Image provided by: ArticlesBase.com

Over the last 4 weeks, I have written a series of posts on how to measure an individual’s online influence and provided tips to improve your return on investment in the Blogging, Tweeting and LinkedIn influence channels. This week, I will shift my focus to online brand influence.

Earlier today, OpenView released the second of its 2-part series of reports on online influence in the Venture Capital space. The latest report ranks the top 10 most influential venture capital firms online and provides some highlights of the tactics that these firms are using to bolster their online influence.

In this post, I’d like to share some of the best practices that virtually any company can implement in order to elevate their brand influence.

• First and foremost, to develop a successful brand influence program your company needs to a) know who it is trying to influence; and b) focus its efforts on serving that group of individuals’ interests and needs.  For B2C companies, this is pretty straightforward. Your audience will be defined by the key characteristics in your ideal customer profile. For B2B companies, finding your target audience is a little more complicated. You will first want to identify your ideal customer profile and the characteristics that define that group. Then, you need to identify the buyer personas, user personas, and influencers that are involved in the purchasing process at target companies. These individuals will be your most targeted audience group. Depending on the size of this group of companies you will likely want to refine your requirements slightly to increase the size of your target audience.
• Identify where members of this community go for information that is related to your company’s product offerings and services. Often there are great marketing channels that provide very little overall influence value because individuals from a given community may not rely on them for information. Therefore, the return on investment in these types of channels may be minimal. You can identify the top influence channels to interact with your target audience via an online survey or a simple LinkedIn poll.
• Make your company’s online presence an important component of the community of companies and individuals that it does business with.  For example, the most influential venture capital firms have realized that they are at the center of startup and expansion stage company job searching, and have made this a key functionality of their webpages.
• Leverage other community channels to expose other members of your target audience community to your content and brand, and expand your brand influence. The more touch points that you have with your target’s community, the more likely your target will become aware of your company and what it does and will potentially follow you in one or more of your target influence channels. This will lead to more chances to influence these individuals and engage with them directly.
• Align the interests of your company with your target audience community. This establishes a relationship beyond being a customer with this individual. For example, companies selling to US pharmaceutical companies may want support online movements protecting drug patents, as this is an issue that is important to these individuals.
• Align your key employees with your brand.  Your employees are an extension of your company, so you should leverage their involvement with your community to amplify your influence. One way you can easily do this is by publicizing the activity of the key players in your company with your target community across each of your major channels of communication.
• Engage directly with your target audience directly using your corporate communication channels.

If you are interested in learning more about brand influence, I recommend reading Inc.’s article on “How to Measure Your Brand’s online influence.”  Additionally, please follow me on Twitter at @bhickie to stay abreast of my current thoughts on startup and expansion stage marketing and business strategies. I post my weekly blog post to my Twitter feed each week.

Editor’s Note: To get more great tips on building your brand influence and helping your company grow, sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

Image provided by: linkedinmarketingsecrets.com

Over the last 3 weeks, I have written a series of blog posts challenging common practices for measuring online influence and offering advice on how to maximize influence in the Twitter and blogging channels. This week, I will share 12 tips to increase your LinkedIn influence.

LinkedIn is often an underutilized influence channel. Many influencers limit their LinkedIn involvement to maintaining an up-to-date profile.  However, they are missing out on an opportunity to expose their knowledge, ideas, and personal brand to large subsets of their target audience in a platform with tremendous engagement opportunities not to mention the ability to drive large volumes of traffic to their other influence channels.

LinkedIn has more than 150 million users in over 200 countries and across all major industries, making it the largest and most expansive professional community in the world. Since each individual’s identity is tied to everything they do on the site, it also makes for an extremely targeted influence channel. An influencer can communicate and engage with his/her target audience, determine the audience’s relevance and engagement levels, and predict the impact of sharing information with their network, participating in a group or community, or asking or answering questions in LinkedIn Answers.

To maximize one’s LinkedIn influence, an individual must have focus, high quality content, consistency in activity levels, encourage engagement, and maximize exposure to his/her target audience.

