Two weeks ago I spent several hours judging entries in an influencer marketing awards contest. Part of the submission was for the brand or agency to describe their organization’s unique selling proposition. Every single entry had some version of the following in their answer:

“We focus on authentic, transparent and human connections with our … blah blah blah.”

You could literally copy and paste one agency’s answer to that question into the spot on any other agency’s entry and no one would have known the difference. It’s like they were told if they didn’t include some indication that they were all about authenticity, transparency and creating human connections, they were disqualified.

But, it was an influencer marketing award competition. That was to be expected to a degree. 

Then I flipped over to my Instagram feed and saw the following quote in a meme sent by a different agency. It read, “Honesty, transparency and authenticity are the key factors that will set your personal brand apart from the competition as a trustworthy, reliable source.” 

I snapped. It’s high time we kill all the talk about honesty, being human and transparency. And once and for all, stick a dagger in the heart of authenticity.

I’ll explain what I mean in today’s commentary.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius really is easy to use but super powerful all at once. I can search for influencers by topic, interest, geography, age … I can also filter them by the demographics of their audience, which networks they’re relevant on … the permutations of isolating the ones that are super relevant for me are seemingly endless.

Then, I can build lists of candidates, reach out to them for engagements, share contracts and assets with them, load in deliverables that I can track, measure the ROI of everything … it’s got it all. 

I literally work in Julius every day for my clients at Cornett. It’s become a required tool in my arsenal. I think you’ll enjoy having it in yours, too. 

All I want you to do is a demo. They’re free and will show you the magic I use every day for influence marketing campaigns. If you love it like I do, you’ll sign up. If you don’t, what harm is there in checking it out, right?

Sign up for that demo! Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius. I think you’ll be impressed!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We recently had a conversation with Brandon Brown of influencer platform Grin about CGI influencers—computer generated avatars that seem to be real people posting influencer-like content and gaining followers. That conversation opened up some discussion about using the influencer landscape as a palette for creativity. We joked that Kentucky Fried Chicken should create a Colonel Sanders influencer account right now and avatar him back to life.

But when you think of the influencer channel as a creative outlet, you don’t have to use computer generated influencers at all. You can just script a fictitious influencer’s life, insert an actor or model to be the character and have at it. You can even insert a real person but help script his or her influencer lifestyle for them.

Bandolier Media stirred up the influencer marketing airwaves in 2019 when it it created @justaconstructionguy on Instagram. Omar, a coffee-loving construction worker, frequently posted about enjoying Cuvee Coffee, an Austin, Texas, based craft coffee shop, on work breaks. 

A tweet from his daughter saying her dad said he was going to be an influencer that included a screen shot of Omar’s account, which then had 75 followers, was posted on Classic Dad, a popular satire site for me. Some big accounts reposted and shared the story. Someone put it on Reddit. 

Within five days, he had over 400,000 followers.

Bandolier Media consists of owners Daniel Stone and Lou Montemayor, plus creative director and owner George Ellis and creative production specialists Kelsey Hickok … and yes, that’s the entire full-time staff. They have turned influencer marketing on its head by being the first advertising agency that essentially creates influencers.

Stone and Montemayor joined me recently to talk about how their approach to social media and just having fun together has reshaped how one might think of an ad agency. They get in deep on the story behind @justaconstructionguy and reveal that while the daughter’s conversation about her dad claiming he was going to be an influencer was 100% true, they got permission from Omar and his daughter to manufacture the tweet so they had a hook to introduce the account to the world.

Honestly? It was and is brilliant. And while their approach does skirt the lines of how transparent one should be with something amazing that isn’t quite 100 percent organic, there’s no intention at Bandolier to dupe anyone. They're just having fun with online content and using the influencer channel as a creative outlet. 

This episode of Winfluence is sponsored by Julius. That’s the influencer marketing management solution I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius helps me identify relevant influencers, has contact information on many so I don’t have to go hunting for that, but then offers up an entire suite of campaign management features, too. I can reach out and share a contract with an influencer, load in deliverables based on our agreement, assign a dollar value to each deliverable, automatically track influencer content and produce an ROI report for each campaign.

