journalists, commentators, moderators, etc.
4. Cultural and social elite – ex. celebrities, artists, musicians, designers, etc.
5. Connectors – people, customers

Advertising and marketing have already more or less successfully learned to work with the first four categories, but they are just starting to discover that fifth group, despite its high influence on a company’s sales success.

So who then are the influencers-connectors?
These are people who by their influence may draw those around them towards your brand or, quite to the contrary, steer them right away from it. These people represent the value of several “ordinary mortals”. They are distinguished by several factors:

• they have more social links, and communication between them is bi-directional, meaning that the surroundings reciprocate their contact
• they tend to be extroverts and have a greater tendency to speak out about their experiences, and to thus spread either positive or negative WOM
• thanks to their interest in the given area and their personality, they hold the clout necessary for influencing the purchasing behavior of their surrounds

Rule of 10 %.
Foreign research has shown that around 10% of the people we’re surrounded by are influencers. This does not mean that there are only 10% of people in the entire population holding a monopoly over wisdom, and who direct the behavior of the other 90%. It is rather the rule that in each segment in which you as marketers are interested, influencers always represent a different 10% of the target group. This means that somebody will be an influencer in the area of cars, and people will go and see him/her when ready to buy a new one, whereas another person will be a mover of new computer purchasers. But it still remains true that it must be a person with wide social surroundings, and must be perceived as a person of prominence.

The most frequent form of work with this group is a “long-term influencer program” with the aim of building a base of ambassadors spreading positive word of mouth amongst the remaining 90% of the target group.

The main condition of working with this highly influential group is to avoid unidirectional “pushy” communication, but rather to start up a dialogue. Another condition is sincerity and transparency.
Thus the keystone of influencer marketing is providing thanks from the brand and drawing them into the brand. Be careful not to confuse this with “loyalty programs” like “buy, collect points and you’ll receive something nice”. It is neither thanking nor drawing, but purely pragmatic “bribery”.

If you really want to use the capabilities of influencers, you can’t buy them; you have to sincerely win their hearts. Their main motivation for spreading positive WOM about the brand won’t be that they’re doing it for the brand, but that they’re improving their friends’ lives and providing them with interesting experiences.

Thank them only when they help other users, perhaps in the form of a reward, but beware. This should never be money or large gifts, because you’d run the risk of turning your ambassadors into paid agents who stop spreading positive WOM the moment they don’t receive such reward. They also lose their credibility in their environment, because their motivation is seen as purely selfish.

Actively engage them in you activities. Desire feedback on your product – new, old, innovated - and on prepared activities. Don’t fear negative feedback and reactions. Your sincere interest in even negative experiences increases customers’ feelings of solidarity with your brand, enhances their feeling that they are important to the company, and thus makes them even bigger ambassadors than before. But they must receive feedback on their feedback.

But a long-term influencer program is not the only way of working with influencers. You can also use the strength of influencers for one-off situations.

Do you have a new product and need for the target group to try it out and become convinced of its qualities? Try for a change instead of an anonymous sampling of 90% of the target group to do target product seeding amongst the influential tenth – the influencers.

People’s average minutes “tangled up” in the web online are growing and growing. The average Czech user then spends 31 hours, 55 minutes and 27 seconds on the Internet each month (source: data from January 2009, Mediaresearch). The average Czech time on-line has grown by five hours over last year, so it looks like we still have something to look forward to. In campaigns abroad, the trend is to engage community-social-networking websites (Facebook, Twitter) or blogospheres. We’re actively feeling our way around this space here in the CR, but for example, Twitter is still flying right by us. How are social networks interesting for marketers?

In part it is because “it’s simply working” and it would be silly to miss out, and in part a because of one simple fact – we’re dealing with people. Webblogs, Facebook profiles and Twitter messages are personal, so their readers relate to them easier than to a unified page of some comfy slipper manufacturer from Upper Downlandia. Which information has greater value for you, and is cooler? When you read on that company website that “these slippers really are the best”, or when you check out your buddy’s profile and his/her latest messages says “I bought these comfy slippers and man, they really are the best”?

