There’s a lot of Marketing books, but so few book reviews.
I read a lot of blogs, articles, and whitepapers – but to really take a deep dive into a subject nothing beats a good old fashioned book (yes, the physical kind, I vow never to use an eReader!)
And what better book to review than Influence Marketing, by Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella.
I’ve followed Danny’s blog for several years (we’ve even nearly had a beer four or five times), I’ve interacted with Sam a few times on Social Media, and Influence Marketing is grabbing a lot of headlines in the marketing world lately.
So without further ado, here’s five things I liked about Influence Marketing, and five things I didn’t:
5 Things I Like About Influence Marketing…
The Timing
When Cindy Gordon (VP of marketing at the Universal Orlando Resort in Florida) was charged with promoting the new Harry Potter theme park, she decided to bypass tv, newspaper, radio, and online advertising and focus on seven bloggers who could help her reach her audience. Within 48 hours, those seven bloggers helped reach over 350 million people to tell them about the new theme park.
This anecdote illustrates that we’ve entered a new era of marketing, and Influence Marketing is here to stay. The timing of Danny and Sam’s book is perfect. It helped me better understand what it is, and how to approach it.
The Tools
The floodgates are about to open for the Influence Marketing tools and technology race. According to Danny and Sam, first out of the gate include InNetwork, Appinions, Traackr, Trendspottr, Squeeze, and oneQube.
Personally I’m currently testing a few of these, and in future blogs will review a few.
But when it comes to tools, I always believe it’s a good idea to follow Avinash Kaushik’s 90/10 rule: invest 90% in people and 10% in tools.
The Research
As a former researcher and budding social scientist, I can tell you that a lot of research went into this book.
It covers everything from the human psyche and emotions, communities and social relationships, the consumer decision-making process, and the process for creating brand advocates and influencers.
That’s a lot of late nights spent reading, searching, scanning, and Googling.
As someone who reads his fair share of marketing books, it’s nice to see a book that gets in-depth with its subject and takes time to cover all the integrated pieces.
The Notion that Popularity does NOT Equal Influence
In a funny anecdote, the books tells the story of a job interview Sam experienced where he was asked what his Klout score was. Yes, his Klout score.
It only highlights the recent phenomenon for people to equate your reach, popularity, or influence by a numerical value: a Klout score, the number Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc.
But “reach” is not the same as “relationship”, and “popularity” is not the same as “influence”.
Having a large social media network can help to broadcast or amplify a message to a wide audience, but influence is the ability to affect someone’s decision-making process when they go to purchase a product or service.
The Customer is at the Centre of Influence Marketing
“The scientific truth that the status quo is hiding is that the customer, not the influencer, is at the center of the marketing universe; ultimately, it’s the customer who makes the purchasing decision, not the influencer.” (p. 77)
I couldn’t agree more.
Any type of marketing that doesn’t put the customer first is doomed to fail. Danny and Sam do well to point out throughout the book that you first need to identify your prospects, then decide what influencers can best influence their purchasing decisions in a process of reverse engineering.
5 Things I Didn’t Like About Influence Marketing…
The Language
I think this book was geared for people like me, someone in marketing who will look to use Influence Marketing to help clients be more successful. But the tone and language felt a little too technical, and text-bookish for me.
I’m less concerned about things like text analytics, natural language processing, and linguistic maps and more concerned about how to use Influence Marketing to make more money for my clients.
The Lack of Accounting for Unconscious Decision-Making
“The purchase habits of consumers have changed; impulse decisions are fewer, making way for more considered, researched purchases.” (p. 113)
I disagree.
I’ve read that 95% of our decisions are made by the subconscious mind. Danny and Sam do point out that certain situational factors can disrupt decision-making processes (attitude, lifestyle, family), but they don’t account for possibly the most important one: the unconscious mind.
I think there’s too much emphasis made on the rational-decision making process when there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that consumers are very often irrational in their decision-making.
As a side note on the topic of the unconscious mind, I recommend reading: Buy-ology, The Buying Brain, Neuro Web Design, and Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior.
The Detail on Influencer Interactions
This is not a big deal, but I would have liked to see more detail on how to interact with influencers.
As a marketer, I want to know more about the best way to approach them. What should I ask them to do? How much should I pay them?
The Methodology
There’s a lot of graphs, a lot of terminology, and a lot of theories in this book, but I would have liked to have seen an illustration of the Influence Marketing methodology all in one place – like a Microsoft Visio connector map thingy.
