Paine Proves Influencers Are Important

In Chapter 8 of Katie Paine's iconic social media/public relations book, "Measure What Matters," she breaks down how to score and measure one of the hottest commodities in social media analytics: an influencer. Now you may ask what an influencer is, and I am here to answer that question for you! Influencers were the outcome of social media mixing up the communication chain of media. Before social media, we got out information from and trusted spokespeople from large companies, but now we trust people who have accumulated a large following of people in a certain industry. This new person that we trust is known as an influencer. You can find influencers in every industry from sports to healthcare to entertainment to government. These influencers are so important because influencers do exactly what their name implies: they influence. In an ideal world you will have an influencer who posts about your brand and they influence their followers to partake in your brand. Consumers tend to trust these kind of everyday people because they think they’re more trustworthy.

Paine also presented her readers with two steps to follow if we want to identify how to find an influencers in our realm of expertise. The first step is to search social media channels or blogs to find people who use big key words that pertain to your company. Step two is to make sure that the people you find are totally committed to posting entirely about your industry and are relevant to your brand.

I’ve talked about influencers a couple weeks ago when I made my post about Disney using drag queens to promote their new movie, “A Wrinkle In Time.” Disney chose a celebrity influencer from a popular reality television series, “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” because the drag queens were similar to the main character of the movie in the sense that they both had to face a lot of obstacles to get to where they are now. These drag queens have huge followings since the series recently entered mainstream pop culture after ten years on the air. Since they have huge followings and have stories that resonate with the main character of a new movie, I think Disney was very smart in picking creative influencers. Disney hiring drag queens almost reminds me of when major brands started using YouTubers to promote their products since they have a huge following of fans who trust them and their opinion.

Influencers can help out any brand. Paine makes it very clear that influencers are wonderful for business and she reinforced a lot of the ideas I learned at the Social Media Workshop I attended at Ohio Northern University in March. One idea that I got from both the book and the workshop was the concept of measuring the outcomes of using influencers. You want to measure how their effected your business so you know whether or not to use them again.