PARTICIPANTS
- Jessica Appelgren, former VP of marketing, experience and partnerships, Impossible Foods
- Ephraim Cohen, global lead, influencer and creator strategy, Omnicom PR Group (OPRG)
- Fran Dillard, VP, brand and product marketing, Driscoll’s
- Chris Foster, CEO, Omnicom PR Group (OPRG)
- Josina Habegger, senior director, corporate brand and communications, Corcept Therapeutics
- Jane Hynes, VP, global comms, Google Cloud, Google
- Amy Sezak, SVP of comms, Yelp
- Alicia Trost, CCO, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)
The textbook definition of “influencer” is a person with the ability to persuade (read: influence) potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending those items. And social media has become, by far, the platform on which most of this influence occurs.
That definition, while still accurate, continues to evolve. During this recent salon dinner, hosted by OPRG, industry leaders convened in San Francisco to discuss how the powerful and evolving social influencer media segment can impact corporate reputation and how comms pros can harness the power – and navigate the pitfalls – of working with today’s influencers.
Panelists noted that as their definition of influencers has expanded, so have the related opportunities and threats.
“I am constantly trying to figure out ways to partner with an influencer to get people thinking about the value of the product,” says Jessica Appelgren, former VP of marketing, experience and partnerships at Impossible Foods. The brand’s early-days partnership with David Chang, which led to earned media for both parties, and the creation of the Impossible Foods cookbook with recipes contributed gratis from celebrity chefs were two earned media wins for the brand. Admittedly, though, it is getting more and more difficult to secure such partnerships without compensation. And when payment is involved, it’s understandable for a brand to become concerned with how that partnership is perceived.
Yet when it comes to paid content, explains Ephraim Cohen, global lead, influencer and creator strategy at OPRG, the key is not whether it’s paid or earned. It’s all about the authenticity, which is very achievable even in a paid scenario.
“Consumers know what's real,” he asserts. “If Harley-Davidson hired Jay Leno, paid or not, consumers would believe it because it’s what he loves.”
Fran Dillard, VP of brand and product marketing at Driscoll’s, echoes that sentiment.
“The authenticity of who you are versus what other people say always shines through,” she underscores.
In a more complex marketplace, brands must work harder than ever to identify appropriate influencers. And one tool – far too underused at present – to greatly assist in this: audience data. “It allows,” adds Cohen, “for a far more contextually accurate decision in terms of who's the right influencer for that particular audience, especially for Gen Z.”
Roundtable participants included (clockwise from top left): Dillard, Habegger, Foster and Appelgren. (Photo courtesy of Tiana Hunter)
A creative approach
Creativity is the backbone of communications. And it’s a talent PR pros are increasingly bringing to bear in the influencer arena – both in terms of the individuals with whom they partner and the channels on which they amplify their initiatives.
Alicia Trost, CCO at BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), epitomizes this. She uses Twitch – an unusual choice for a government entity – to stream with the brand and focuses on micro influencers.
“Any rider could become our next best story,” she notes. Her team has set up “epic searches on the social listening back end” to alert them as to when a celebrity is on the system.
“We also reach out to people who have a huge following on Twitch to see if they use public transit,” adds Trost.
For World Frog Day, Trost’s team planned a Twitch livestream with a biologist from the San Francisco Zoo tied back to BART.
“We take a lot of risks and feed the right people the right information so that they can carry our message,” she points out. “Instead of relying on other people, we want to be our own influencers or to cultivate them in-house.”
At Dricoll’s, Dillard has tapped into UMass (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) students to advocate directly for the agriculture company.
“The Millennial Mom is still our core purchaser,” she notes, “but we're starting to think of our next-generation consumer – and influencer – and how to connect with them.”
Dillard works closely with the sales team to understand where the future of food sales is headed. When the company considers placing a cooler with fair trade, organic berries in a campus cafeteria, having a UMass student advocate for it makes tremendous sense.
The dangerous side of influence
Amy Sezak, SVP of comms at Yelp, has witnessed firsthand how her platform – and others – can be easily weaponized by influencers, an obvious potential pitfall for all brands.
For example, in 2018, after Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Lexington, Virginia, restaurant because of her association with the Trump administration, the restaurant’s Yelp page received an influx of reviews from people on both sides of the political spectrum — those who supported Huckabee Sanders bombarded the restaurant with negative reviews, and those who opposed the former press secretary showered it with positive sentiments.