Julius allows me to find and compiles lists of influencers, analyze each for their audience characteristics, but then also analyze my list in aggregate so I can ensure the influencers I’ve chosen optimally align with my brand and target audience. 

You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My previous commentary that focused on the idea that Words Matter pointed out a flaw in semantics with how HypeAuditor reported fraudulent behavior. That semantic difference—a simple poor choice of words—lead Campaign U.S., a popular advertising industry publications, to post the statement that more than half of Instagram influencers—"engaged in fraud"—with 45 percent of accounts—"fake." 

Engaged was my problem. Because fraud can happen to an influencer’s account without the influencer having a thing to do with it.

HypeAuditor listened and in its May Report on Fraud on Social Media, made good with new data and new phrasing.

It turns out that on average, almost 34 percent of influencers in the U.S. are impacted by fraud. That can be growth anomalies, inauthentic comments, comments from bots, giveaway comments or comments from pods … that being groups of people gang up to comment on each other’s content just to drive up engagement rates.

The majority of the fraudulent impact comes from inauthentic comments. One-words, an emoji or two and similar structures that seem robot-like and irrelevant. 

HypeAuditor estimates that fraudulent activity can be costing advertisers up to $800 million each year. 

This episode's commentary dives into more and indicates my previous assumptions about the level of intentional fraud that happen in influence marketing may be right.

You can find all the data from HypeAuditor’s May Fraud Report on t he HypeAuditor blog at Hypeauditor.com. Or by clicking the link in the show notes.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius really is easy to use but super powerful all at once. I can search for influencers by topic, interest, geography, age … I can also filter them by the demographics of their audience, which networks they’re relevant on … the permutations of isolating the ones that are super relevant for me are seemingly endless.

Then, I can build lists of candidates, reach out to them for engagements, share contracts and assets with them, load in deliverables that I can track, measure the ROI of everything … it’s got it all. 

And yes, Julius has an audience health tool, too. So it can help you understand what percentage of the influencer’s audience is perhaps suspect and subject to fraudulent behavior or attacks. 

I literally work in Julius every day for my clients at Cornett. It’s become a required tool in my arsenal. I think you’ll enjoy having it in yours, too. 

All I want you to do is a demo. They’re free and will show you the magic I use every day for influence marketing campaigns. If you love it like I do, you’ll sign up. If you don’t, what harm is there in checking it out, right?

Sign up for that demo! Go to jason.online/julius and request one. I think you’ll be impressed! 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time, I was a fairly knowledgeable guy about social listening. (I still am, I think. But in the early 2010s I was kind of known for that.) Analyzing online conversations to mine for consumer insights became such a focus for me that I started a company around the practice. The Conversation Research Institute didn't last long because we didn't have artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to scale data analysis. We had a couple of people manually coding samples of conversation to extract signals from the noise.

Imagine my intrigue when hosting the Influencer Marketing Show earlier this year when Ian Randolph of Tailify talked about mining influencer content to map their values to that of a brand. It is his company's process of helping companies identify better influence partners. Randolph is a cognitive scientist. Tailify's mission is to help brands more accurately predict influencer marketing success by more perfectly matching the brand’s values to those of the influencer.

How do they do that? Deep social listening and analysis. 

This is a fascinating next-level concept of identifying the right influencer for your brand. And it’s not just a concept. Tailify has clients like Rosetta Stone who have mapped their company values, identified language education influencers with similar values and the engagements are producing better results across the board.

The conversation is an intriguing one to say the least. The algorithms Ian has worked with were the predecessors of those that became the one Cambridge Analytica used in the 2015 and 2016 elections. Ian wasn’t involved and had left the parent company there at that point. But his efforts since have be fueled by a desire to help people use data mining from social media conversations for good, not bad.

We dive into how on this episode.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find outdoors influencers who also love jazz music. Or the content creators who are dermatologists in Chicago. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a product or campaign around any type of product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For much of the last year or so in the influence marketing space, there has been a growing trend to move away from mega-influencers in favor of micro- and nano-influencers. Those with fewer than 50,000 or even 10,000 followers. The reasons, as we’ve discussed with several of our guests, is that the smaller the following, the higher the engagement rate … generally speaking. If the engagement rate for a small number of people is high enough, it means that influencer has actual impact on more audience members than mega-influencers with lower engagement rates.

