As we enter 2024, I told you we were going to dial in our pursuit of changing the mindset in the influence marketing industry to help brands and agencies focus on influence, not just influencers. So we’re going to have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people along the way to make that happen. We’re going to kick off the year talking to one of my favorite people. Krista Neher has been a leading authority on digital marketing for as long as I can remember. She’s a six-time...

It’s been a minute. If you haven’t noticed, Winfluence has been on a bit of a holiday hiatus. Honestly, its a good thing for me … client work ramped up toward the end of the year and I simply didn’t have enough time to fit in the weekly interviews and production to give you an episode worth listening to. Instead of rushing to crank out something mediocre, I opted to step back, focus on the client work and reassess what Winfluence is and can be. For the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and...

When someone says they run an influencer marketing agency, what comes to mind? I’ve asked a few brand-side folks I know that question in the last week or two and have received a number of different responses. Some people say they think of an ad agency only that only focuses on influencers. Others say a consultant or small shop that handles all that busy work for you. Another contact said they think of the team at the software company they use, like CIPIO.ai for instance, which does the cat...

We’ve had a couple of episodes and conversations in the past that talk about gamers. The online video game industry is worth billions of dollars. Its content creators have some of the most captive audiences in any medium. Twitch is one of the biggest and most impactful social networks and it is dominated by video gamers who live stream themselves playing video games. And yet, this behemoth of a segment is still a mystery to most of us in the influence marketing space. Some consumer brands...

Do you know what this show is about? If you said “influencer marketing,” you’re close, but not necessarily wrong. If you said “influence marketing” you’re more right. And if you said, the exploration of how brands can apply influence in all its shapes and forms, to aide it their marketing, you’re spot-on. But if you weren’t spot-on, that’s my fault, not yours. It’s an example of my marketing and communications with you failing to deliver the point. It’s an exercise in clarity. And Steve...

We’ve been talking to some talent managers of late. They play an important role for many creators, managing the business of their influencer status while the creator, well creates. Many of them add another perspective to the creative process, contribute ideas to shape partnerships into something more than they would be otherwise and are valuable to the brands and agencies in the equation as well. But allow me a moment to be rather frank. Those are exceptions to the rule. Most talent managers...

Those of you who have watched or listened to Winfluence for a while know that I got my professional start in radio. I marched myself into the local radio station at 14-years-old and said, “I wanna be a deejay!” And for some reason they said, “Okay. You start Friday.” I pursued radio through high school and college, navigated the world of broadcasting and sports hoping to one day land at ESPN. I actually interviewed there the same week I interviewed for its parent company, ABC. My first...

The evolution of a content creator is something brands and agencies see, but don’t watch. Bear with me on this for a moment. It’s like the difference in hearing something, and actually listening with the intent of understanding. So we on the agency or brand side of things may run into a content creator we find on Instagram who is doing interesting things around the topic we’re focused on for our brand or client. We reach out to them, maybe do a sponsored post or some other type of trial run...

There’s another “State of the Industry” report out this month. It actually came last week from Linqia, which is one of the enterprise influencer marketing software companies out there. These reports are always useful, so I like to report on them here on the show.  If you want to read the full report for yourself, which I encourage you to do, you go to their website and sign up and trade your email address for their research. You become a lead in their platform … that’s how B2B marketing often...

Depending on where you are at the table in the influencer marketing space, your meal is slightly different. Creators can range from nano-influencers who barely consider themselves influencers or creators at all … to those who achieve true celebrity status and have full production teams they employ to create all that content while they live off their personality and audience connection. For brands, you can be super nimble with your budget and work with the former of those. You can go big and...

What would you do if you didn’t have access to social media for a day? How about a week? What about three and a half months? How would that change your daily habits? How would it change where you turned for information. How would it affect your business?  Now, certainly for you social media content creators and brands that rely heavily on social media creators and content to drive customers, I’m sure if could be catastrophic. But really? Are there no other alternatives? Don’t get me wrong....

If you’ve been paying attention to the goings on in the influencer marketing world, you know by now that there was a major acquisition announced recently. Sprout Social, long known as one of the top social media management solutions in the space, acquired Tagger Media. Its main product, Tagger, is one of the leading influencer marketing software solutions on the market. It was once a regular sponsor of this program as well. Tagger was actually also responsible for bringing me to the...

