Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As our influencer marketing columnist Raymond Morin blogged sometimes ago, there are 3 main types of influencers:

- celebrities

- opinion leaders (traditional media, online media, social media)

- ambassadors (satisfied customers, happy employees).

With the democratization of social media influence, there are simply more people that yield influence in social media. Perhaps this is one reason why Influencer Marketing continues to soar in 2015. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise, because numerous stats have already documented the power of online recommendations...

...According to Neilson Global trust survey back in 2009, only 14% of people trust ads while 78% of people trust consumers’ recommendations.

While the number may change today, the concept of consumers trusting their friends’ recommendations remains the same.

Recently, I wanted to watch a movie and I couldn’t decide if I should watch Wreck it Ralph or Rise of the Guardians, so I asked my editor Henry for his opinion, and he recommended me to watch Wrect it Ralph. I went with his suggestion and I didn’t regret it. But guess who just lost one customer here because somebody I trust pointed me the other way? 

The big question is how do you find these influencers or brand advocates? There are a couple of tools out there that can help you with that....

At Onalytica we have been looking closely at the transformation of PR as we know it. Our vision is to evolve media relations into influencer relations professionals by managing relationships with hundreds of key influencers rather than just journalists.

Think about the numerous analysts, politicians, bloggers, thought leaders, industry professionals, stakeholders and influential consumers that all have big audiences that you want to reach. Influencer relations is a truly essential part of modern PR (we also offer a B2B influencer relations platform for PR practitioners)

One of the most time consuming parts of influencer relations (or influencer marketing) is identifying the right thought leaders. What if you just wrote a new blog and you have no idea what influencers would be interested in your content?

We’re here to help! We built a new tool to do this. Before it took up to an hour to find 10-20 relevant influencers, now you can do it in less than a minute…