I wanted to dig in and explore use cases and case studies where this is happening and connected with Erin Murray recently. She is the vice-president for brand and consumer marketing at Peace Out Skincare. They have used both mega-influencers and micro-/nano-influencers to help educate the market and create awareness and conversion for their skin creams, acne treatments and ointments. And Erin shared their learnings with me.

Peace Out also zeroed in recently on surfacing a very niche, but highly relevant sub-group of influencers in the space: dermatologists.

She joined me to talk about the brand’s back and forth with influencers of different sizes, zeroing in on a specialty niche of influencers and even what her brand is up to on TikTok. You always seem to learn more when the guest is a brand-side decision maker because they’re not just thinking about all this activity with influencers. They’re testing approaches, learning and actually executing campaigns that drive their business.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find outdoors influencers who also love jazz music. Or the content creators who are dermatologists in Chicago. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a product or campaign around any type of product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the fascinating new trends in the influencer space is that of influencer houses. You may have heard The Hype House, probably the biggest example in the U.S., is queued up for a Netflix distribution deal after starting on social media channels. There’s another in the U.S. called the Sway House, yet another called Club Beverly Hills. 

The concept borrows from the original reality TV show -- The Real World on MTV. Influencer Houses bring together some number of large audience content creators and put them in a big, fancy house with each other to collaborate, create content, participate in challenges and more. 

There’s a lot of smarts behind these things: Talent agencies created them to cross-promote client audiences and grow each influencer’s network, while at the same time building a frequently watched episodic content creation -- a TV show -- that can be monetized with advertising, merchandise, syndication deals and even big network distribution.

But is this really influencer marketing? Or is it entertainment with online influencers playing the parts? 

I invited two of the people behind Wave House, an influencer house concept out of the United Kingdom to help us understand it all. Jidé Maduako originated the Wave House concept to support his stable of influencers at Yoke Network and is the primary producer of the series. Ali Clifton helps produce the show and series through Brave Bison, a social content firm in the U.K. that partners to support Yoke’s mission with the show. 

I talk to them about the concept, the reasons for being, the end game and I even dig into whether or not these are reality TV shows or overacting zaniness to get eyeballs. You’ll appreciate the discussion, I’m sure. 

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find outdoors influencers who also love jazz music. Or the content creators who are dermatologists in Chicago. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a product or campaign around any type of product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ve had the good fortune to have built a respectable audience over the years, creating and sharing content on social networks, writing blog posts and articles, speaking at conferences and the like. My primary platform for much of that time has been Twitter. And the way I built a nice following there was by sharing good content.

At one point in time I actually wrote the following on a sheet of paper that I stuck on my office bulletin board: Twitter Strategy -- Share good shit. The more I could become a trustworthy curator of content, the more people would trust me. It worked.

Back then, however, social media was different. Short form, snackable content platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok didn’t exist. Building influence back then involved writing blog posts and sharing content on Twitter. There were also social bookmarking sites that allowed you to save your favorite links to great content in one place. For a content curator, these were a godsend. Unfortunately, social media consumer behavior shifted to those aforementioned shorter-form platforms.

When blogs and articles aren’t the same level of currency, social bookmarking and curation becomes less interesting. Even I slowed and sometimes for periods stopped sharing good shit.

And then a few weeks ago I received an email from the PR representative for a new startup called Bookshlf. That’s the word bookshelf without the “e” and it’s a .com. So bookshlf.com (just remove the e.)

Almost instantly, I was transported back to the time when bookmarking other sites was a big deal. This was a lot like my favorite social bookmarking site from back then -- deli.cio.us. I can save and share links to great content, organized on a virtual shelf, hence bookshelf, and I can then share that shelf. 

When I found out they were rolling out a way for someone’s curated content to be monetized, meaning we could make money for not creating original content, but finding good content elsewhere and sharing it? I knew I had to know more.

