An Interview with Dino Dogan of Tribber on Influence Marketing and A New Service to Hook Up Brands and Bloggers 

I got to interview Dino Dogan, founder of Triberr, at Social Slam 2013, and just published  an article about that in Branding Magazine.  I’ll let you read it there – he makes some interesting comments on the nature of influence, and also describes a soon-to-be-initiated Tribber service to help brands engage bloggers (and let bloggers actually make some money off the deal…. which of course complicates the whole issue of the integrity of influence marketing).

The the best part is the video – actually, the best part is just Dino, and video at least captures a bit of that Jersey energy.  Please take five to watch it, and let me know what you think.

The Altimeter Group is embarking on an ambitious attempt to understand and define the evolution of the customer experience, what they have coined “The Dynamic Customer Journey.” As they summarize it:

“The customer journey has evolved, yet organizations have failed to recognize and adapt to the change. Today, the new customer is empowered to make faster, smarter, more-informed decisions using technology, for instance, by accessing real-time information on their mobile devices or connecting with trusted peers across open and closed social networks. To respond to a dynamic customer journey, organizations must transform their rigid sales, marketing, and customer service programs and adopt an intrinsically more flexible organizational, technological, and go-to-market approach”

The Dynamic Human Journey
Their observations focus on organization, technology and process – but I hope they will also include, and invite others to comment on, core issues of human communication that arise from the often-bewildering challenges listed above. In fact, I submit that customers may not always be so “empowered” as “challenged” to “make faster, smarter, more informed decisions.”

Are Your Customers Developing a Complexity Complex?
Altimeter may be nodding in this direction when they note in a heading “The Factors that Impact the Dynamic Customer Journey Multiply Complexity.” Of course, we face more than just the question of how to control, minimize and seamlessly integrate structural complexities – we face the challenge of how to ensure that the composite end result amounts to useful, usable, human relations and communications.

Not surprisingly, “useful” and “useable” correlate well with “simple.” Siegel+Gale has been tracking the need for, and benefits of, simplicity for some time, and their latest Simplicity Index points out the paradoxical blessing/curse of technology:

“On the one hand, the steady stream of innovation continues to make it easier for consumers to watch, listen, share and communicate. But many companies in acquisition mode have expanded their profiles and portfolios and incorporated such a sea of product models and technology types that many customers feel lost as they attempt to navigate their way to a simple purchase.”

Simply Put, Brands Need to Put it Simply
The upshot seems to be that brands must embrace a unifying and simplifying approach to technology and communications. Easier said than done? Perhaps. Nonetheless, I suggest, and invite comment on, two guiding principles:

1. Brands that take the complexity burden off of consumers will step to the fore.
2. Of those complexity-defying brands, the ones that learn to also communicate in
   the simplest, most communally human terms will be the long-term winners

Human-to-Human Communication vs. Brand to Prospect
Do you agree? Disagree? And do you believe that considering the dynamics of honest human communication – alongside organizational, technological and process-oriented factors – would enhance the Altimeter discussion?

Please leave a comment, and join in the Altimeter discourse.

I’ve long explained to inquiries coming from our (still surprising to me) #4 ranking as a top SEO copywriting firm, per topseos.com, that we don’t concentrate on the typical relationship between copy and algorithm but, rather, on the human relationship between brands and the people they would honestly serve. And I’ve been feeling validated by developments in search of late, particularly as both user preferences and Penguin, the latest Google update, strongly favor content quality over keyword quantity or SEO gaming.

Content Curation vs. Creation
With all that, I wonder about the future of content development – specifically, automated curation and sharing vs. original content creation.  Just today I received an email from a leading – or at least an aggressive – curation platform, with the subject line “Content Marketing in a Box.”  I suppose that notion appeals to some, but I fear it all too aptly sums up the downside of automated curation.  In a marketing world that rightly holds that “thinking outside the box” is crucial to profitable brand differentiation, why would any marketer want to literally think inside the box?

Curation Services Inform – Human Curators Enliven
This is not to say that content curation services are not valuable – they simply can’t be used as a magic box out of which instantly pops a meaningful content marketing program (that same email claims that the service proffered will reduce your content time to just 20  minutes a day).  As another recent blog post notes, there are a lot of great services out there to pour content into your topical funnel, but only a human curator can distill it into a meaningful, manageable content offering.

What’s your experience with content curation services? And to what will you trust the future of your own content marketing efforts: the more affordable, relatively automated curated sharing of third-party content, or more expensive, out-of-the-box human curation and the original content it can support? (And if the answer is both, which do you see as being the dominant factor?)

In the continuing excitement over all things interactive, it’s easy to overlook one of the most important indications in the latest US Interactive Marketing Forecast, from Forrester Research.  Yes, the report clearly indicates that interactive has arrived as a permanent part of the marketing mix– but, just as clearly, it also shows that traditional media isn’t going way.

TV OR NO TV?  THERE IS NO QUESTION.
Just look at Forrester’s numbers– a combined 67% of US interactive marketers expect that TV will either increase in importance, or retain its importance. As you can see in this excerpted chart, direct mail, magazines, outdoor and radio are also expected to maintain, or increase, their influence in the overall marketing picture, at similarly high confidence levels.