Marketers see great strength in just these on-line reviews and product evaluations from its satisfied users. It makes sense, the Internet is a well of knowledge, into which every dips their bucket when they have the slightest hesitation about something. And when you hesitate plenty in a number of categories when buying something, why not seek out advice? Where’s the problem? Already in our WOMonitor, which mapped Word of Mouth on the Czech market in 2007, we confirmed that personal recommendations given face to face influence us the most when deciding whether to make the purchase. And the best ones are from our family, relatives and friends. In the WOMonitor, 80% of Czechs attributed influence to their friends, and 73% to family members.

The American consultation company Rubicon performed research among American Internet users over the age of 13, where personal recommendation blew away the world of Internet commentaries, printed media or reviews on specialized websites. “It’s interesting to find that as much time as we spend online, we still prefer a personal recommendation from someone we know and trust. Young adults are somewhat more likely to turn to the internet for advice and referrals, but even they listen to their peers first,” says Chris Haack, senior analyst of the company Mintel, drawing from the research by Rubicon.

How does your brand do in the social surroundings of your customers? Have you ever tried to find out?

The WOMMA Ethics Code of Conduct speaks clearly about what is and isn’t propaganda, and what can and cannot be. It defines the fundamental ethical principles of Word of Mouth – transparency, sincerity, veracity and protection of privacy. WOMMA also clearly defines unethical techniques that are incompatible with Word of Mouth:

stealth marketing – commercial communication under a false non-commercial identity
shilling – paying people to speak about your brand
infiltration – false identity manipulating online or offline conversations
comment spam – automated or false commentary in online discussions
defacement – damage of property for the purpose of promotion
falsification – spreading false or misleading information
fake blogging – commercial blogs masked by civilian identities

Examples that speak for all:

Pay per tweet is a service that reeks of shilling, introduced by the server ProBlogger. For each mentioning of a product of brand that you launch in the air through Twitter, you’ll get paid. This sounds like a prescription for sincerity in pill form. Call it support for Word of Mouth? You can make up your own minds.

Jim and Laura have become immortal in the history of fake blogging for Wal-Mart. Wal-Marting Across America. Two ordinary people in a caravan (RV) head across America from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart, writing on their blog about meeting with people who love Wal-Mart. The fulfilled erotic dream of the Wal-Mart brand manager was unfortunately fully sponsored and directed by the PR agency Edelman, and gave birth to a number of blogo-lies-to-your-face that were all carefully scripted. Boo!

The Target corporation achieved three encroachments on ethics for the price of one. Target Rounders are students who gain points for promoting products of the retail chain Target. Openly. Then however they were instructed apparently by infants to keep their affiliation with the Rounders “a secret” on Facebook. (encroachment no. 1). Rosie, a PR student involved in the program claimed it to be unethical on the Facebook group Rounders. Before her contribution was deleted by administration (encroachment 2), an employee of the agency asked her for details, without claiming with whom he was affiliated (encroachment 3).

Some marketers understand Word of Mouth as advertising with greater potential to invade one’s privacy. But Word of Mouth cannot be falsified or bribed, eradicate or “prevented from happening”. Word of Mouth is just here. Period. It’s up to every brand to decide to support, strengthen and facilitate it, or to manipulate and/or falsify it. But the second path has such short legs…

Have you tested your campaign out with the help of “20 questions?”

Start monitoring: You’ve got several means at your disposal that are free of charge (Google, searching on Twitter) of finding out what’s being said about you and your field, but mainly who said it. You can even find opinion leaders or discover in people’s debates a calling, which your brand is facing without you even knowing it.

Monitor blogs and hold conversations: Sernovitz obviously means blogs relevant to your business. It is not in the power of each marketer to maintain his/her own blog, and this is a way of remaining in the picture and getting a feel for how it is possible through an albeit foreign blog to influence the perception of your brand, and what reactions it incurs. Join in the commentary and sell yourself and your company.

Form an account on Twitter: It is much easier than building a name amongst blogs. You don’t have to spend more than a few minutes on it each day. Twitter will also allow you to contact the right people and monitor their insights, thoughts and ideas within the space of a few hundred characters.