As mentioned, there’s also a whole lot of factors that can disrupt the influence model and consumer decision-making process, including: personal, economic, social, situational, and psychological. But at some point a theory or methodology is weakened (in my opinion) when too many variables affect an outcome.
The Lack of Evidence
I thought for a book that spends a lot of time on theory, methodology, and a scientific approach to Influence Marketing, that there would be more evidence.
Granted there are a few case studies and examples, but it really left me wanting to see more.
A good theory needs to be tested, tested, and tested and even falsified if it is to be considered scientific.
In the author’s defence, Influence Marketing is still in it’s infancy…maybe more case studies for the next edition?
Click here to check out Influence Marketing on Amazon.com
Have you read the book? What did you think? I’d love to hear your feedback (and thanks in advance).
Hey there mate,
Thanks for such a thoughtful and in-depth review – it’s always a pleasure to hear the thoughts of someone whose really spent time with the book, and shared their thoughts. So, thank you for that. With regards the points you raise, they’re most definitely fair ones and I’ll try answer here. :)Language. This is something samfiorella and I pushed back on with our publisher Que, who – in fairness – were very amenable to our requests. We firmly believe there are too many 101 books out there, where the language and topic has been simplified to the point the book loses impact. We see Influence Marketing as business book in the truest sense, and one that’s primed for scholastic education as well as business education (indeed, I’m teaching a 14 week course next spring at Seneca with the book as the backdrop). So, agree, it’s very dry and technical but this was a deliberate choice on our part.
Subconscious mind. This is an interesting one, as – like you mentioned in the review – we don’t discount how powerful the subconscious is (as highlighted by dedicating a complete chapter to the human psyche). It’s one of these topics where there’s no clear answer – for every study, paper, etc, that shows the percentage of decisions made subconsciously, there are equal amounts that show defined paths and steps. Suffice to say, I think we all agree that the mind is hugely powerful, but even that can be swayed by situational factors which, ironically, can alter the subconscious thought process too.
Influence Interactions. We didn’t want to go too deep into this, as we offer an in-depth framework for this with the Four M’s of Influence Marketing in Chapter 9. The reason for not diving in deeper re. interactions and cost is that there are so many solutions around, as well as different needs for different approaches, that to try and offer a one size fits all suggestion would essentially be counter to what we’re trying to achieve with the influence discussion. However, both on the official book site and guest posts/resources around the web, there are plenty of reference points to help go further into that topic.Methodology. While we do offer a framework/methodology on joining the dots, again we stayed away from using an IFTTT approach, purely from a requirements angle. As we maintain throughout the book, influence is a complex beast and generally the path isn’t quite as simple as “do this, then this, then that”. Our framework, as laid out in the middle section of the book and then covered by the Four M’s, will offer a solid starting point for any business (since we used it ourselves on successful outreach campaigns, and fine-tuned based on learnings). However, a simple connection map may be something we add to the online resources you get free when buying the book.
Evidence. I actually thought this was where we offered a lot, haha! The complete first chapter is all about the mistakes we made, the poor results, and the learning that forced us to think differently and come up with the methodology we present in the book. For brevity as well, we didn’t want to turn the book into case study after case study (even though we do share a lot of examples throughout). However, this is an area that Sam emailed me about this morning, funnily enough, so keep an eye on the revamped book website for more case studies, etc. 🙂
Again, thanks for much for the overview, mate, and yes, we need to have that beer!
Hey there mate,
Thanks for such a thoughtful and in-depth review – it’s always a pleasure to hear the thoughts of someone whose really spent time with the book, and shared their thoughts. So, thank you for that. With regards the points you raise, they’re most definitely fair ones and I’ll try answer here. :)Language. This is something samfiorella and I pushed back on with our publisher Que, who – in fairness – were very amenable to our requests. We firmly believe there are too many 101 books out there, where the language and topic has been simplified to the point the book loses impact. We see Influence Marketing as business book in the truest sense, and one that’s primed for scholastic education as well as business education (indeed, I’m teaching a 14 week course next spring at Seneca with the book as the backdrop). So, agree, it’s very dry and technical but this was a deliberate choice on our part.
Subconscious mind. This is an interesting one, as – like you mentioned in the review – we don’t discount how powerful the subconscious is (as highlighted by dedicating a complete chapter to the human psyche). It’s one of these topics where there’s no clear answer – for every study, paper, etc, that shows the percentage of decisions made subconsciously, there are equal amounts that show defined paths and steps. Suffice to say, I think we all agree that the mind is hugely powerful, but even that can be swayed by situational factors which, ironically, can alter the subconscious thought process too.
