Identifying, Approaching and Cultivating Digital Influencers
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Identifying, Approaching and Cultivating Digital Influencers
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A deep dive into influencer relations in the world of higher education.
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Identifying, Approaching and Cultivating Digital Influencers
- 1. IDENTIFYING, APPROACHING & CULTIVATING INFLUENCERS INFLUENCER MARKETING IN HIGHER ED #EDUWEB16 JON MCBRIDE | BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY @JMCBEE84
- 2. USING POKÉMON GO TO CATCH YOUR DIGITAL GOALS 1990 CARTOON CHARACTERS IN HIGHER ED MARKETING #EDUWEB16 JON MCBRIDE | BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY @JMCBEE84
- 3. IDENTIFYING, APPROACHING & CULTIVATING INFLUENCERS INFLUENCER MARKETING IN HIGHER ED #EDUWEB16 JON MCBRIDE | BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY @JMCBEE84
- 5. IDENTIFYING, APPROACHING & CULTIVATING INFLUENCERS INFLUENCER MARKETING IN HIGHER ED #EDUWEB16 JON MCBRIDE | BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY @JMCBEE84
- 9. TODAY WE’LL LOOK AT… • The latest in influencer marketing • Best practices of how you can fully utilize influencer marketing at your institution • Along with … #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 15. INFLUENCER MARKETING TODAY • Influencers are typically defined as digital leaders in a specific field or niche market with a highly-engaged following • Utilizing influencers to share your content increases your reach exponentially #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 25. INFLUENCER MARKETING TODAY • Big celebrities can wield big influence, but it could cost you in $$$ and disclosure • There’s a better way to do influencer marketing, without having to spend any $$$ #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 27. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Look at the audience you’re trying to reach, and identify who is influential to them • Influence does not always mean popularity, and popularity does not always mean influence • True influence drives high levels of engagement #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 28. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Leverage the relationships you already have • Current students • Professors • Alumni #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 29. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Current students • Monitor social conversations happening on campus (hashtags, location searches, etc.) • See who is getting engagement #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 31. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Current students • Form a street team #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 33. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • How our street team has helped us at BYU • 90 percent of our Insta content is user generated • Our Insta following grew from 24K to 72K in a year • We’re now consistently in the top 10 universities for engagement #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 42. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Professors • You have some of the most influential human beings, leading experts in multiple fields, teaching on your campus • Know who they are, and know what they’re studying • Are they on social? • Yes – work with them! Collaborate on posts. Ask for posts. • No – work with them! You can still capitalize on their influence on your own social channels by simply featuring their research, words, images, etc. #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 45. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Alumni • Keep tabs on influential alums • Know when they’ll be visiting campus and collaborate #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 48. LOOK AT THE GUEST SPEAKERS YOU HAVE COMING TO CAMPUS IN THE COMING YEAR, CONTACT THEM (OR THEIR SOCIAL TEAM) FOR SOCIAL POSTS. #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 49. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Dig into some robust online tools #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 56. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Influencer attributes to weigh • Reach – How many people can this influencer potentially reach? On what channels? What’s their engagement rate like? • Relevance – does this influencer and their audience align with your objectives AND your image? #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 57. IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS • Make sure you’re comfortable with the image and reputation your potential influencer has #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 63. APPROACHING INFLUENCERS • Be strategic • Be professional • Be straightforward • Look for the win-win #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 81. KNOW WHO YOUR OLYMPIANS IN RIO ARE! #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 82. SOCIAL MEDIA AND MEDIA RELATIONS CAN LEARN A LOT FROM EACH OTHER. #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 83. APPROACHING INFLUENCERS • Be strategic • Be professional • Be straightforward • Look for the win-win • Work with your media relations team on pitching #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 84. “BUT WHAT IF WE DON’T HAVE BEYONCÉ?” #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 85. CULTIVATING INFLUENCERS • Don’t be satisfied with a one-and-done • Look to build a relationship #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 103. CULTIVATING INFLUENCERS • Don’t be satisfied with a one-and-done • Look to build a relationship #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 104. FINAL TAKEAWAYS • Using influencers to share your content increases your reach exponentially #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 105. FINAL TAKEAWAYS • Using influencers to share your content increases your reach exponentially • True influence drives engagement #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 106. FINAL TAKEAWAYS • Using influencers to share your content increases your reach exponentially • True influence drives engagement • Leverage the relationships you already have with students, professors and alumni #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 107. FINAL TAKEAWAYS • Using influencers to share your content increases your reach exponentially • True influence drives engagement • Leverage the relationships you already have with students, professors and alumni • Look for the win-win with influencers #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 108. FINAL TAKEAWAYS • Using influencers to share your content increases your reach exponentially • True influence drives engagement • Leverage the relationships you already have with students, professors and alumni • Look for the win-win with influencers • Work with your media relations team on pitching #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 109. FINAL TAKEAWAYS • Using influencers to share your content increases your reach exponentially • True influence drives engagement • Leverage the relationships you already have with students, professors and alumni • Look for the win-win with influencers • Work with your media relations team on pitching • Build relationships with your influencers #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
- 111. PLEASE RATE THIS SESSION USE THE EDUWEB APP #EDUWEB16@JMCBEE84
Editor's Notes
- Hi, everyone. Welcome to your final session of eduWeb. Just the closing keynote remains! I’m excited to present to you. Always so much good stuff here at this conference. Hoping I have some simple takeaways for you today. I’ve been excited about presenting on this topic for a while. But I did contemplate a last-minute change in topics …
- There is actually a ton of cool stuff I could say about this, but decided to stay true to what was originally approved by our eduWeb organizers.