Sezak notes that Yelp’s guidelines require that reviews are based on first-hand consumer experiences. The company’s moderation team is “very proactive,” she reports, so an unusual uptick in review activity quickly triggers a notification that prompts an internal investigation, "which often leads our moderators to place a media attention alert on the business page, as we clean up the page by removing these types of reviews."
“That's the kind of thing we pay attention to on social media,” continues Sezak. “Not just how people are talking about Yelp, but how people are talking about other businesses.”
In another campaign to bombard businesses with reviews on Yelp pages, Gen-Z for Change, a vocal advocate for reproductive freedom and abortion rights, encouraged people to leave one-star reviews on Crisis Pregnancy Centers pages to warn consumers that the business is not an abortion clinic.
Yelp, which is also a vocal advocate for reproductive rights, has been recategorizing reproductive health businesses as Crisis Pregnancy Centers since 2018. Last summer, it also added a consumer notice on these business pages to state that they do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers.
"We intentionally decided to take a public stance with our support of reproductive freedom,” explains Sezak, “because we were hoping to encourage and influence other companies to speak out and consider similar policies to support their employees."
In fact, according to at least one other participant on the roundtable, Yelp’s stances on LGBTQ rights, women's rights, gun-safety and reproductive rights, has helped it become an influencer.
Roundtable participants included (clockwise from top left): Sezak, Cohen, Trost and Hynes. (Photo courtesy of Tiana Hunter)
Sector-specific scenarios
OPRG CEO Chris Foster says his team is being asked more frequently to work on the issues and corporate side with grassroots advocacy and third-party influencers, particularly on a local level.
“Communicators’ jobs continue to evolve,” he observes. “We have multiple stakeholders to whom we're accountable – consumers, regulators and policymakers. When trying to advance a brand, product or service, we need the authenticity of a third party to get that done.”
In most cases, the influencer’s impact will happen very publicly. In government, though, the behind-the-scenes work done by an influencer is most important.
In the heavily regulated and risk-averse biotech industry, Josina Habegger, senior director of corporate brand and communications at Corcept Therapeutics, suggests the importance of vetting influencers cannot be underscored enough.
“Everyone's been canceled and it's scary, especially from a biotech perspective,” she says. As such, it’s critical that influencers stay on message.
“An influencer can talk all day about Cortisol in general,” explains Habegger, “but as soon as you start to get more into detail about the product, you're in trouble.”
Metrics are tricky – but trackable
Though improvement is clearly evident, measuring and proving the impact of broader comms programs is still a work in progress for the PR industry. That challenge, however, remains acute when it comes to influencer campaigns.
And this rears its head, all roundtable participants agree, when the time comes for securing budgets up front. It’s hard to do that, they unanimously concede, without having concrete numbers to make the case. Jane Hynes, VP of global comms for Google Cloud, has some advice.
When she measures the impact of a targeted campaign, she looks at how many times the influencer was quoted in the last month, whether the information was in the right publications and if they hit the desired soundbite.
“It can be super surgical,” she notes, “but sometimes, to get something off the ground, you have to start small.”
And all types of engagement count.
“We've spent a lot of time creating memorable moments in our stations and we’re getting a flood of high-school or college journalists reaching out to me,” reports Trost. “Either their professors told them BART will actually respond to you or we've intrigued them with our engagement with riders on social. That should be counted because it shows I'm posting the right type of content for the brand.”
Dillard adds that at Driscoll’s, the focus is on performance tracking rather than specific ROIs. Communications is trying to impact a long-term “heart investment” that can’t always be viewed as a quick-fix hard-data answer.
Cohen identifies two key measurement challenges – and offers solutions.
“One is shifting the conversation revenue to invest upfront,” he suggests. “Instead of measuring what worked at the end, we're predicting at the beginning what's going to work for each incremental dollar.”
Rather than approaching measurement of news and social data, Cohen suggests that comms pros begin with identifying what key audiences are interested in, why they are interested in it and where they're going.
“The data we use is the exact same data our advertising brethren are using to figure out how to spend a billion dollars,” he offers. The only difference is the platforms and vehicles that are being studied.