Influence Interactions. We didn’t want to go too deep into this, as we offer an in-depth framework for this with the Four M’s of Influence Marketing in Chapter 9. The reason for not diving in deeper re. interactions and cost is that there are so many solutions around, as well as different needs for different approaches, that to try and offer a one size fits all suggestion would essentially be counter to what we’re trying to achieve with the influence discussion. However, both on the official book site and guest posts/resources around the web, there are plenty of reference points to help go further into that topic.Methodology. While we do offer a framework/methodology on joining the dots, again we stayed away from using an IFTTT approach, purely from a requirements angle. As we maintain throughout the book, influence is a complex beast and generally the path isn’t quite as simple as “do this, then this, then that”. Our framework, as laid out in the middle section of the book and then covered by the Four M’s, will offer a solid starting point for any business (since we used it ourselves on successful outreach campaigns, and fine-tuned based on learnings). However, a simple connection map may be something we add to the online resources you get free when buying the book.
Evidence. I actually thought this was where we offered a lot, haha! The complete first chapter is all about the mistakes we made, the poor results, and the learning that forced us to think differently and come up with the methodology we present in the book. For brevity as well, we didn’t want to turn the book into case study after case study (even though we do share a lot of examples throughout). However, this is an area that Sam emailed me about this morning, funnily enough, so keep an eye on the revamped book website for more case studies, etc. 🙂
Again, thanks for much for the overview, mate, and yes, we need to have that beer!
Danny Brown samfiorella Thanks for taking the time out to respond Danny, really appreciate it. Now we have a good excuse for finally getting that beer – you can sign my copy of your book 🙂 Cheers, Robert
OpEdMarketing samfiorella Haha, well played sir – yes indeed, let’s make it happen soon.
OpEdMarketing Did someone say beer?!
samfiorella Always up for a cheeky pint Sam, does your book-tour stop in Oakville 🙂 Cheers, Robert
OpEdMarketing Um, no, but since Oakville is my backyard, I’m sure we can work something out!
samfiorella OpEdMarketing We’ll be at Silicon Halton Tuesday night if you guys are interested: http://www.siliconhalton.com/events/upcoming-event-posts/418-meetup-46-content-marketing-and-your-business
Otherwise, name a time and a place and we’ll meet-up 🙂
Cheers,
Robert
Danny Brown samfiorella Thanks for taking the time out to respond Danny, really appreciate it. Now we have a good excuse for finally getting that beer – you can sign my copy of your book 🙂 Cheers, Robert
OpEdMarketing Did someone say beer?!
samfiorella OpEdMarketing We’ll be at Silicon Halton Tuesday night if you guys are interested: http://www.siliconhalton.com/events/upcoming-event-posts/418-meetup-46-content-marketing-and-your-business
Otherwise, name a time and a place and we’ll meet-up 🙂
Cheers,
Robert
OpEdMarketing samfiorella Haha, well played sir – yes indeed, let’s make it happen soon.
samfiorella Always up for a cheeky pint Sam, does your book-tour stop in Oakville 🙂 Cheers, Robert
Thanks for calling us tools, Robert……
In all seriousness, appreciate it! Also, great overview of the book – I still have a couple chapters to go, then it’s my turn to write my take on it! 😉
Daniel Hebert
Inbound & Community Manager, InNetwork
danielghebert Haha, thanks Dan. Indeed a bit of a misnomer as InNetwork is less of a tool and more of a community. I purposely didn’t read any reviews of Danny and Sam’s book until I did my own, but interested to hear what others have to say. Cheers, Robert
Thanks for calling us tools, Robert……
In all seriousness, appreciate it! Also, great overview of the book – I still have a couple chapters to go, then it’s my turn to write my take on it! 😉
Daniel Hebert
Inbound & Community Manager, InNetwork
danielghebert Haha, thanks Dan. Indeed a bit of a misnomer as InNetwork is less of a tool and more of a community. I purposely didn’t read any reviews of Danny and Sam’s book until I did my own, but interested to hear what others have to say. Cheers, Robert
OpEdMarketing danielghebert No, it’s a tool. I was just being funny 😉
OpEdMarketing Um, no, but since Oakville is my backyard, I’m sure we can work something out!
OpEdMarketing danielghebert No, it’s a tool. I was just being funny 😉