SO WHY HASN’T NEW MEDIA KILLED OFF THE OLD?
Pundits have been predicting for years that the online world would completely supplant offline – and I’ve long had the impression that many marketing managers feel they’ll be perceived as outdated if they continue to embrace traditional media at all. But as the Forrester report keeps repeating, success isn’t to be found in any one type of media, new or old – the magic is in the mix.  And in today’s marketing mix, traditional media offers these three sometimes overlooked advantages

1.             Offline media drives people online – fast.
Attention may concentrate around the brushfire-fast nature of videos or tweets going viral, but many bedrock elements for online marketing, such as blogging, or building an email list through content offers, take time to build an organic audience and have an impact. However, a targeted print ad with your white paper as an offer can rapidly build response and an initial following – the old push can help turbocharge the new pull.

2.             Traditional media – especially TV – can say “this is important”
Media that was once known to the masses can still convey a largely emotional halo effect of significance – or, as a prospect said to one of our tech clients after seeing the TV spot we’d created for exclusive use around CES (via a targeted cable buy), “I almost cut myself shaving – I didn’t know you were on TV!”   If you want to burnish your brand image – or even help establish one as a serious player – traditional media can still provide that big-time glow.

3.             Where content is king, storytelling media reigns
As content marketing becomes more pervasive it also needs to become more creative if it is going to continue to be attractive (in every sense of the word).  TV, print and radio all offer exceptional opportunities to tap into the combined rational/emotional persuasiveness of well-told stories. This may mean branded content, like webisode series that cross over to cable, or print vehicles such as bylined articles.  In fact, it can mean whatever you can dream up. We once created a full length song for a mutual fund that never once mentioned the fund but tapped directly into the lifestyle of its prospective boomer investors – the artist’s major label liked the song, and promotional potential, well enough that they offered to put it on the artist’s next album (sadly, the client did not approve).

What creative combinations of new and traditional media are you mixing up – and to what effect?

OK, I’ve another bit of Altimeter research to recommend:  “The Rise of Digital Influence.”  As with many studies on social media, content marketing and other areas of the still developing digital world, this one raises as many important questions as it answers.  It does a good overview job of answering the question  “What is digital influence, and how can my brand take advantage of it?”  It completely begs the issue of “When will ‘sparking desired effects’ among the influential digerati slip over into anti-social, trust-damaging marketing manipulation?”

WHAT IS DIGITAL INFLUENCE, AND HOW CAN BRANDS LEVERAGE IT?

Let’s back up to the first half of that question.  The report helpfully tries to level up the notion of digital influence from one of mere electronic word of mouth – with influencers being those having the most “mouths” follow and repeat what they say – to a more nuanced understanding of digital influence, which the report alliterates as being comprised of

Reach:  Popularity, proximity and goodwill
Resonance:  Frequency, period, amplitude
Relevance:  Authority, trust, affinity

USING DIGITAL INFLUENCE VERSUS PEDDLING IT
The report goes on to talk about how “businesses can shape and steer positive conversations and… desired outcomes,” and offers case histories wherein companies offered often very expensive “incentives”  to influencers in exchange for tacit help engaging their followers to help achieve those “desired outcomes.”  It also mentions that “… the brand borrows the social capital of the individual to appear approachable and desirable to their followers.”

This brings me to the real issue at hand: the difference between “borrowing” social capital and buying it. When your approach is to attract digital influencers via free phones, expensive trips and the like, the balance tips in the direction of “buying.”

PAYING FOR INFLUENCE BUILDS NO MORE TRUST IN MARKETING THAN IT DOES IN POLITICS
So what’s the harm?  The potential harm is the same we see in the politics of pay-to-play states like the one I live in, or in the influence-peddling hallways of Congress:  once consumers, like voters, wise up, long-term damage is done to the trust required to make relationships, or even entire systems, work.

HOW TO BUILD SOCIAL TRUST
While the report evinces some of the subtle arrogance that typifies any hot trend and its new masters (sample section heading:  “The New Era of Consumer Influence: When Nobodies Become Somebodies), it also highlights (though not as much as I think it should) two keys to keeping consumer trust while paying to piggyback on the authority and relationships of others:

1.    Provide real value to develop honest support from digital influencers
It’s a central tenant of all social and content marketing that’s it’s not all about your brand. As the report puts it “Rather than ask connected consumers to share random or purely promotional updates related to your business, provide them with ideas, content, links, or editorial suggestions…”  In short, provide incentives that have a natural value to your target influencers (and their followers).

2.     Be aggressively honest and open – transparency begets trust
It’s not enough to simply comply with the FTC Endorsement disclosure guidelines for blogs, social media, etcetera. Marketers would be wise to follow the lead of Virgin America, who, as mentioned in one of the Altimeter report case histories, assertively encouraged an honest, no-holds-barred response from the digital recruitees by announcing, “We do not want to ‘buy’ your tweets.  You are receiving the product because you are influential and have authority on topics related to the product… You are welcome to tell the world you love the product, you hate the product, or say nothing at all.”

What are you doing to create relationships with digital influencers – and how are you doing it?