Written by Steven Woods, CTO, Eloqua
Submitted by Eloqua

One of the most important uses of social media in a B2B environment is to build and maintain relationships with influencers in your space. There is much agreement with that, but there is also the sense that this is somehow new within the world of social media.

An Old Challenge

Managing influencers, however, has long been
a part of the role of marketing – analyst relations and public relations have long had this as their main goal. By carefully managing and cultivating good relationships with influencers such as analysts, journalists, and editors, you would find your perspectives known and understood by the writers, you would be included in mentions, and you might even find a slightly more positive perspective on your company than without such a strong relationship.

Influencers in a Social Media World

In today’s world, this core dynamic is still there. Good relationships with influencers can lead to being present in mentions, having perspective understood and appreciated, and having a slightly more positive bias. However, while the core dynamic remains, theapproach that we need to use to manage influencers has changed significantly.

More But Smaller

The first major change is that the influencers have changed in number and in size. Whereas historically, there may have been a few analysts worth focusing on, and a similar number of publications, there are now many, many more blogs, lifestreams, content sites, and magazines (let’s call them all “publications” just to keep things simple). This is brought about by the fact that the cost of infrastructure needed to publish information has gone down to nearly zero. This explosion in the number of publications is matched by a corresponding decrease in their individual size. Many only have a few thousand viewers, or focus on a highly specialized niche that would have been unprofitable for a major news outlet.

Read the rest at: Digital Body Language