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"Influencers" or "opinion leaders" are too important to add value to the brand/product communication; digital or physically. Their opinion influences more than the internal company messages.
The personal influence´s target´s the ones that are more susceptible for the "change" and follow, or imitate, those people; in several aspects of way of life.
One "influencer" can be defined being a person that gas credibility and good reputation in the society, thankfully to his/her knowledge with a concrete thematic.
That "value" of those influencers needs to be directly attached to your brand/product values; the ones that you elected to communicate. Young, energetic, funny, sportive, healthy, social, and so on.
I´ve read the other day one article that was talking about the "influencers". And in some paragraph, with some humour, the author wrote that at the present times we "listen more the economic, politics, social, etc opinions of the stand-up guys than from the politics"! This is a fact, at least in Europe. Having a politic opinion leader nowadays is not so credibility because of, for example, the high levels of corruption; people already don't believe them. So, not such good idea to hire a politic person to promote and talk about your product/brand!
To choose an "influencer" you ned to pay attention for the follow items:
- Language that they use
- Age/sex
- Social position
- Economic, political, cultural "affiliation"
- Geographic reach
- etc
The "value" can be measured by the adoption of the product/brand in some communication/promotion strategy, the way that consumers/public try to communicate with the "influencer", and his/her presence in several social media platforms, and so on
For example, there are several free tools that you can use to identify "influencers"; I can refer some:
1. Alltop - Here you can identify the most influencers authors by them or content.
2. Lijit - allows you to connect with influencers and connect with their target
3. Monitter - you can follow and manage related themes according to your key-words in Twiter. Getting the SEO to measure the influence, it will give tips who is the "best/higher" influencer in their field.
4. PeerIndex - Allow us to identify who are the opinion leaders/influencers in some specific thematic.
5. Social profile -has the same goal.
6. etc, etc etc.
There are some things which are intangible and cannot be measured. Trying to measure such things would mean wasting the most important resource we have - time.
Use carefully value added theory of Business.
I think it might be hard to value partnership with influencers, in tangible way. But you can check your customers or fans reaction before and while partnering - do you have more movement in digital space (likes, comments, shares), is your sales higher, do you have more leads etc.
