Recently, during Channel Signal presentations, brands have shown a great interest in accumulating Influencers. They ask:

How do we find them?
How do we attract them?
And how do we make them ours?

The thinking goes that brands can attract 30-50 Influencers and convert them into messengers who relay brand propaganda to their readers. It will be viral, powerful, and increase sales. ”We will have a new salesforce.”

Channel Signal has accumulated a list of Influencers in the Outdoor Industry. We have measured each of these Influencers by the:

• number of followers on Twitter
• quality and frequency of their blogs
• Facebook quality and number of friends
• And finally the quality of their content and it’s viral power.

And we found that these Influencers were not retweeted or mentioned in Facebook or their blogs passed around anymore than anyone else. Yeah, they were read and many have RSS feeds into desktops, but the “influence” was not there.

So, what does cause a message to take off virally?

The power of the message. And that message can be posted by anyone, come from anywhere, at anytime. If that message is interesting, unique, provides a different perspective on a topic, or is a strong personal account…it will get passed around. It may even explode.

Here’s the problem, after it explodes it disappears. And that’s a major problem because brands are trying to “bag” Influencers thinking that these messages come from them and that there is staying power. There isn’t.

And here’s the other problem: building marketing programs around messages and Influencers is no good.

Messages + Influencers= No
Conversations + Relationships= Yes

Brands can not bottle messages and influencers, nor can they broadcast their message on the Internet with any sort of power.

Leroy Stick, the guy behind the BPGlobalPR Twitter phenom…(for those of you who don’t know, this site made fun of BP during the oil spill, attracting 187,000 followers)…he says,

“So what is the point of all this? The point is…forget your brand. You don’t own it because it is literally nothing. You can spend all kinds of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately that’s up to the public, isn’t it.”

What can brands do?

Produce messaging and content that is interesting, gets viral play on a continual basis…and then follow that up with conversations.

And with those conversations you build relationships.

And some of those relationships will be gold if the relationship is real. The consumer talks and writes…and genuinely believes in the brand. And the brand continues to produce product that reinforces that belief.

This is hard work. And brands will need to turn their marketing departments upside down.

Brands must build many relationships, and they will come and go. A company should organize itself to converse with many people in different channels about its products and initiatives. Then the social media effort will be a success.

So far, brands have only hired a “social media specialist”….whatever that is. And have continued to broadcast their messages through the new channels.

And into the wind the messages go.

Never to be heard again.

iMarketer came out with some statistics that caught my eye. Here they are. So, teens are getting bored with Facebook.

That’s not surprising. What is…is why they are dropping out.

So, Facebook is boring, other websites are cooler, my friends don’t use Facebook, and I’m tired of keeping up with all the chatter.

This comes on the heels of Prince saying the Internet is so yesterday, and refusing to sell his latest album online. It will come out only on CD and be released with chosen newspapers. Actually, a pretty good strategy. Newspapers need subscribers and they will benefit. Prince is already benefiting due to the publicity. In an interview with the Mirror in Great Britain he says:

“The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.

“The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.

“They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

So, guess what? The Internet is established, large, and now the new whipping boy. Many teens are moving away from Facebook and running away from MySpace. Rock stars are having all sorts of trouble with YouTube over music rights. And now Prince.

This is why it is critical for companies to establish an online beachhead. I don’t care how big you are and how much money you have, a company must focus on bringing good content to the right platform,  and stick with it.

And they should ignore the day-to-day sturm and drang of the Internet.

Facebook will most certainly struggle to hang on to its mammoth user base…over 400 million people. MySpace is struggling to stay alive. YouTube is so huge users have trouble finding what they are looking for. LinkedIn and others will work to occupy the business community space.

And now we have FourSquare, Gowalla, and about 30 others who are going after the “location” space, where users tell other users where they are, what to order, what is fun, etc. And it is maturing into a play for the “game” and “location” space.

The Internet is maturing and  fragmenting.

And the challenge I see for companies is to understand where your voice is best suited and then provide content that builds the brand presence.

At Channel Signal we comb through a lot of data. And we can tell you where the money is being wasted or well spent. We do monthly analyses of both online performance and customer reviews. Online performance is where it becomes painfully obvious. On the good side…retweets of strong content, blogs getting virally passed around. Growing followers. In short, content is getting read, shared, and building the traffic base.  The other side of the coin…companies who use platforms as sales sites. And the result? Tweets that are meaningless. No retweets. Blogs that have no viral energy and contribute nothing to building the brand.

Just because it is a platform that has proved useful for some brands does not mean it is right for you. Teens will come and go. And Prince’s music will be online in a New York minute…and he will make money from it.

The Internet is now too big to fail. Too big to ignore. And too big not to be picky about where you put your messages.

Build your beachhead and populate it with content that improves the lives of customers using your gear.

And Prince is right about one thing. Much of it is crap.

Nothing much needs to be said here but to watch and be amazed. Technology
fused with old-fashioned magic.