- So we’ll stick with this.
- (GIFs) As a reminder, use hashtag eduweb16 to tweet about anything you might like from this session.
- We’re talking about influencer marketing in higher education. I’m Jon McBride from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I’m a Media Relations and Social Media Manager there.
- If you don’t know much about BYU … I unfortunately don’t have time to tell you a whole lot more. But I’ve at least got to show you the campus I get to work on every day. I love this place. I’ll reference a few more things about my role, my team, my institution as we go through the presentation today.
- And this is Team McBride that I get to go home to every day. Fia, Sam, Rachel and in this pic there was one on the way.
- And now she’s here. Little Lily with those adorable, pinchable cheeks.
- So that’s a bit about me. Here’s what we’ll cover today.
- References to Dawson’s Creek …
- (GIF) Lil Wayne …
- (GIF) Olympians with killer dance moves …
- (GIF) And I will actually talk a bit about Pokémon GO.
- First, let’s look at the current state of influencer marketing.
- Here’s just a quick intro of how to define an influencer. It’s not just a celebrity or someone who has popularity. Engagement matters!
- So we’re beyond testimonials and celebrity endorsements. We’ve been utilizing these for years. Here’s the Dawson’s Creek reference. But remember back to the 90s and how wildly popular these cheesy milk mustachioed Got Milk ads were? The celebrity influence was huge, but not as huge as it is now, as celebrates are much more capable to make their voices heard. Personally, “I don’t want to wait, for our lives to be over” … before utilizing these celebrities’ digital influence beyond a print or television or even web ad.
- Certainly celebrities are still used in influencer marketing now, but it’s a different game. You may remember this super bowl ad from last year featuring Lil Wayne, Jeff Goldblum (and George Washington). It was a fun commercial. I thought it was clever. But look at the difference some digital influence makes …
- It’s one thing having a celeb just appear in your ad. But when a celeb with 27 million Twitter followers tweets about your ad and your organization to his unique audience … THAT is exponential influence.
- Here’s one more example with Katy Perry, the most followed person or brand on Twitter, working with Staples on a campaign.
- Look at the numbers here to illustrate. Staples is a big, respectable organization. 322 Thousand followers. That’s a lot.
- But now look at Katy Perry. You just went from 322 thousand followers (which I’m sure any of us would love to have as an audience), and by them working with a major, major influencer reach an audience 90 million people larger. And besides the sheer volume of people, you’re reaching a specific type of people. That’s just as important here.
- Here’s that comparison again. Exponential influence!
- Also, in speaking about the current state of influencer marketing, you’ve probably seen a few stories like this lately. Disclosing the payment of influencers is something the FTC has been looking at for a while. They made an example of Warner Brothers. This is something to be aware of when working with influencers. I don’t think you need to get overly hung up about this, but be aware of it. Besides, you’ll see as we go through the rest of this presentation that there are plenty of opportunities for influencer marketing without having to spend any money in the first place.
- (GIF) So sometimes in influencer marketing, like in 1990s hip hop, the axiom is true: Mo money, mo problems. Thanks, Biggy, Puff Daddy and Mase.
- So there’s a real cost to actually paying influencers. Again … there’s a better way.
- So let’s go through some specific processes now in identifying, approaching and cultivating influencers … starting with identifying. I’m going to spend most of my time in this section, since I feel like there is a lot to break down here.
- Some guiding principles.
- You’ve got a ton of influencers with potential exponential influence right under your noses. Do you realize it?