Dialog is thus the key word and common thread joining all of Sernovitz’s tips; but it will remain decisive on into the future. Some fortunately realized this for themselves, while others may even need a flogging about the head and shoulders to finally get the point. Take for example the American juice giant Tropicana. It opted for a major change in the packaging of the Pure Premium series, without preparing its customers for it. But a strong group of consumers piped in, not wishing to relinquish the iconic image of the orange with straw, and not wanting to buy Tropicana now with the dispassionate theme of just a glass of juice. To its own surprise, Tropicana had to read off the complaints on paper and the computer screen, and handle a slue of irate callers. “This wasn’t in our research,” offered Tropicana’s then President Campbell in defense. And the result? The label remained the same, the redesign was washed out and the weak packaging resurfaced as the new series Trop50. This lesson came with a price tag of USD 35 million.

Starbucks ran in the opposite direction. When checking out their Website during the launch of their new instant coffee, you’re inundated with a Website chock-full of social media. Photography, video, twitter contributions, commentaries, a link to Facebook… No effective flash, no “Hurrah! We have new coffee!”, but rather the customer plays the starring role. And the next project only confirms the fact that this is the role in which Starbucks loves its customers the most. At My Starbucks Idea, you can take part in anything you can imagine relating to your favorite purveyor of coffee-to-go. This isn’t about how big your idea is; what’s important is that someone is interested in your voice. “Help shape the future of Starbucks – with your ideas.” And for clarity’s sake, in the section “Ideas in Action Blog” you can see what’s going on with your ideas. As Tropicana may have found out for itself, listening pays dividends (or saves a bundle).

Do you listen to your customers? And did you ever think that they could be the ones who work on the future image of your company?

We didn’t close our eyes to projects involving alcohol. Ostrava Bazal and Stella Artois Perfect Gastronomy Program still fill out our timesheet, but a while ago we started work on the first Outbreak “housewife” seeding trial of a project for Vitana, and we're just starting up cooperation with the cereal giant Emco.

This is especially fantastic because according to research by the company Lucid Marketing, women pass along positive Word of Mouth around 10 % more frequently than men. And according to more research by the company Keller Fay, America's pregnant women and new mothers engage in one-third more Word of Mouth conversations than the rest of the American population, whereas over two-thirds of these conversations contain recommendations. This group has a weekly average total of 109 conversations about products, services and brands, of which the majority (10:1) are positive. Other mothers perceive these recommendations as highly reliable. This summer we plan on publishing a case study from one of the current housewife projects.

27. March 27, 2009, the City of Ostrava

2:47 a.m.
My cell phone alarm is going off for the fourth time…this time I get up. The hour that I normally got to sleep is the one that starts my day. The weather’s a big question mark, so I throw my scarf and gloves in my bag and head out. On the stairs I meet my cameraman Max, who just got in from Slovakia. He says he caught a good nap in the afternoon, so he has been up since 2:00 a.m. and is already a bit bored. My legs are still asleep and I’m a bit jealous of him. Our photographer joins us in front of the hotel and we await the rest of the team.

3:02 a.m.
We’re still waiting for people. Some goofed up our meeting point and are waiting in a completely different part of Ostrava, while the others forgot it was up to them to get here. With nothing left to do, we wait.

3:15 a.m.
We’re finally all together. We’ve given everyone jackets sporting the Our Football Beer project label, and we fill up backpacks with the whistles. We divide up localities and agree on how to share the cameraman and photographer. Their first location is Jan Hus Park, right nearby the hotel.

3:28 a.m.
We start by tying the packages with whistles to the park bench. There’s an easy way to pull the string out of the package one after another and then hang the whistles, making the work go much faster. But I don’t discover this method for another two hours. I pull apart the rubber band holding all the packages together. The first thing I see when thinking about where to hang these things are the trees. My partner Ondra meanwhile is “bombarding” all the benches and light poles. The photographer and cameraman are jumping in between us, mainly to provide the photographer with illumination.

