Over at the Marqui blog Tara reports back on an Influencer 50 report Marqui commissioned to tell them what groups exerted the most influence over the buying decision of their target market. The results:
- Industry Analysts: 22%
- Journalists: 18%
- Vendors: 18%
- Online/Blogs: 16%
- Individuals: 10%
- Consultants: 6%
- Forums: 4%
Good news for those of us out here peddling blogs and web strategy consulting. Hey, the web matters to people and influences their decisions!
But that’s no surprise, is it? One of the ongoing shifts of communication over the past decade has been the growing influence of the web in purchase decisions and perception of products. This is no secret. It’s now common that customers entering a showroom or store to browse know as much about the products they’re considered as the sales people.
So it’s encouraging to see that companies are starting to recognize the profound effect the web has on their business. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Influencer 50 is a great way to tap into the collective and collected information on the web about your product / service and company. Inherently it’s very limited – a standardized methodology with standardized outputs – that reminds me of old-school market research, not new information synthesis and aggregation techniques. And in practice, it seems to deliver a set of recommendations without helping companies and the people running them understand how to keep those recommendations current.
This is one of the oldest lessons out there. Give a man to fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. If I were considering commissioning an Influencer 50 report, I’d want to be part of the report creation, to learn how to do it for myself. Otherwise I’ll be commissioning another report the next time I need to know my key influencers.
One of the things that the new generation of web applications and websites promises (and has begun to deliver) is getting technology out of the way and allowing people to form relationships with other people. The human relationships have stepped to the forefront. That’s why companies can start blogs and create two-way communications with their customers. That’s why individuals can start to have their own voices within the structure of the company. That’s why creativity from customers can drive product innovations.
If the web is about people and relationships, then the darker side to outsourced reporting like the Influencer 50 is that it acts as a validator for companies who choose not to form relationships. It’s a surrogate report in lieu of actual engagement, by proxy and snapshot.
Instead of a one-time report, I’d recommend that companies learn to fish. They might have to hire a fisherman to teach them, but hiring one fisherman to learn from is better than always buying someone else’s fish.
To me, the existence of the Influencer 50 points to a deficit of engagement in technology companies and an engrained avoidance of risk. To have to hire another company to tell you who you have to reach with your marketing sort of forces you to question what you’re doing with a marketing department. Are they just there to produce campaigns and report on a narrow set of metrics? Now those seem like capacities well-suited to outsourcing.
No doubt the Influencer 50 provides a valuable and timely service to some folks. And I don’t mean to pick on them, they’re trying their best to make a go of it, just like the rest of us. I just question the need for the service in the first place. And, in the second place, the long-term viability of any company that doesn’t know its customers and influencers. Outsourcing strategic thinking creates a culture of learned helplessness.
But hold on! Isn’t web strategy a cornerstone of Work Industries’ services? Yes, and we take pride in it. We also take pride in helping companies we work with develop their own web strategy capacities. Their success is our success.