- How do you find your influential students? Make a special note especially to step back during campaigns to keep this in mind. One of our biggest campaigns of the year, as I’m sure it is with many of you, is the day students get their acceptance letters.
- We’ve branded our day at BYU with the #BYUBound hashtag. You’re no doubt going through these photos to like and congratulate these students. But if also would be worth checking out their full profile. Is this a student with influence? Is this a student we should keep tabs on? Is this a student we should add to the street team? Keep track of this information.
- So I mentioned “street team.” We started our student social media street team up this past year. This is a really, really great way to harness student influence.
- We actually started ours after being inspired by Oakland University last year in Chicago at eduWeb. (See kids … there are some takeaways from this conference you can implement when you get back to the office. Oakland does and incredible job. This website of theirs breaks down what they’re doing and how they’re doing it extremely well.
- The results speak for themselves.
- Let me introduce you to a few members of our street team, to give you a flavor of what we’re doing. This is India Sleem. She’s a BYU junior majoring in advertising.
- Here’s part of India’s instagram grid. You can see that she likes bright colors. She does a bunch of macro photography. Not a lot of people in her photos (interesting considering what we heard in yesterday E-Expectations session.) She has a style all her own.
- And that style resonates well with a certain group of people. As you can see, she has more than 36 thousand followers. This is a unique audience for us to tap into.
- This is Cooper, another member of our street team. Definitely a different style. Outdoors, adventure and some landscape stuff.
- This is Shanoa. Happy, adventure, with her own perspective.
- This is Claire. She actually spent a semester at our BYU Jerusalem Center and captured photos unlike we’ve ever seen from there. This was highly-prized content for our community.
- This is Tyson. Family man (a lot of our students are married), outdoors, unique perspective.
- One final street team thing, previewing the section on approaching influencers. All of our initial contact with the street team was by instagram messages. I wondered how that would go, but really it was our only way to do it outside of doing some creepy stalking or going through an annoying back-and-forth with our records office. This process worked incredibly well. The students were very responsive. There’s so much more that I could say about our street team, but I’m going to move on.
- Identifying professors with influence is also important. These are worldwide experts in their fields. They have a lot to offer
- Thanks to Eric Clark who presented yesterday. This is one of the faculty he works with at Eastern Nazarene. This is just a simple example of a professor who gets it and uses his influence for good.
- I really loved this session from Monday from ExpertFile. As you can see here, their slides are now up on the eduWeb website. I would highly recommend that you look through those. ExpertFile has some really great tools that could vastly assist you in utilizing your faculty as influencers. There’s also great stuff in their session about WHY working with faculty on this stuff is so important. I have two faculty examples of my own toward the end of the presentation and will come back to those …
- Alumni are another one of your assets for influence.
- Liz Wiseman is one of our alums. She’s the author of Multipliers and was named one of the top 50 business minds in the world this past year. She came back to campus to deliver a forum address, so we decided to partner with her on some social posts. I reached out to her social team and we had a good back-and-forth about what they wanted and what we wanted. It worked out really well in the end, as they shared a plethora of our content with their unique, important following in the business sector.
- YouTube sensation Lindsey Stirling with a (recent) BYU alum. When she came back to campus to get her diploma last summer, we made sure we worked with her publicist team beforehand to see what we could or couldn’t leverage from her. We ended up being able to shoot this Facebook video right before she walked, with a nice interview with her. It performed extremely well, because again, we were reaching a unique, different, Lindsey-Stirling-loving audience.
- One easy takeaway for any of you from this session.
- There are a lot of tools that can help you identifying influencers.
- I’m just going to talk about Iconosquare right now. How many of you have used their brand or influencer index? As you can see, Iconosquare ranks Instagram profiles by followers, engagement rate, posts on their own hashtag and total media posted.
- You can also sort by category, like in education
- Here they are, sorted by engagement rate. (FYI … this is how we were able to see our engagement rate ranking I referenced earlier.)
- Here are influencers who have huge followings but aren’t necessarily celebrities in and of themselves.
- Here are travel influencers.
- Here are cat influencers. Yes. Cat influencers. Notice, Professor Pouncy!
- In any identification of influencers, you need to weigh some important attributes.
- THIS is important.
- Anyone from Texas A&M in this session? Sucks to have your Heisman Winner go crazy. So much for leveraging this guy’s influence.
- From America’s Sweetheart to party boy let go by his NFL team after his first season, it’s been a rough ride.
- Be careful with big celebrities. Look at this caption!
- Look at THIS caption. Bad in so many ways.