Marketing automation is a topic that most people dig into when they’re in the enterprise or B2B space. It’s an approach to marketing that allows you to set up triggers and events using software to drive leads, then work those leads down your funnel to conversion.  When you think marketing automation, you almost always think of email. Set up sequences of emails for people who fill out a form on your website or register for an event. They get an initial thank you email, then you automate one...

The influencer marketing landscape is changing. Now, that’s not a statement many people would find alarming. It’s always changing. But when you watch the industry like I do and for as long as I have, you see the tea leaves. And when they perk up a certain way, you sense a change is a brewin’.  Mavrck is out this week with its annual Creator Compensation Report. It’s a yearly survey of several hundred content creators that asks specific questions about how much they make, what type of work...

What are your goals? More importantly, do you write them down? How often do you refer to them?  Or are you like me and have vague ideas of what you want to accomplish in your head, but they kind of morph and change depending on the day? Certainly, we’re more disciplined about business goals. They typically have to be articulated in strategies and presentations, discussed in meetings and conference calls, probably ad nauseum. But they’re important to have, to revisit frequently and to refer to...

There are many ways to slice an apple. Or peel an orange. Or for that matter, there are many ways to get from your house to the office or grocery store … and just as many to get back.  There are also many ways to approach influence marketing. If you’ve been listening and following along with Winflunce for any amount of time you know that we focus on influence marketing, without the R. While social media celebrities with big followings are one way to slice the influence apple, there are many...

From time to time people find out in conversation that I’m a published author. It’s a monicker and fact that sits in my social media bios and certainly something I say proudly on my website and such, but it’s not something that typically comes up on conversation. When it does, I get asked a lot of questions about it. Writing a book certainly had a big impact on my professional credibility and personal brand. Though anyone with an idea and the Internet, and maybe a little bit of money, can...

Some of you may know I spent the first half of my professional career as a public relations professional in the world of college athletics. Back then we called the job being a sports information director, or SID. The industry evolved to labeling the role something like athletic media relations or athletic communications or similar, but our job was to publicize the teams, coaches and student-athletes. The first sport I was ever placed in charge of as a student assistant at Morehead State...

You may have noticed I’ve been mixing in more content here recently focused on content creators. It’s not that you brand and agency folks aren’t the primary focus of the show. You are. But if you’re reading between the lines, the advice that some of our guests have had recently about helping creators build and grow their business … well, it applies to you, too.  Kind of a two birds with one stone approach, if you will.  In this episode of Winfluence, we’ll follow in that direction a bit. Dean...

There’s a growing problem in the influencer marketing space with content creators. We’ve talked about it on this show before. But there never seems to be any great push to solve for this particular problem.  The main focus of many an influencer today is creating videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. For posting Stories on various platforms and engaging their followers and fans there. But those platforms aren’t owned by the creators. There’s a significant amount of risk influencers and...

We’ve been talking a lot about brand lately on the show. Recent episodes featuring Patrick Hanlon and Rick Ray have centered all of us, brands and creators, agencies and vendors alike … we’ve become centered on telling a brand story. But we can’t leave it at that. We have to put that brand story into action. I happened to be in the audience at CEX, the Creator Economy Expo, in Cleveland last month, to see Jay Acunzo speak. He’s formerly with ESPN, Google, HubSpot and a few other places. He’s...

We spent some time recently with Patrick Hanlon talking about Primal Branding. Having that deep assessment of who you are as a brand can inform and even drive everything you do. I think we reached the conclusion that spending time to deeply understand and define your brand is important, whether you are a content creator or have products and services to sell. The topic of branding is quite intriguing to me. When it’s done right, the brand is memorable, if not successful. So I wanted to...

The influencer marketing landscape is big and ever-changing. You have huge agencies that with with big brands for big budgets. You have boutique firms and consultants that mix and match influencer approaches. You have niche players in the agency and software space that focus on micro and nano influencers. And at each of those tiers, you have speciality shops that are more like Hollywood entertainment production houses, video-only tools … Honestly, it’s a big mess. The ever-changing landscape...

If you follow the conventional wisdom around an influencer’s lifespan, you know they start living their best life, then define a strong content niche and build an engaged audience. Then they do lots of brand collabs and make a fair amount of money. Then they diversify and get into creating their own products, services or even a full on media platform. Mr. Beast is an example of the latter. Jake Paul is another influencer turned big star. Lilly Singh went from YouTuber to late night TV star....