Here’s my keynote presentation from Infopresse I gave last month “Social Media and the Food Industry” .

The toplines:

- 16 insights

- 6 reasons why your company should lead this effort

- 9 Essentials to get this world right

- 20 great food examples

Let me know your thoughts and and other great industry examples or insight.

Social networks have not diminished the power of the influencer, they have revealed it.

Consider a few stats:

On LinkedIn - people with +$200K income are 7 times more likely to have +150 connections

On Twitter - only 0.7% of twitterers are followed by 1,000 people

On Wikipedia - 1.7% of the audience publishes 70% of the articles, 0.7% of the audience edits 50% of the artcicles

On Digg - the top 100 Digg users post 56% of the content

In the blogosphere - high authority bloggers post 300x more frequently than low authority bloggers

In life - Influencers have 2x as many social connections and get involved in 2x as many social activities

Face facts - some of these people are not like the other.

And as an organization stretched for time and resources, you need to find out who these people are and get them on your side.

From what pulpit does the influencer’s power govern? There’s like many individual reasons why these people are so powerful but people tend to worship them from their 4 core altars of powers (RECS):

Reach - whether it’s because of hard work, a bit of luck, reputation or charming personality (and usually all 4), these people have many many people who like them, respect them, follow them, fan them - don’t ever let anybody tell you that reach or scale isn’t important when you’re trying to get a message started and going and also remember don’t discount real world reach because you can’t see it - remember more than 80% of conversations still happen real world away from their social network dashboard

Exposure - not only is the vast number of people that follow people but it’s also how broadly scattered that counts. The whole idea of “weak ties” suggests that the more different social circles you’re connected to, the better your message will jump across networks - from a digital standpoint that means, that they blog and I see them on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook and perhaps some other niches - noticing a wide range of interests and events attended is also an indicator of exposure-driven influence.

Credibility - so they have a lot of people, they also have a wide variety of people - who cares if no one listens to them? Do they have content that screams read me, do they state opinions people adopt with Oprah-like loyalty? Do they’re content rich posts and tweets get rebroadcasted? Do people go out of their way to get their opinions? Credibility takes shallow influence and makes it real and things like follower counts is one of the biggest mistakes in suggesting credibility (retweets, treackbacks and comments do have some merit though).

Suasion - by some magic force, these people get other people to do what they might not normally do. Do these people host events and people come out? Do these people recommend others and people act on their suggestions? Different than credibility, the force of “suasion” causes people to act.  It can be ambient suasion ( they post creative stuff that people react to) or direct (they make recommendations that curns reaction). As a lifelong beer marketer and word of mouth expert, I always suggested to my promotion teams - don’t sample just anybody - find me the guy/girl who is holding court at their table of 20 and is the one in charge of what pitcher of beer they drink. That’s suasion!

Next time, you are thinking about an influencer or grassroots outreach program, think to the power of RECS. Or simply contact Agent Wildfire about our award-winning influencer outreach programs.

Candidly I’m not surprised. For a good decade, the culture of our agencies have been lagging the culture of our customer.

At Agent Wildfire, we have spent the time to know how to get the world of “word of mouth, social media and effective customer engagement and collaboration” right. We have put the time in, asked the best in the business on how they do it, spent the long nights engaging with our audiences and orchestrated ourselves to be the top services firm in Canada geared to social influence marketing.

We like a lot of agencies, don’t get us wrong. But trust me when I say, the moment a client brief says we need some social media, digital engagement or influencer outreach in this year’s campaign or new launch, most start running for the hills. Sure, we get the phone calls to come in on pitches, but by force of nature, passage of time, greediness and/or arrogance, the agency tries to execute it themselves, leaving the industry of “social media” pockmarked with another failure by an agency that overstretched their experience and knowledge base.

Here’s the big problem - finding good talent in this space is difficult, keeping good talent in this space is difficult, doing it in an environment where the agency culture doesn’t respect the impact that social influence  can have is a Herculean task.  Add on top of that, having senior people who have built their careers on mass advertising trying to consider consider the alternative/the future, changing the closed agency culture that is geared to being the creative savants and strategic wunderkinds for their clients and given their current structures, having agencies pay enough attention to this new media that has less standards, less algorithmic predictability and thus, less ability to monetize is glacial in its slowness to adapt.

That’s why you need us. We’re geared for conversation and hungry to prove we’re the best. We have a simple mission of getting our clients noticed, talked about and advocated. It’s a very different mission than our agency brethren. They want to convince masses of consumers that the product is right, superior or well-differentiated for your appetitites.Some do it very well and it works despite our era of media fragmentation and limited attention spans.

We instead want to get customers to participate in the brand, because we know if they do and have a good experiecne, they will become advocates, evangelists and ambasssadors. It is the new currency of marketing and it’s what makes 2/3rds of our economy tick.

And this evolution - requires markedly different talents and infrastructure for getting it right. We believe we have the right alchemy of people, passion, assets and processes to get it right.

Below, you’ll see our overview of why we’re geared for conversation across all key 9 components of building communities/campaigns/buzz more than any other type of services firm in Canada:

Dare you, give us a shout and we’ll stack our skills and abilities up against any top 10 agency in Canada not in TV, radio or outdoor - they would kill us - but smart, engaged grassroots marketing and media - game on!

I keynoted an opening presentation with an auditorium of 200 marketers in Toronto at Marketing Magazine’s conference “Engaging Influencers” this week.

Given the reaction of the crowd, it’s about time this section of marketing was covered off.  You could tell for some, it was reinforcement of stuff that wasn’t getting nearly enough airplay in their offices, for others - you could see the pin drop and give consideration to an entirely different world out there beyond the scope of their current “marketing air wars”.

For another constituency, habits were so engrained that people were trying to fit what they were learning into what they already knew and practiced. Not an easy forcefit. My friend David Alston from Radian6 explained adroitly what this actually meant using a really clever metaphor of the “church of the community” - engaged brand owners and the “church of the audience” - mass marketing practitioners — worthy consideration for another post.

In my opening keynote, I covered off in the attached presentation:

- some of these people are not like the others - the parallels and proof that influencers exist

- our networks, white papers and new book - Wikibrands

- refuting Duncan Watts and supporting The Tipping Point

- how we should value these people differently

- a call to action - why we should care, the Marketing Divide, the power of a “person like me”

- the flipping on its head of the mass marketing model

- growth expectations for word of mouth #1 and individual components of the new marketing spectrum

- the stories of Mozilla Firefox and lululemon

- why influencers are so damn valuable

- RECS - the formula of influence - Reach x Exposure x Credibility x Suasion

- the inequality of Influencer participation

- the traits of an influencer - ACTIVESP

- 6 types of Influencers - their definition, motivations and profiling questions

- Crossing the Chasm - how each type of Influencer works in sequence to spread ideas

- the 36 motivations that spark Influencers to do stuff - the who (the audience), the what you do (the activity) and the what you are (brand/product), yes there are 36

- the six dos and don’ts of influencer marketing

- reinforcement that humans are social animals - engage, converse, relate - don’t brag, broadcast and conquer

- our contact page

As much as their were some good case studies presented at the conference, it made ourselves at Agent Wildfire have a little swagger in our step realizing just how up front of our industry we really are and what an incredible set of assets we offer our clients - a nice unexpected reinforcement.

Please share us your thoughts on the attached and stay tuned for three important Agent Wildfire influencer announcements and launches in the new year.