- So we’re finally through that identification section. Let’s talk briefly about approaching now.
- Here are some guiding principles that I’ll try to illustrate during the following case study I’ll run through.
- Let me to go back to my presentation last year for a second. I was slotted in a horrible time, and I’m guessing very few of you were in that session. If you were, stay with me for an abbreviated version here. In that presentation I talked about one of our students at BYU, Kate Hansen, who competed at the Sochi Olympics.
- We wrote up a small feature story on her before the games began. This was plan No. 1. We wanted to introduce her to the BYU community and mobilize our fans to follow her throughout the Olympics. It worked out well that she won the final World Cup event going into the Olympics. This made it the perfect time for us to feature her.
- One other part of early strategy was that we actually mailed this BYU hat to her in Latvia before the World Cup stop. We asked her to just send us a pic to use with our story. This turned out to be a small thing that was very helpful to the brand.
- As the games began, this was pretty much it. We didn’t know if we’d end up doing anything beyond this feature, since Kate was not favored to medal or anything.
- (GIF) Then this happened. NBC’s cameras fell in love with Kate’s pre-race routine. It’s is a little different than stretching out and staring off into space (like most athletes). Kate’s routine is to put on the headphones, pump Beyonce (and only Beyonce) and bust some pretty fresh dance moves. It was my job to see how much digital reach we could get here.
- And the coverage continued. All of a sudden, Kate’s dance moves were being shown all over the place. Also … a small note, the color commentator on the broadcast actually made a comment about how he didn’t like what she was doing. He said he wanted to see something a little more “sport specific.” The internet did not like him saying that.
- We start monitoring like crazy. What are people saying about Kate? Turns out … some pretty cool stuff.
- We especially liked this one from CBS Sports, and strategically chose to share this one with our social media following, since it had a BYU reference right at the top of the story. We shared, and the posts did really well, and then we reached another “are we done?” point. Then someone in a meeting later that day asked. What can we do to make this even bigger? That’s got to be something more we could do. Someone else answered sarcastically, “we could get Beyonce” to share something. Everyone laughed. I didn’t. I was going to take it on. I was going to pitch Beyonce.
- So how was I going to get in touch with Beyonce and her publicist? Well … thanks to Google and Buzzfeed, it wasn’t hard finding this. You might remember when there was a big deal made about Beyonce’s publicist trying to tell sites to take down unflattering pictures on Beyonce. Well, Buzzfeed thoughtthis was pretty funny and decided to publish the email. As you can see, they tried to preserve the privacy of the publicist a little by blacking out the last part of her email address … but omitted to black out the first part! I felt so investigative at this point. Now all I had to do was guess the domain that the email would be associated. That wasn’t hard. It was obviously the same as the organization’s website.
- In my presentation last year I went through all of the details of the back-and-forth I had with Beyonce’s publicist. Basically I just sort of laid out the stituation. I didn’t feel like I had to make a crazy hard sell. I included a couple of links to show what was being said and then just explained why this would benefit Beyonce for sharing it. I also mentioned the part about the color commentator, and sort of framed it in a way that showed how Beyonce could stick up for the little guy here. I send this off, and then I wait …
- … exactly four hours later, I get this while I’m in the parking lot at the grocery store. Certainly not the most committal of responses as to whether or not they’d be sharing anything … but hey, it was something. I sat in the parking lot for a while, pondering the next move. I didn’t want to come across as needy and email her back right away pushing. I also thought that there was so much out there already in the media, that now that she could look for it, she’s going to see more and more content about Kate. So I decided to wait it out, and if I didn’t hear anything more back from her, I could reevaluate in the morning.
- Then one hour later, I got this back. Boom! We’re in!
- So it was at that point when I responded and had a bit of a back-and-forth and ironed out details with Beyonce’s digital strategy team. There was a handoff from the publicist to the digital team. And then …
- THIS! The pitch worked and Beyonce posted on her Facebook page to her 63 million followers.
- So now, after Beyonce posted, we entered another unexpected phase. Now we started seeing the entertainment industry, which covers everything Beyonce says, cover this story about Kate. And things just got bigger and bigger. THIS IS WHAT INFLUENCER MARKETING DOES! It gets you in front of new audiences.
- Here she is dancing outside of the Today Show set on camera with some fans. Wearing her vans high tops. We really liked Kate’s style. I should mention that. She just turned out to be such a good ambassador for us. She definitely bucks the stereotype of what a typical, Mormon, BYU student is. She is Mormon, by the way, but a cool one. And those exist! And that was cool to show.
