Last year I posted about whether or not companies should send out Christmas greetings cards, or if in this day and age it’s more appropriate to send ecards (making a donation of the cost saving to charity). Well it seems 2007 saw a bumper crop of e-cards (in fact I only received 1 work related traditional Christmas card) being sent. However this year the motivation was more around reducing carbon footprints than CSR.

So it seems the traditional card is falling from grace and slides further towards the trash can. In all honesty I doubt it matters much how you send your Christmas greetings, as long as they are genuine, timely and consistent with the rest of your communications.

With that in mind I thought I’d share a couple of ecards I received this year.. enjoy! (It would be nice if they actually said Merry Christmas though… is this political correctness gone mad).

ICICI Bank - nice but where’s the Christmas message..?

Fresh Minds - a London based research agency

If you received any particularly good Christmas ecards them send them on and I’ll post them up here.

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!

I first learned of the term ‘influencer marketing’ at a Social Tools for Business conference in London last year when I had a brief conversation with Duncan Brown of Influencer50. As a quick intro Influencer50 is a marketing agency working with tech companies to engage in influencer marketing programmes.

So what is influencer marketing?

At its most simple level, influencer marketing is the practice of targeting marketing activities at those people who most influence the sales decision buying process. But surely I hear you say, all sales and marketing activity is designed to reach those influencers. You know, the people who buy your goods and services.

Well yes, but in actual fact in influencer marketing, the influencer is defined by Duncan as:

Influencers are not your customers. Influencers have no budget. They are not your market. They influence your customers, influence budget, influence your market.

or on Wikipedia:

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orientates arketing activities around these influencers.

So you see, not only does your marketing have to target the guy with the credit card, but also those that ffect whether or not he uses that credit card. For example, if you’re selling stationery you not only need to communicate with the administrator who places the order, but all the other people in the compnay who influence the decision of what to buy, i.e. the product users and specifiers. In fact the list could be endless so it’s important to identify and target specific individuals who carry the most influence, those who Influencer50 say are the people responsible for sales cycle objections.

For a slightly different definition head to Influencer Marketing 101 and watch Marcus Colombo’s short video. He’s a practising influence marketer and effectively says his job is all about getting sample products into the ands of those that influence the market.

It’s clear then that influencer marketing is not just about communicating with potential buyers of your product, but other influencers and information gatekeepers in what marketers call the decision making unit (or DMU). There are two different approaches to influencer marketing as well:

1. Influencer50 suggest it is more about joining up your marketing and sales teams to identify the objectors (and objections) that most impact their sales figures and then devising a plan to communicate with these people, and

2. the second approach is to ensure product samples get to the right people at the right time, for example ournalists, analysts and more increasingly bloggers or other social commentators.

So why is it important?

Much has been written of late about how traditional marketing methods no longer have the same impact. It is probably fair to say that both consumers and businesses have become more resilient to traditional marketing methods such as advertising and direct marketing. However they have not actually become immune, yet. In reality these methods are still powerful tools for any marketer as long as they are well integrated.

That’s where influencer marketing seems to fit for me. Influencer marketing could well be the glue that brings together our existing marketing campaigns and ties them into your sales campaigns. In other words it is taking an integrated approach to your sales and marketing, which seems very sensible and key objective for many marketers in big companies these days.

So what can you do about it?

I’m no expert and I would suggest heading over to Duncan’s blog to learn more. But it would seem there are some simple steps that a small and medium business could take to introduce influencer marketing techniques into the sales cycle.

Have a look at the Influencer Marketing Wheel below:

Well, with that written I’m off to look at the biggest sales objections I receive and who they’re from. If the big boys like HP, Xerox, Microsoft and co are engaging in Influencer Marketing then there’s no reason why us small business shouldn’t try it out also.

Duncan, if you’re reading this, I hope I’ve done influencer marketing some justice. However it would be great to get your comments. Please fell free to drop me a line or post a comment..

Just a quick one today. I found this reasonable summary of Seth Godin’s permission based marketing system. It’s quite a straight forward and simple summary for those of you in a rush.

For those with even less time, here are the five steps to permission marketing:

1. Define the irresistible offer

2. Create a targeted business list

3. Create the opt-out message

4. Craft the perfect pitch

5. Reinforce the relationship

To define permission based marketing it’s all about building ongoing relationships with your customers and prospective customers, rather than focussing on transactional relationships. In other words, aiming to extract the maximum life time value of a customer, rather than a just one off purchases.

I was presented with a very powerful marketing concept for small companies the other day. It’s not a new fangled phenomenon, or something that will cost you a lot of money, or even a tactic that requires anything more than common sense. I want to term this concept “attitudinal marketing” but I suspect this already refers to some form of market segmentation, f*ck it, I’m calling it attitudinal marketing anyway.

So first of all let me set the scene. Some friends and I were eating out a great restaurant in East London called Kaya House (check out a review here), enjoying the food and the hospitality the host and his wife offered.

After dinner we started to chat with the restaurant owner, a great guy called Ambrose, who was really interested to get to know us as new customers. It seems from the countless reviews I’ve since read about this place that he remembers all of his customers by name - quite a feat - and he gets to know their favourite dishes, what they do for a living and probably much much more.

Interestingly he started to tell us about some of the businesses his customers were running. Everything from limo hire to travel agents and hotel owners in Malaysia. Not a hard sell, just introducing us to them as part of our conversation.

It turned really interesting when our friend mentioned she was running a cake business. Ambrose took an immediate interest and started to take down her details to pass on to his clients. The cost of this, nothing, Ambrose’s sterling attitude was that if he could help out another small business that was enough for him. Of course he’s hoping that what goes around comes around as the old saying goes.

It’s Ambrose’s attitude that I just have to admire. He works hard to make his business successful and at the same time pass on some of that success to other small businesses. So this is what I want to call “Attitudinal Marketing” - the deliberate act of spreading business opportunities purely with the interest of furthering the success of other businesses”. Or perhaps I should call it Ambrose Marketing?

So with this in mind and without further ado, here’s a short plug for my mates cake making business. If you are in the UK, more specifically the South East and need a cake for a special occasion, perhaps a wedding, then check out Sam Morris Cakes. Sam’s cakes are a delight and she is absolutely lovely to boot!!

http://www.sammorriscakes.co.uk

OK with the free plug out of the way. Have a think about whether you could engage in some attitudinal marketing. Ambrose has a notebook to store information and he displays adverts for free in his restaurant window. What could you do? If you make a plan to help just one small business each month, imagine the impact you could have.