Image provided by: openviewpartners.com/

Below are 12 tips to increase your LinkedIn influence:

1. Understand your target audience and focus your efforts on a limited set of topics/industries that are relevant to their interests and needs. See my previous entry on blog influence for a more in-depth explanation on how to hone in on your target audience.
2. Complete and optimize your LinkedIn profile.  This will drive visitors to your linked blog and/or Twitter accounts and expose them to more of your ideas and content. If they like what they see, they will likely sign-up for your newsletter or RSS feed, or follow and/or list you on Twitter. Both of these opportunities enable you to push content to these people and potentially pull them into your sphere of influence. For more on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile, please see my post on LinkedIn Search Optimization Tips and Tricks.
3. Keep your profile professional, as this will aid you in establishing credibility and expertise in your target industries and subject matters on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional network and getting too personal via this network will detract from your credibility and decrease the number of connections that review your updates.  That said, adding a personal twist to your profile and your LinkedIn presence can actually make you more approachable. The key is to limit this information to the areas that invite you to share personal information like the interests section, and to not get carried away in filling these sections out.
4. Identify the functional and industry groups that your target audience(s) participates in. These groups represent great opportunities to expose your personal brand, knowledge, and ideas to these individuals. You should dedicate some time each week to engaging with members of these groups.
5. Engagement in LinkedIn Groups is not posting your blog posts into the forums; rather, it is actively participating in group discussions and adding value to the community through sharing ideas, answering questions, and asking questions. 
6. Be sure to share your blog posts with your LinkedIn connections — these shares are a way to get your content circulating within an engaged and targeted audience. By doing so, you will also be featuring your latest posts on your LinkedIn profile, exposing profile visitors to your newest content.
7. Consider starting your own group that focuses on a target industry or function if there are not other groups serving the target audience and purposes you cater to. To do this correctly, you have to be willing to actively moderate the group and provide starter discussion topics and questions to keep the activity level in the group high. This will drive engagement with you and other members of your community and also provide a forum to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in a given subject area or industry.
8. Search the LinkedIn groups and communities to see if any offer blog lists that are focused towards your target audience(s) and add your blog to these listings with a description. LinkedIn blog lists are becoming go-to places where individuals search for blogs.
9. LinkedIn personal updates have a much higher likelihood of being read, but the number of posts that are tied to your profile are limited, so it is important to be selective in what you post into LinkedIn. Quality will almost always trump quantity. Also, make sure to optimize your post with a description and image that will attract visitor eyes on your profile page.
10. By showing off your knowledge and actively engaging with others in LinkedIn Answers you can build relationships with members of your target audience, exhibit your ideas, knowledge and expertise in a given industry or subject matter, and also earn credentials as a subject expert on your LinkedIn profile. These credentials will establish credibility for you as an influencer, and drive higher click-through rates for your blog and Twitter links on your profile, which in turn should increase the number of people that you are able to expose to your content.
11. Cross-promote your LinkedIn presence on your blog and social media profiles, so as to encourage people to visit your LinkedIn profile and also let them know that they can engage with you via LinkedIn Answers and in various LinkedIn Groups. This should drive engagement levels on LinkedIn, which should lead to an increase in your LinkedIn influence.
12. Publicize your LinkedIn Q&A activity in your profile descriptions on other Q&A websites like Quora and Sprouter, so that people know that you also have a presence on these other Q&A platforms. This should also increase engagement levels on LinkedIn. 

If you are interested in learning more about how to effectively incorporate LinkedIn into your company’s marketing strategy, please refer to my previous posts on How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Profile Page. Additionally, please follow me on Twitter at @bhickie to stay abreast of my current thoughts on startup and expansion stage marketing and business strategies. I post my weekly blog post to my Twitter feed each week.

Next week, I will share 7 tips to increase your company’s brand influence that I identified in researching and putting together OpenView’s latest report on the top 10 most influential venture capital firms online.

Image provided by: likeable.com

Last week, I wrote a blog post on How to Maximize the Return on Your Blogging Efforts. This week, I will share 11 tips to increase your twitter influence.

Twitter influence is often misunderstood as simply having massive follower numbers. However, a large number of followers does not always translate well into large reader appeal or public-deemed expertise in a given subject matter or within an industry. Followership only measures potential reach, and the follower statistic is often biased upwards by the follow-to-be-followed game. This results in a very low transition rate from followers to content consumers.

A better measure of the number of people paying attention to chattering and musings in Twitter is the number of times listed. That number tracks the number of times a follower has categorized your feed into a specific group of tweeters that he or she can look at independently of the rest of his or her followership feed. This statistic indicates that the individual is likely consuming your content.

