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.