All You Wanted to Know About Becoming a Social Media Influencer and Influencer Marketing

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged practical advice on how to best leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of maximize social business. Neal Schaffer. Hey everybody, this is Neal Schaffer and welcome to a another edition of social business unplugged. As I mentioned last week, I am currently in Japan. So this is coming live to you from my hotel room here. In Osaka, Japan, I was told where I read a long time ago that if you close your drapes and keep your hotel room, dark, ie do not let any outside light in or natural sunlight in or don't view it, it actually helps reduce your jetlag. So the room is relatively dark. But I'm always excited to help you and your company leverage the best of what social media offers. Now I'm going to be doing a seminar next Monday, I often do seminars, and I'm here in Japan, as well as other business, teaching Japanese professionals and businesses how to leverage social media, I speak Japanese, so I teach it in Japanese as well. But the interesting thing was as a lead up to that I did a promotional Google Plus Hangout recently, this was in Japanese. And if you ping me, I'll send you the URL. It's actually on YouTube. So you may be able to find it by doing a search for me. But anyway, the question of influencers and social influence came up and social influence as a topic I don't think I've talked about on this podcast. So I wanted to share with you the same perspective that I shared with others that were listening, that Google Plus Hangout. And it really comes down to, if you're a business and you want to get more amplification from your message, or you want to better segment your audience because you're bombarded with 10s Hundreds 1000s of app mentions direct messages a day, obviously, having some sort of social scoring can be very, very convenient, it can actually help the efficiency of your marketing help the efficiency of your customer service and what have you. The problem, as we all know, is that there's no one perfect social score, we have a few companies that have emerged on the scene cloud to being the most famous, K L. O UT. We also have cred k r Ed made by the folks that people browser, great company. And we have another company that perhaps some of you in Europe, or the UK have heard of, and not many in the United States have called peer index. And I had a chance to meet the founder and CEO of both cred and PeerIndex. And they're both great people and, and great companies filled with lots of very, very intelligent sales, marketing engineers, product developers, what have you. But what it really comes down to I find, and businesses also want to become more influential, but people want to yield influence. And if you're a social media professional listening to this podcast, that may be what you're very, very interested in learning about influence, how do I become influential? How do I get a cloud score above 60? Above 70? or what have you, you know, there's some books written on the subject, there's been some blog posts written on the subject, I don't think it's hard to imagine that because these are algorithms, that the algorithms have a way of working, and they work on data that is publicly available. So if you think about it, what is publicly available data? Well, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook profile, isn't really available for the public, because you don't want the public to view it. Now, if you have a Facebook page, that's another story. But if you use influence from your personal Facebook profile, or your personal LinkedIn profile, it can be very, very limited. Now maybe you own a LinkedIn group that has a lot of members. Well guess what? That LinkedIn group API may not be accessible by these algorithms. And in fact, if you sign up to clout, you can see what social sites you can integrate. And I don't think there's any place to integrate a LinkedIn group or even a LinkedIn company page if you have a lot of followers there. So it really comes down to yielding influence means yielding influence for the public to consume. And what are the platforms that are open to the public? Well, Pinterest is a public platform, although there are secret boards that exist. I don't know how many people use them. I guess they're good for collaborating. But Pinterest is open for public. Now the interesting thing about Cloud for instance, is that Pinterest actually is not indexed by them. As far as yielding social influence, as it is depicted by a score like a cloud. Pinterest is for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. Right? Well, what about the other public platforms? Well, we have Google Plus which you have a chance to use privately, but I believe most people use publicly. And then we have Twitter, and of all these platforms. Now Google Plus obviously has a lot more users and it's a lot bigger than most people think. But of all the you know, if we were gonna look at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook of the mature social network platforms, although they've only been around for a decade or so, Twitter is indeed Public 99% of the conversations that are being had there unless you're you have a protected account, are public. And what that means is if you really want to get a lot of influence, you need to be active on Twitter. This is my own personal theory now, and I don't work or have any insider information at these other companies. But if you look at, for instance, the Forbes top 50, social media influential list of which I think I'm number 33, you'll notice that most of these people, if not all, are very, very active and have a very, very robust Twitter following. On the other hand, if you've only been active on Facebook, and really haven't done much on Twitter, it really limits the potential and it makes sense because Twitter as a real time search engine is probably number two, or number three in the world only behind Google and perhaps YouTube, if it's not ahead of YouTube. It is where the people look for the news, it's where the news breaks, it's just a huge site that's also a global site used very actively here in Japan, as well as other parts of Asia and other parts of the world. So that's sort of the way I look at social scoring and how you can influence or what have you. And after I did that Google Plus Hangout, there were a lot of comments like, wow, in Japan, Twitter, sort of, on the down Facebook, obviously, it's become more popular, and then people are moving to a platform called line, I won't even get into what that is. But they were reminded of the importance and of the value that Twitter can have if you really want to get your name and your brand out there in the market. And this is also why, although