Similarly, consuming content does not directly translate into influence and neither does engagement. However, the combination of consumption by the appropriate target audience and level of engagement is a pretty good predictor of Twitter Influence. Thus, twitter influence is a function of reach, impact, and efficiency. The following algorithm for Twitter influence accounts for these 3 components and is a good place to start when developing a Twitter Influence strategy.

Image provided by: Source Namopenviewpartners.come

Below are 11 tips to increase your twitter influence:

• Understand your target audience and focus on a limited set of topics/industries that are relevant to their interests and needs. See my previous entry on blog influence for a more in depth explanation on how to hone in on your target audience.
• Focus on sharing high quality content that is relevant to your audience and try to add value to each piece of content you share. This will build trust among your followers, which will increase amplification of your content and demonstrate your expertise in an industry or around a given subject matter.
• Successful Tweeters use hash tags (#) to categorize Tweets and make their feed easily searchable. This also helps make the content you share easier for your followers to sift through. For a guide on how to effectively hash tag your tweets, see Ben Parr’s Mashable post on How to Get the Most Out of Twitter #Hashtags.
• Make your twitter stream interesting and predictable by:
• Setting expectations about the feed coverage and how you use Twitter in your bio.
• Targeting a minimum tweet volume per a week.
• Creating a Tweet series that your followers can expect to see on a regular basis and can find via a customized hash tag.  For example, some firms post a user tip or functionality of the week, others post facts of the week or something more fun like a trivia question or trick of the week. These types of tactics should be geared toward your target audience. Sometimes fun weekly tweets can be a great way of making a feed more personal and make the user more approachable, which should help drive increased engagement as well.

• Twitter is not just a content broadcasting tool; rather, it is an engagement platform. Influential tweeters try to drive engagement and not just drive clicks back to their blog or website. They will do so by tweeting questions and asking for their follower’s point of view on a given issue or a piece of content. This demonstrates that you value the opinions of your followers and use them to develop and vet new ideas.
• Influence is not restricted to a single channel. To maximize your influence, you will also need to use Twitter as a tool to drive engagement on other channels. Twitter is great for direct questions and insights, but influencers can benefit from driving more general business or funding questions to a Q&A site where interested parties generally go to ask these types of questions like Quora or LinkedIn Answers, as this will increase exposure and hopefully drive influence as well.
• Share and comment on interesting content provided by other influential people in the industry or that focus in a similar topic area. By providing interesting insight to other tweeters content, you will expose a new audience to your knowledge and give them a sneak peak at what they could gain from following your Twitter feed. This will expand the reach of your account and also help establish the quality of your feed.
• Similarly, engage with the thought leaders in your space. By engaging with other people and companies with large followings and similar focuses, you will increase your Twitter feed’s exposure to people and companies that are interested in your content.
• Cross promote your Twitter presence in other channels, as this will increase exposure and therefore the reach of your content.
• Be responsive to your followers. There is nothing more aggravating for users than an unresponsive voice behind a Twitter feed. If someone reaches out to you, try to respond to them within a short time period. Brad Feld, a prominent tweeter, has built a huge following around sharing great content and being very responsive to followers. He responds to Tweets within an hour most of the time. This shows his followers that he is interested in what they are saying and it encourages them to share their thoughts more often. For more information on engagement, see my post on Twitter follower engagement tips.
• A clever way to do this is to feature your twitter life stream on your blog and on other social media sites like LinkedIn.
• Make sure to include a reference to your Twitter handle in your contact information on your blog and on other social media mediums.
• Add some character to your Twitter feed. Dry content is not very engaging. Some of the most successful tweeters get personal with their twitter feed and others let their wittiness come out. This makes Tweeters less intimidating and more approachable as well, which will also lead to increased engagement.

Next week, I will share tips to increase your influence via LinkedIn based on tactics we uncovered while creating the top 10 venture capital online influencer report.

Long-term readership is the key to blog influence, as return visitors and those who engage with you are the individuals who actually look to you as an authority in a given subject matter, and consequently are the individuals that you have the opportunity to influence.

Image provided by: openviewpartners.com

Below are 8 tips to increase your blog influence:

1. Understand your target audience and focus on a limited set of topics/industries that are relevant to your target audience’s interests and needs.  Below is a chart demonstrating a typical B2B blogger’s target audience.

2. Clearly define the blog’s coverage and target readership in the blog’s description, so that your readers know what to expect from your content and know that your content is intended for their interests.