- Here she is with Lester Holt on NBC’s set. Great headline by Deadspin here. Now check out the other girl on set here. This is the day after the luge event completed. Kate finished 10th. Which is awesome … 10th best in the world at something is incredible. But people who finish 10th at the Olympics do not ever get much media attention. So the other girl dancing on set here with a bit of a forced smile on her face, is Kate’s fellow American luger, WHO FINISHED SECOND! She had a silver medal! But she’s getting overshadowed by her dancing teammate. We started feeling kind of bad for her, that Kate was stealing the spotlight … this was one of those moments where we stepped back and realized just how crazy this experience had been.
- So … Another easy takeaway here. Kate wasn’t on our athletic department’s radar at all!
- Another takeaway. This was the last slide of my presentation last year. I think this is even more true now. Especially with influencer marketing. Learning how to craft a perfect pitch is crucial. Convincing an influencer to work with you for a social campaign is a lot like convincing a journalist to cover a story you’re pitching. I know that I’ve heard from many of you in the past that the media relations team at your institution is in a totally different silo than you digital or social team. I would recommend getting together. Teach them how to tweet and use GIFs. Ask them to teach you how to craft a perfect pitch.
- So again, recapping those guiding principles.
- One other thing on this though. We didn’t HAVE Beyonce. It’s important to note here that I pitched Beyonce cold. We had no prior connection there. All we had was really relevant content that we were able to have appeal to her. Believe it or not, you can do that too!
- So now on to our last section, cultivating influencers.
- This is what we call fan mail. This was a general email I sent to a reporter at Global News in Canada. She’s a major influencer in social science news … something important to us at the university. I sent this more than a year ago after I saw the journalist covered one of our professor’s research. All I said was that I thought the story was great and thanks for covering it. I made zero asks. Just trying to build a relationship. I also followed her on Twitter. Kept in touch here and there. Favorited and retweeted her stuff now and again.
- Fast forward to a year later, just about a month ago now. We had a professor publish some interesting social science research on the effects of social withdrawal. Really important findings here. I did a bit of newsjacking here, flipped the findings around a bit and pitched the reporter on the idea that Pokémon GO is helping solve these problems. It’s getting people outside, interacting, out of their basements, around other people.
- She loved the pitch and ended up publishing this story. Exponential influence.
- But I still wasn’t done there. I made sure to send her another message after her story published, letting her know a few specific things I liked about it. She got back to me and actually thanked me for pitching her the idea! (Note: this doesn’t always happen in media relations.)
- Moving on to one final case study. This is another BYU social science professor, Sarah Coyne.
- Sarah recently published this.
- We loved the research and wrote our own, pretty longform piece on the research.
- We posted it to social.
- It trended on Facebook. Just behind Blake Lively.
- Having OUR post at the top of the trending topics page was huge. It drew a ton or traffic and click throughs to our story. A good news story for us usually gets 10 thousand page views. This one got 70 thousand page views, with 50 thousand coming from Facebook alone.
- This went crazy. And people went crazy! We had not idea people would get so passionate, on both sides of this research. That got a little stressful through the process, but it also helped keep the conversation going.
- It was interesting to note that I pitched a lot of journalists to cover this research both before and after the topic trended on Facebook. Before it trended, I had nothing. But after it trended, and after I told journalists it trended …
- We got some incredible coverage from the top news outlets in the country and many random outlets from around the world. So that’s the background to the influencer cultivation part. Back to Sarah.
- As I said, there was a lot of passion and argument about this research with widely-varying sentiment. Sarah, although she looks pretty young, has actually be the lead author of many other highly-publicized, top-tier studies. She was used to seeing this sort of negative sentiment. Until this happened …
- She got this anonymous letter through inter-department mail on campus. As you can see, she posted at length about this on her own Facebook page. She was devastated and annoyed that this sort of thing would happen on our own campus. I saw this pop up and conferred with a colleague of mine. This wasn’t good. Was our office kind of at blame for this? If we wouldn’t have publicized it, would this troll have ever seen it? Maybe or maybe not. But we wanted to do something to cultivate the relationship.
- So we did this. We trolled the troll. We mocked the other letter a bit, put a positive spin on it and didn’t leave it anonymous. Sarah loved it.
- She posted this as a comment on her initial thread. This was huge in helping us cultivate a relationship with Sarah AND with all of her colleagues who say it as well.
- So again, the guiding principles.
- In conclusion, looking back to some overarching takeaways from this session …
- Thank you for your time! I hope this has been helpful. All the best to each of you as we go back to our institutions and harness the power of influencer marketing!