Co-founder Mike Abend and I sat down last week to talk all about social bookmarking, how bookshlf works and what the future holds. Will people actually subscribe to or tip good content curators? Listen to find out.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find outdoors influencers who also love jazz music. Or the content creators who are dermatologists in Chicago. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a product or campaign around any type of product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nothing gets me excited quite like finding like minded people who are interested in and knowledgeable about the same things I am and having a good conversation. That’s why I started this podcast. I feel like I eat, sleep and breathe influence marketing these days. So I love talking to smart people who do the same.

Henry Langer is one of those people. He’s the vice-president of customer success at Julius, my influencer marketing platform of choice. You’ve heard about them because they sponsor the show and I use their platform. But one of the reasons I like them so are the brilliant people there, like Henry, who I can chew the fat with on the industry.

We synced up last week to have one of those chat sessions and hit record so he could share some insight into what he’s doing and seeing with the variety of clients he solves problems for every day. Henry and his team work with Julius’s clients and help them vet influencers, develop processes to manage and measure influencer campaigns and beyond.

When you’re hands-on, solving brand problems all day every day, you get really smart about influence marketing real fast. And those kind of folks are the ones I value chatting with the most. You’ll see why on today’s episode. Get ready to take some notes.

And yes … this episode is also sponsored by Julius. But we’re going to talk about some of its features and reasons I use them during the chat, so we’ll forego the talking points and just share Henry’s smarts about the space and practice of influence marketing. But do go do a demo of Julius. You owe it to your brand or agency to do so! Get straight to it at jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the first inklings of what we have come to call influencer marketing emerged in the late 2000s, Instagram, TikTok and SnapChat didn’t exist. Facebook was actually barely a thing at that point, because only college-tied emails initially earned access to the platform. YouTube existed, but web video was still complicated and cost-prohibitive for the masses. Influencer marketing back then was primarily focused on blogs and Twitter. 

IZEA was the first company to force the issue on turning social media content into sponsored-message opportunities. The first iteration of its company name was actually PayPerPost. It launched in 2006 and offered bloggers everything from gift cards and free product to cash payment in exchange for a written post about experiences with its clients.

In 2009, IZEA launched Sponsored Tweets, and the world of online content creators taking money for social media posts was off and running. 

The social media pundits didn’t like it. And I was one of them. 

I’ll explain why and how the conversation produced a philosophical spectrum for influencer marketing in today’s commentary.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find just the gardening influencers in New England. Or the people who get excited about brick oven pizza. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help promote anything from stationery to toothpaste.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

Oh, and they have their own audience health score to help you weed out ones with suspect audiences or engagement. 

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on the influencer using our campaign hashtag, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

I first wrote about the influencer philosophical spectrum on Entrepreneur.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s pretty obvious that you believe in the power of podcasting. Or at least you’re willing to give it a shot or you wouldn’t be listening to this, right? Yes, podcasts are a great way for someone like me to share ideas and interview interesting people for people like you. Ideally, you find the episodes helpful and get smarter about influence marketing.

But what switch needs to be flipped for you to see podcasting as a powerful trigger for your own influence?

Phil Pelucha specializes in helping businesses use podcasts for three primary outcomes: More publicity, greater marketshare and funding introductions. Podcasting suddenly seems more interesting, right? 

Phil and his team at Billionaires in Boxers have been doing this with businesses ranging from large financial institutions to small businesses for quite some time. And they’re pretty good at it.

Phil came on Winfluence to talk specifically about how and why influencers should look to podcasting to raise the bar on the type of content they create, but we dove into a treasure trove of discussion about how agencies, brands and services professionals can leverage this medium, too.

We even get into the interesting perspective that sometimes, your podcast can be valuable to you without even considering the size of your audience. And we had some fun riffing on the topic in an inside-look kind of way you'll find amusing as well.

Phil mentions the Billionaires in Boxers Starter Package on the show, so you can find that link here.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find just the food and beverage influencers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Or the men’s fashion voices that most impact Vancouver. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a beauty, tech or automotive product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices