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Influencer Marketing with Neal Schaffer

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“If you are trying to make money as an influencer, there’s this notion that someone on the other side of things is going to pay to engage with you. Who is that going to be?” - Neal Schaffer Click To Tweet

Not all social media influencers are equal. Just because someone has a ton of followers doesn’t mean they actually have any influence on their audience. It’s important that we learn to be critical thinkers that do research and not just believe what we hear and read. Whether you’re a business looking to use an influencer to promote your product, or you’re interested in becoming an influencer yourself, this is the episode for you.

Today’s guest is Neal Schaffer. Neal is an authority on helping innovative businesses digitally transform their sales and marketing. He’s the founder of the digital marketing consultancy PDCA Social and currently serves as a fractional CMO to several companies. He teaches at Rutgers Business School and the Irish Management Institute and is fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Neal is a popular keynote speaker internationally and has also authored four sales and marketing books including his latest, The Age of Influence. 

“Any brand can build a certain amount of influence in three to six months if you’re consistent with talking about your subject, publishing content, and pitching and branding yourself as the expert.” - Neal Schaffer Click To Tweet

Show Notes:

“It is a huge industry with a lot of money being thrown at it and it is very easy to dupe people.” - Neal Schaffer Click To Tweet

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Transcript:

I know this is a little bit of a twist from our normal scams and frauds but I wanted to talk about influences, specifically social media influence these days and how it moves us and how to tell whether that sort of thing is genuine or not. Could you give us a little bit of background about how your involvement is with this and how you came to deal with social media influencing?

Sure. Well, I am a digital marketing consultant, author, and speaker. I started getting, I'd say, 2017, 2018, a lot of questions whenever I spoke or from clients about not just influencer marketing, which is how to leverage influencers for your business, but also, especially people in their 20s—how do I become an influencer? It looks like there's a lot of money in this. It’s almost like the dot-com boom. If you ask your kids what they want to do, they're like, “I want to be a YouTuber.”

“What the heck's going on here?” is the first thing I was asking myself. But upon doing more research and looking at case studies, what have you, I realize that—now I know that not everybody listening to this podcast is an entrepreneur, or business owner, or marketer—that’s my normal audience—but leveraging influencers really is compelling for a lot of reasons. The flipside is it's a huge industry. There's a lot of money being thrown at it. It's very, very easy for people to say, “Look, I have a lot of followers. I have a lot of engagement. I'm an influencer and because I have this many followers, you need to pay me this much.”

I'd say there's a dark side and there is a lot of fakeness out there. There is an audit done by some firm that said there's more than $1 billion of fraud from influencers that are out there. That is real. There's still no one scientifically correct way to find out if someone is a fake influencer or a fake follower because you don't have access to their account. There are tools out there. There is advice that I give people, but you really never know. I think from the consumer perspective or from a social media user perspective, it's the same. If you see someone with a lot of followers, you assume that they have a lot of influence. You assume that they know what they're talking about. When they talk about a product and you see lots of great comments, you assume that the influencers are users of the product and the people engaging are users of the product as well. When in many cases, that's not the case.

This isn’t all of the influencers. There are some great people out there as well, but on the flip side, there are others that have taken advantage of it because there's money out there to be had.

What would be some of the signs that maybe someone who is claiming to be an influencer really isn't who they claim to be or doesn't have the following, or for lack of a better word, the influence that they claim to have?

If you understand how social networks work, if you have 0 Instagram posts and have 10K followers, there’s something wrong. -Neal Schaffer Click To Tweet

Now maybe they haven't published a lot of content, but they have a little link in their bio and the link is their YouTube channel. They have 100,000 YouTube subscribers and they just got started on Instagram. These things do happen. I know when I say this, some of you are going to throw rotten tomatoes at me, that Google is your best friend here. But Google really is your best friend here because just do the art of searching for someone. Where did they get their influence from? Where are they on the internet? That’s going to give you a really good idea.

There’s an internet TV station called Chatter that some of you may be or may not be familiar with. I was actually interviewed on Chatter a few years ago and it's really cool. They actually do their interviews on the floor of NASDAQ. That’s on Wall Street. It was really cool. We were talking and right at that time, it's very financial-minded. Facebook stock was taking a hit. They were talking about the emergence of fake news. This is 2017 after the 2016 election. What do we do about fake news?

I'm like, “Look, people have to be smart enough to be able to have a critical mind and analyze what they see, don't take it that it's the truth, and be able to figure this stuff out. We need to teach our kids how to do this.” There's no better way to do that because, right now, we have a divided country. Each side says the fake news is what's influencing the other side. This is not a political podcast, I'm sure. I don’t want to go into politics. You don’t make any friends. You just make enemies. But that's the fact of the matter. You need to become a better thinker and analyzer by looking at all these data points.

Do a search on Google. Do a search on other social networks. Look at their content. Look at their followers. Look at their follower-following ratio. Those of us that work in marketing get pretty good at doing this over time. But if you're a beginner, you need to do this. For me, it's not much different than looking to buy something on Amazon. I find a product. I read the reviews. I may go to their website. I may go to their social media. I may Google them to see what their competitors are.

Instead of doing this for things you want to buy on Amazon or online, you're now doing this for people. If you take that same approach and same critical eye, it's like all these reviews are good, should there be one bad review out of 10,000? Yeah, there should be. That's why I have some books on Amazon. I thank people when they send a negative review my way because it makes it real because there's no way you're going to please everybody. If you just take that internet common sense, you can avoid dealing with a lot of fakes that are out there.

I guess from a perspective because I run a big website and I've done advertising before, I suspect when companies are wanting to do business with influencers, there are probably things that they've got to watch out for. Is this person in line with your brand identity? What are some of the other things that a business should be looking for that might have a negative backlash on them?

I wrote this book called The Age of Influence, which really answers all those questions. I did it because a lot of businesses ask the exact same question you do. I think they missed the point of influencer marketing because people or brands think of influencers as, like, these programmable advertising units—“I'm going to hire this person, they're going to talk about me, and their followers are going to see it and they're going to buy my product.” It really doesn't work that way.

What I'm telling businesses is, “Look, you have a lot of influencers within your own sphere of influence, within your own brand affinity circle.” What's really interesting is that even in the influencer marketing industry, what used to be called a micro-influencer is now a nano-influencer. What they're saying is, “Look, if you have 1000 followers in any given social network, you have enough mass to be considered to have some influence. At that level, go into your customer database, look at your followers on social media, look at your employees.”

There are tons of people that already know and trust your brand that have influence. I would like to start with these people because they already like you. They're already buying your product or they're already getting you a salary. How do we work together? How can we collaborate? We want to be talked about more on social media. We want to help boost your personal branding. We want to help you make better content. There's a lot of things businesses can do, not just pay money, like giving products, and not just giving products but saying, “Hey, we invited an influencer who's killing it on TikTok right now to teach all of you how to do Instagram reels. It's going to be totally free. Sign up here.” Or, “Hey, we have a video studio for corporate videos. We're going to loan it out to all of our influencers, which you can use for free.”

There are so many things that brands can give influencers that already know and trust them. You know, it's funny, because now the industry has woken up to this. I would start with if you're going to reach out to someone that does not know you, that is not following you, they've never had any interactions with you, I'd say, “Hey, just wondering, have you ever used our product?”

If they haven't used your product, how the hell can they genuinely talk about using your product and promoting it to their audience? This is where we talk about authenticity. It's being real. It’s starting with brands reaching out to people that actually give a damn about that company. The more they give a damn, the more genuine it's going to be when they recommend you.

It's just common sense that at the end of the day will rule, but in the beginning, brands are just doing stupid things. They're reaching out to people that may not want to give them the time of day. They're reaching out to people that are already working with their competitors. Now they're getting information that they're giving to their competitors. It's all about relationships, all of this. It's about building genuine relationships with genuine people. They're going to help businesses better and leverage influencer marketing.

It's funny. It just popped into my head: some of these influencer fails that have happened that I've seen where someone or the influencer was told, “Hey, we want you to talk about this and mention our product…” whatever. The person just copied and pasted the email from the PR person into their Instagram feed, or whatever it was. I was like, that stinks.

If you treat an influencer like you're hiring them for a specific project with a specific deadline—“I want you to create three Instagram stories, one blog post, two tweets, you need to mention these hashtags, usernames, you need to go to Walmart and take a picture of yourself holding Captain Crunch cereal”—I don't even know if that still exists—but the more restrictions you put on influencers, the worse and the less genuine the content is going to be.  Let's face it. That's why those things happen.

The more restrictions you put on influencers, the worse and the less genuine the content is going to be. -Neal Schaffer Click To Tweet

Instead of saying, “You know what, we need to give influencers some freedom here. Yes, we have a brand, but it influences the brand, too. Influencers create better content than we can. Why are we trying to limit that and instead unleash it?” Oh my God, there have been so many failures. I actually was a guest teacher last night for a class at USC here in Los Angeles on influencer relations. It's a master's program. There was someone on before me who heads an agency and she was talking about influencers who a week after the post, they already deleted the post. Well, if you hire someone, you need a contract. You need to put all these things you take for granted. Whereas, if you're working organically, you're collaborating, and you're always keeping in touch, it's just a very different paradigm.

I wrote this book, The Age of Influence, to try to get people out of that mindset and to leverage the influence that's existing all around them and really in the spirit of collaboration, win-win, and what's in it for me. The more you try to treat influencers like programmable ad units, just throwing money at them, the more failures you are going to have and the less effective your investments are going to be.

That results when you're just saying, “Do this, blah. You don't know anything about my product or anything about my service. It just resolves it and blah, influence.”

Trash-in-trash-out. Seriously, yes. From a vanity metric side, yes, your content is published. Yes, you're getting hostile compressions. Yes, you're getting likes. But the potential impact is very low on the scale of the potential. People can see through it. I mean, when it's a cut-and-paste, it's not spoken in the natural language that the influencer has built their community on. It's almost like they're speaking a foreign language.

You always post in English, why are you posting in Yiddish now? Weird example but that's what it sounds like to their followers. You're really introducing foreign elements into the community. Those that are really passionate can sniff it out. They’ll know it pretty quickly.

I guess this is more of what makes businesses easy prey? Do you see a situation coming where there is a lot more government intervention into influencer marketing where there are required disclosures and things like that?

Absolutely. I mean we've already seen the FTC give a number of guidelines to influencers. There have been cases. There was one case of an agency that was working on behalf of the launch of a new Sony PlayStation game. What happened was, during the launch, the agency got their employees involved—we call this employee advocacy—and the agency employees were pimping this game in the launch on their social media profiles. The FTC said, “Hold on a minute, you’re employees of an agency that's making money off the launch of this. You need to disclose the fact that you're a related entity.”

This was several years ago but that had a lot of impact on the industry. We've seen other things, but at a minimum, you have to disclose. Guess what, it's the brand's responsibility. I'm a blogger as well as a podcaster and I'm active on social media. I still have companies come to me saying, “We want to work with you on something, but we don't want you to say that it was sponsored.” It's the law in terms of the FTC. They're not going to come down on you immediately. They're not going to come down on everyone.

But every once in a while, they like to set examples. The bigger the brand, the more that you have to lose. You want to make sure when you work with someone, in the contract, you will say that this is an ad. That this is sponsored. There are some brands that I've worked with where they say, “We want you in a tweet.” The first thing you put is a hashtag ad. We want to make it very clear without a doubt that this is an ad, but the opinions are mine. The experience is mine.

I will talk about this. “Yes, the brand was kind enough to sponsor this post, or this tweet, or this photo, but I genuinely have been a big fan. I've been a customer there for a decade and I'm excited to share the news. In case you didn't know that they launched this new product.” It’s a disclosure, but it can still be effective. You're still getting your message out there in front of people. That's really the key thing here. It starts with brand awareness. Here's the thing, ever since I wrote The Age of Influence, I've got even further.

Social media is about word of mouth. If no one's talking about you, your Facebook page posts are going to be seen by nobody. It becomes pay-to-play. Influencers are the only way that you're going to get people to talk about you. It’s the only way to really leverage social media. They are a necessity, I believe, in businesses today. Any business can leverage them. It's just how you are going to leverage them. Instead of paying them to post something, why don’t you pay them for their content? Why don’t you hire them to become a content creator for you? Why don't you invite them to a roundup blog post of The Top 10 Paleo Recipes for 2021 and promote what they're doing? Invite them on your podcast, whatever it is. These are things that businesses can do to develop genuine relationships with influencers and those relationships do generate that word-of-mouth and that ROI over in the long term.

Yeah, it sounds like when it's really that the pay-to-play, here we're going to pay you to do stuff, you might be a little more hit-and-miss whether it's going to work out. But if you're developing and building that relationship, you have a better chance of it being more effective.

And authentic.

To me, that's the thing about social influencers. If it's not authentic, it does not really influence anymore. I've seen some of these people that are popular on social media. Obviously, it's a sponsored post and it's so off-brand for them. It's so disconnected from what they do and what they're passionate about and you're like, “That's an ad.” And like on your TiVo, skip.

Good influencers turn away those opportunities. In my profile photos on social media, I'm wearing a black suit with a royal blue dress shirt. In the words of Barney Stinson, “I'm suiting up.” I've had this custom suit company reach out to me: “We want to create a custom suit for you. Will you talk about us on social media?” I said, “No. People don't follow me for fashion, and if I did post about you, it would be freaking weird. I'm not going to win anyone over.” I believe it's all about relationships.

I’ll give you another example. Influencer marketing is not just about social. It's about SEO and websites as well. I have a blog—nealschaffer.com—and I have a lot of guest bloggers. I noticed that one or two of my guest bloggers were always trying to link to certain sites. These certain sites of my competitors. When you dig into it, it's like well, there are certain people that have a lot of friends that write a lot of content and generate a lot of backlinks. It's about relationships. I’ve developed relationships with these people. I'm getting better search engine rankings. I'm getting more traffic as a result of it.

It all comes down to relationships and finding whether it's social media, blog, YouTube, or podcast—content creators are influencers. It's really all about developing relationships with content creators. The great thing is that businesses need content. There is an inherent relationship waiting to happen, but it's not about just spraying and painting and reaching out to any and every influencer. It's really finding the ones that obviously are already in your brand affinity ideally. But if not, that really speaks to your specific audience, that really would be the ones that if they had a chance to try your product for free, that it would actually help them and they’d be singing the praises. Those are the people that you want to develop relationships.

Yeah. That makes perfect sense is when there's that disconnect with that lack of relationship that just hurts the whole process.

Absolutely.

If people want to become influencers themselves, how would they go about it? What are the things that they should watch out for?

Becoming an influencer is a long-haul thing. It has to be something you’re passionate about. You’ve got to choose your niche. -Neal Schaffer Click To Tweet

You’ve got to choose something that you're going to, on a consistent basis, talk about. Part of choosing a niche is also choosing your content format. Is it going to be audio with podcast or Clubhouse these days, or Twitter spaces? Is it going to be a video with YouTube? Is it going to be blog content with text? Is it going to be dance routines with reels or photos on Instagram. But it's the combination of content medium and that passion that you have, that niche that is going to define what path you're going to go down. Blogger, YouTuber, podcaster, Instagrammer, or TikToker. Those are the main paths.

It's really this thought that you're going to share what you know and, through that, you're going to create a community. People who follow you and are going to learn from you, are going to be inspired by you. Over time, you're going to influence them by being consistent with publishing content but also being there to answer their questions to engage with them.

That's the core infrastructure that you need. It really starts with the why. I've seen so many people start a blog—six months later, it's gone. They just ran out of things to say. They did it for the money and it's not fun anymore. You really want to try to find something that, five years from now, I can see myself talking about whether it's TV shows or whether it's indie rock or whatever it is. That's really the key.

On the flip side, though, if you're trying to make money as an influencer, there's a notion that there's someone on the other side that’s going to pay to engage with you. Who is that going to be? Here's the thing: I can talk about indie rock, but I don't think record labels are going to reach out and want to sponsor me. There's some common sense here that says, “Well, I'm really into jewelry and I can pick up all these jewelry brands that they would love to sponsor me because I'm talking about content that's relevant to them. That if they access my audience, they're going to be able to sell.”

Part of this exercise is also trying to keep a shortlist of brands in the back of your mind that if I build this community, these are the brands that would want to work with me, or these are the brands I want to work with. I'm a travel blogger. I’d love to work with Ritz Carlton. When you think about it that way, it's going to help you better define your niche and better define the content.

If I were to say on this podcast, “I really want to fly Singapore Air to my next vacation in Singapore.” They're probably not going to sponsor this episode.

No, but if you, over the course of a year, interview people that have flown Singapore Airlines about their experiences, talk about your own experiences flying them, talk about your experiences in Singapore, and become known as the Singapore influencer, and I lived there six months. That’s the thing—you become known for something. I had a really interesting experiment publishing this book—The Age of Influence—because I was a blogger since 2008, but I had very little content about influencer marketing that I'd written.

But as I was writing the book and blogging more and telling people I was writing the book on influencer marketing, I became known as an influencer on the subject. That's what happens. It starts with content creation and getting the word out there. I tell people, any brand can build a certain amount of influence in three to six months if you're consistent with talking about it and publishing content on that subject and pitching yourself, and branding yourself that you are the expert in that.

It's good to know that actually there is a path for people who want to become an influencer, but it's not going to be a quick path. They're not going to be Insta-famous overnight.

Be strategic and enjoy the journey.

Dude, I mean, there are no shortcuts in life. There are no free lunches. I truly believe that hard work and perseverance are undervalued in our society. But by being a little bit smart and strategic about it, you can obviously accelerate that process. Obviously, timing is part of it. Luck is part of it. Some people, in six months, blow up. Some people take a few years. It's really about the journey and about the people you meet along the way, the people that you enrich in the relationships you create. That, to me, is the gold in doing any of this.

That’s what I've really enjoyed with the podcast. I've been meeting some really great people, getting to know a lot of people and I was like, “These are some really interesting people. I've really enjoyed the conversations. I've learned a ton from them. I hope my audience learned a ton from them.” I get that feedback from time to time, which is encouraging.

Are there things that if you want to be an influencer, that you definitely don't want to do? I can think of a thing that comes to the top of my mind is feeding the trolls. That you're always going to have some haters. Does how you deal with those friction elements have a significance?

Yeah, haters be haters. They're going to be on every social network. I learned with these most recent elections the joy of blocking people on Facebook. It's funny because when you go out on a limb, there are going to be fringe elements that are going to push back. But for every one person that pushed back, I received 10 messages from friends saying, “My God, Neal, thank you so much for saying that. It had to be said. We're with you.”

Part of building fans is standing up for something, standing up for your niche, and being really passionate about that, and not letting anybody destroy who you are and what you do. It's very easy to set up a fake profile, to set up a bot, and just negatively post about things. Just remember that sometimes I believe it's the noisy really, really small minority that seems to have the loudest voice in social media. There is a silent majority out there and it bears reminding, “Hey, block.” If they come onto your profile to comment on your content, it’s your space. You're totally free to delete and block. Go for it. It’s not a big deal.

You're not going to lose clout with your community. They're probably going to support you. I'll give an example. The sin that I probably shouldn't do that I do every day is I play Clash Royale on my phone. Now, my son got me into it and my son is now moved on to Brawl Stars and I'm still stuck in Clash Royale and we have a clan, and I'm a co-leader in the clan. There's something in Clash Royale called a clan. Do you play Clash Royale, Chris?

I have in the past. It's not currently on my phone.

OK, for probably a good reason, I'm sure. There’s something called clan wars where the clan comes together. As a leader, you're always trying to get as many people to these clan wars. The leader, I actually know, is a soccer dad like me. Our kids played on the same soccer team. We actually know a lot of people in the clan and there’s a lot of people we don't know. He goes, “Make sure you do your clan wars.” And then someone said, “We don't really care about clan wars.”

I said, “Well, this is how it benefits you.” Then another member of the clan, who I don't know said, “Hey, Neal, you're a co-leader, why don't you call this person out? Why don’t you kick them out for saying that? That’s really disrespectful.” In some ways, the people in your tribe, in your clan, are waiting for your leadership that when someone tries to rock the boat, you have permission to actually kick them out. Just remember, it's not about you sometimes, it's about everyone in your community.

You want to make it a safe and pleasant place for them. Those people that are going to ruin that—it's your responsibility to kick those people out. Report them. I report people left and right to Pinterest, to Instagram, to LinkedIn, to Twitter. One guy saying, “Hey, Neal, if you ever come to my neighborhood, I’ll be on the lookout for you.” I contacted the police. That was really threatening.

Don't take those things for granted on social networks. The law enforcement authorities that are out there take those things very seriously. I would always be in contact with them if you feel threatened in any way.

That's good. I'm trying to think, is there anything that we have significantly missed out on talking about with respect to social media influence and influencers?

Leverage influencer content as much as possible.

Well there's obviously a few ways to look at influencers. If you're a business owner, it is a fantastic channel for marketing. I would say my advice for my clients is make as little contact as possible, leverage as much influencer content as possible, not just for your social media, for your ads, for your website copy, everywhere. If you're a business owner, entrepreneur or marketer, there is my advice.

If you're just a general consumer, it's just like Amazon reviews. You’ve got to take everything with a grain of salt. Just because an influencer pushed it, don't believe it. Obviously, you can do a search for #ad, #sponsored. If you see that on there, yes, you know that money is in play there. Although, they could still genuinely be recommending the products, so don't be fooled. I've talked to influencers who said, “Well, I signed up for an influencer marketplace, but then they said I needed to have 10,000 followers. I only had 2,000 so I bought 8,000 followers. Then I was able to get business from brands.”

There is a lot of that out there. Just be aware. If you want to become an influencer, don't do it for the money. Do it for the passion. Do it for the friends that you can make. Do it for serving other people and I think you're going to get tremendous ROI. Hey, you might be able to make a little bit of money out of it, but I think that the majority is going to provide you a heck of a lot more than that. On these three different fronts, that's my advice for influencers.

I love it. Do it because it's something you want to do, not because it’s something you're going to make $1 billion from doing.

Man, you're going to be miserable really fast if you're just doing it for the money. Trust me.

Neal, if people want to find your book, can they find The Age of Influence in all those non-existent brick-and-mortar stores and the only place to buy online, Amazon?

Yeah. You know it's funny. I hate to say wherever fine books are sold, but literally this book was published through HarperCollins Leadership. It's available in paperback. It's available on Kindle, on iTunes. There's actually a CD version of the book that you could buy. I could go back to my bookshelf and show you. It truly is the omni-channel experience. It is available everywhere. My name is Neal Schaffer. I'm the real Neal on social media and on the web, nealschaffer.com.

For those of you that want to investigate how to leverage influence, primarily for your business, but also if you want to become more of an influence yourself, I also have a dedicated podcast called the Maximize Your Social Influence Podcast.

Cool. Thank you so much, Neal. I appreciate your time coming on the podcast today.

 

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