my next book is going to be called maximize your Social, I'm building a social media strategy. I'm also in parallel working on a Twitter book, which I've actually been working on for quite some time. But I'm willing to commit that that's going to be my next book after my maximize your social buck. Hopefully, you'll see that appear maybe in the spring of next year. But the message that I really want to give you all about influence and how to become an influencer is don't follow the influencers, don't necessarily retweet the influencers, become the center of influence become an influencer. And this is actually how I walked this social media path. I remember I joined Twitter, and I think it was November of 2008. I'm like, wow, I totally missed the boat. I'm late for Twitter. And obviously, you're never late on any given social media site. Even on Facebook, I just started a new Facebook page for maximize social business. And what you find is that your past relationships that you have in your past friends and fans, you can leverage for whatever new things you want to do on any site. But when I started, you know, I was retweeting a lot of content from a lot of people, a lot of pretty famous people. And you know, it was lonely, because my existence never got acknowledged. And I thought to myself, Why am I helping promote these people, when I should be promoting the people that help them promote me, it's human nature. And maybe because I'm a fan of the underdog, and I believe I've always been an underdog myself, which is sort of fueled by passion. And hopefully, my my business success, optimism now and in the future. That's where I realized that I needed to carve my own path, you carve your own path of your influences by first of all having your own perspective, your own point of view, and sharing that to the world through blogging. And that's why a blog is a central part of any social media strategy that I create. But above and beyond the blogging, it's not only sharing your own point of view, but it's also in the type of content that you share, or curate, and who you curate, from what social signals you send, who do you engage with? And that's why even today, okay, even if you just signed up on Twitter, and you only have five followers, and you were to say, Neil, that was really a great blog post, I have a question for you. If you throw that out to me to Twitter, I'm going to engage with you. And sometimes it takes me a few days. But I'm religious, that if someone is going to go out of their way, and spend time to send me a tweet, I'm going to respond back because I should and even if I have 70,000 followers, it doesn't matter. It's also why I tend to share a lot of the content of people that share my content. This once again is human nature now. It's interesting, I have people that direct messaged me, hey, here's my latest blog post care to share. You know, I don't want to tell people look, if you share a lot of my content, I'll be more than happy to share your content. But really, if you want to engage with someone that's sort of high up in the influence chain, and you want to get the right Just be natural, read their blog posts, comments, send them a tweet every once in a while retweet their content, share their content on Facebook, tagging them. It's not rocket science, but it's really amazing how very few people do that. That's really the thought that I want to leave you with. You know, when I grew up in the 1980s in Southern California I was very big into punk rock and this is Social Business unplugged right and want to share a little bit about me. There were some great bands at the time in the 1980s Southern California punk rock scene was quite active. There was a band that I like called the Minutemen I doubt you've ever heard of them. And recently on my Facebook wall I shared a post called What would D Boone do it's a band where the you know it was a three piece band they were called the Minutemen because these to only record songs that were about a minute or so long, sort of like this podcast is only eight minutes long, but their lead singer and guitarist actually died in a very, very tragic car accident. Wow. It's been almost 25 years and the bassist and the drummer kept playing kept playing the music. And they started a band called fire hose and the basis still has his own man, his name is Mike Wah. But after every show that Mike like does, he tells the audience, what does he tell the answer? He says, Start your own band, draw your own picture, create your own story, do something. And it's this sort of like, do it yourself, be inspired to do something to add value to the world and whatever passion you may have. And that's really, in a nutshell, not only my advice to you become the influencer, don't follow the influences become one yourself, but also add value. And no matter if I'm blogging, or writing books, I'm trying to add value every day, this podcast hopefully is representative of that. And if you're not getting value from this, then obviously, something's wrong. And I'm making mistake and I need to optimize what I do. But that really is the centerpiece. And it's funny, I'm reading this new book by Jay Baer called utility. And that's exactly sort of the centerpiece is become useful become a utility. And it's geared towards businesses. But I think the same thing can be said for people and all the advantages that come your way. So isn't it amazing how podcasts start in one direction, and they end up sort of evolving into another direction as I talk, I do not pre plan these podcasts outside of the fact that I know sort of the subject matter that I want to talk about, and I have a few thoughts about it. I'm not reading off a script. Like I said, this really is unplugged. I speak a lot on social media. So this is a great medium for me and I really enjoy doing these. If you enjoy listening to these as much as I enjoy doing them, I really do hope that you'll write a review up on iTunes, maybe share the podcast with some of your friends on your social networking profiles. I know a lot of you are listening to this. And the more value you get, the more you share, the more value that I'm going to add to this podcast. So I'm gonna end it there. I'll be coming to you next week, probably again from somewhere in Japan. But anyway, have a great rest of your week. Make it a great day wherever you are in the world. And sayonara thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast, and adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on this podcast or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at maximize social business.com for additional social media for business advice. Please make sure to check out your new social media for business resource at maximize social business.com Thanks again and make it a great day.