The Power of Influence

I met a very interesting digital influencer today. His name is Ian Mckee, and he is the CEO of Vocanic – a leading digital and media monitoring / word of mouth marketing agency. Ian had great conviction to influence quite a few of us to think about the power of influence. He runs a blog by the same name, and its worth your time.

Ian’s Blog

Ian’s Interview to Channel News Asia about Word of Mouth Marketing

Now, he believes that there are influencers in every brand out there today – the digital ‘obsession-ist’ and the digital ‘terrorist’. The former would kill to protect your brand, the latter will not hesitate to kill you (and your brand) if he had a chance to. Focusing on the digital terrorists, these disgruntled folks have plenty of avenues to complain due to the vectors or tools available today. If they spend 15 minutes a day scanning through your product forums and web community and decide to drive away new users due to the pathetic product you have (that he believes will do more harm than good), you have a digital terrorist you need to manage.

And today’s monitoring tools like Brandtology can take all the sentiments from the internet, put it into a bucket and analyze it for you – a sentiment analyzer of sorts for your brand across the digital medium. And if the adjectives, tags and keywords found are positive, you know you are doing it right; if negative, fix it; if neutral, then be more remarkable – you do not strike as stellar.

So before you get to the tools, what does your gut say about what your influencers are feeling about you?

Now act.