3. Engage with your readership and draw attention to this fact.

– Adopt a blog layout that clearly highlights the blogger comments with a comment button or a different color that calls attention to the blogger’s participation in the comment section of the blog.

– Respond to reader comments within 24 hours or less. Responding to reader comments quickly shows that you care about what they are saying and view their input and involvement in your blog as an important component in the overall development of ideas.

– Make your blog interactive, so that readers feel welcome to comment and engage with you.

– Clearly post your email and all social media contact information in the blog description or About page, and encourage readers to reach out via any of these channels.

4. Generously reference previous posts, so that new readers and occasional readers are exposed to multiple posts every time they visit your blog.  Long-term readers result from multiple touch points and continued satisfaction, so encouraging multiple page visits every time they come to your page will increase your blog’s RSS subscribership.

5. Cross-promote your blog content via Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media channels, so as to ensure maximum exposure of each entry.

6. SEO optimize posts, so that new readers have a higher likelihood of stumbling across your content when executing searches in Google and the other search engines.

7. Write guest posts and articles for important community publications and participate in important community forums, blogs and discussions, so that you can expose new readers to your content and knowledge and hopefully inspire them to check-out your blog.

8. Make your content predictable, so that readers know what to expect. Top bloggers use the following tactics to do so:

– Post in regular intervals, so readers know when to expect new content.

– Foreshadow the next topic that will be covered at the end of each entry, so that readers can get excited about your next post.

–  Write series that cover multiple posts that encourage readers to visit your blog on a regular basis.

– If you post more than once a week, write weekly and bi-weekly series to generate reader anticipation.

Next week, I will share tips to increase your influence via twitter based on tactics we uncovered while creating the top 10 venture capital online influencer report.

For more great tips on improving your marketing (and growing your business), sign up for the OpenView newsletter.

Online Influence = Reach + Impact + Efficiency + Content Relevance + Predictability

Each of these applications uses some combination of these factors across a number of online channels to measure online influence. Below are commonly accepted definitions of each of these inputs:

• Reach: the number of people that you can influence either directly or indirectly via a given channel
• Impact: the quality of influence that an individual is able to exert via a channel
• Efficiency: the marginal return that can be expected per a resource or unit of time
• Content Relevance: the focus of an individual in terms of content
• Predictability: the predictability and consistency of an individual within a given channel

However, there is one factor you probably did not consider when looking at these metrics: how much weight does the algorithm place on each channel? This information is proprietary and has likely been altered over time, but one thing is clear. These weights do not adjust with subject matter and consequently these scores are an imprecise measurement of influence that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Image provided by: openviewpartners.com

Take, for example, the venture capital space. The ultimate goal of influencers in this space is to increase their company’s competitiveness in winning deals. To do so, they are trying to drive brand awareness for their company, demonstrate their startup or expansion stage business acumen, and provide entrepreneurs with a glimpse of what it would be like to work with them (since investors generally end up sitting on a company’s board). Thus, it would make sense for venture capital firms to target investor information and early stage business best practices as key subject matters of influence. However, when OpenView surveyed entrepreneurs about where they go to learn about this information, we learned that 0% rely on Facebook for finding information about investors and only 7.1% utilize it for learning about early stage business best practices.  Based on this, it is very clear that Facebook is not a very good channel of influence for a venture capital company.

This is not to say that Facebook would not be a great influence channel for a gaming company or a e-commerce business. In fact, I would be willing to bet it would be. The point I am making is that the importance of each channel is variable across subject matters and industries. This is not reflected in any of these algorithms and I doubt it ever will be due to the complexity of integrating the information.

To be successful as an influencer, you need to incorporate this factor into your influence strategy. And to accurately evaluate your online influence in a given subject matter you need to account for the importance that your target audience places on each of these channels.

OpenView Labs used this methodology to rank the top 10 technology venture capitalists in a report that we published earlier this week called Social Media Mavens: A Look at Venture Capitalists on the Web. We also explain exactly how we went about doing so. OpenView Labs plans to publish a sister report later this quarter ranking the online influence of technology venture capital companies. I highly recommend reading these reports to get a better sense of how to think about influence channel strategy and how to evaluate your influence efforts.

Over the next few weeks, I will write a series of posts sharing effective influencer tactics for blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn channels that we learned from our research for this report.