3:46 a.m.
By the time I’ve covered another tree with whistles, the wind picks up and the branches with the packages become loud. Those little hidden balls in the whistles are kicking up nicely in the wind; the waving packages thus form an entertaining sound effect. No packages are falling, which I feel good about. The weather situation is worse; it looks like rain. Just great.

4:00 a.m.
It hasn’t rained yet, and we gradually move from Jan Hus Park out to the surroundings. We hang the packages on the adjacent bus stop. Ondra starts hanging the whistles on the railing, and we apply this method until the last whistle has been hung. When we finish, both sides of the streets fill with the sound of whistles blown naturally by the wind.

4:27 a.m.
An older man comes up to me and asks me what’s going on. I explain it to him and he ends up leaving with four packages – for his work buddies.

4:40 a.m.
As I’m digging through my bundle of whistles, the municipal police pull up to us. Two officers ask the same question, but with markedly less enthusiasm than the man had. To calm them down, I offer them the opportunity to take down the info from my ID, and they each got one whistle. They leave satisfied, and that’s the last I see of them. We’re running out of whistles, so we await fresh supplies.

5:10 a.m.
We slowly stop “bombing” each railing along the street by Jan Hus Park and moved on to the front of Hotel Imperial. We call to the other teams to see how they’re managing, and they tell us that some of the hanging packages are already disappearing. We hear the Baník anthem resounding from afar and we’re curious to find out how many “socially tired” fans are around us in the wee hours.

5:15 a.m.
A bit away from us comes a pair of guys decked out in full Baník garb. In the park, we again adorn the trees with the little packages – lamp posts and railings too. We’re out of whistles, and the other teams must be running out too. We slowly return to the spot where we started.

5:45 a.m.
Almost all the whistles have disappeared from the benches and from the railings around the park. They're still hanging on the trees. Walking around the park, we arrive at the bus stop – several of the whistles are already taken, the nearby tree is bare, and the packages that we hung right on the bus timetables of individual busses are gone too. The railing across the street is still rather full. The quickly disappearing whistles however spurn us on to retrace our “hanging” paths to see what the story is elsewhere.

6:05 a.m.
I plan to return to Jan Hus Park and photograph the last whistles, but as we go past the railing I can see that all the other packages are gone. As I walk through the park, the trees are bare, and one little package with one little whistle is hanging from one lamp post. On a bench a bit farther along, an empty package is waving in the breeze. Nearby is an information panel with a map of Ostrava, so I’m looking at how far I am from the places where the other teams have hung whistles. The closest by is Masaryk square…

6:25 a.m.
I crisscross the square and I don’t see anything. I ran into two posters calling for the tapping of the first keg with the Bazal football lager, but I don’t see the packages anywhere. I ask a lady walking by to be sure that I’m in the right place, and she merely confirms my sense of direction. I call the cameraman and photographer to find out where they are and if they were able to capture on film any of the people taking the packages. They assured me that they had a few good shots. The whistles unfortunately began disappearing faster than we were all expecting.

8:30 - 11:00 a.m.
When we check the places that we hung whistles, we find that everything has “turned to white”, and we only found one solitary package left hanging at the Svinov train station. The police didn’t even call us. We personally bring special packages into the offices of selected regional media outlets for journalists, containing the Bazal whistle and a press release from Staropramen Breweries.

Its not just love for good food and sophisticated gastronomical expertise that binds this group of a hundred perfectionists; it is mainly the desire to help improve the quality of the Czech hospitality industry. The perfectionists will evaluate restaurants regardless of the brand of beer, gastro segment and locality. They will publish their evaluations and tips for improvements at www.perfekcioniste.cz. These improvement tips will be delivered to the managers of the establishments. By doing so, Stella Artois will help the restaurant pinpoint its weaknesses, and define opportunities leading to providing guests with an impeccable dining experience. Positive reviews will appear on the Website and in the media, but only the managers of the establishments will receive improvement tips. This has already been addressed: Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Chief Evangelistsays that companies that try to make the world a better place in which to live end up being the most successful ones. Kawasaki offers three ways of doing so: 1. improve the quality of life, 2. right a wrong, 3. prevent the end of something good. What about your brand? Does it accomplish any of these?