The influencer’s five qualities – S.W.A.R.M
In an effort to understand the new Influencers Marketing phenomenon, I decided to try and identify some of the influencer’s characteristics and skills. This information is based on my experience, observing several individuals whom are perceived as influencers by me and others in the online world.
I can envision few derived action items possibly taken following this information:
- Building influencer’s self training curriculum
- Learning to identify upcoming influencers
- Learning how to influence the influencers
The influencer – SWARM
I came up with the SWARM acronym to help remembering them, because it reminds me the metaphor for describing the human behavior following an influencer call for action; like a swarm of bees reacting to environmental change.
| Virtue | Underline Skills | Impact | Tasks |
| S – Storyteller | Know how to tell a good story. Hers and others. | Vision, Inspiration | Collect inspiring stories to share. Focus on possibilities and not on constraints. |
| W – Well-rounded | Technology, Marketing, Selling, and Communication savvy | Respect | Read outside of your domain. Work on turning week points to strength. |
| A – Ahead | Patience, Analytic, Confidence, Distinctive | Leadership | Be curious. Make very little assumption. Ask questions and look for answers. Reverse engineer. Try to write, and explain how it works. |
| R – Resist | Can see outside the common thinking. Extract signals from a lot of noise. |
Priorities | Read a lot before making an opinion or taking side. Read a lot to build solid baseline for comparing it with new information. Read Seth Godin – reading his blog posts regularly is a good training for counter thinking. |
| M – Motivating | Know how to break it all to manageable tasks so other can execute. | Education | Design a plan from one point to the next including tasks, milestones, and objectives. |
How can we use this knowledge for Influencer Marketing – ideas:
Your thoughts about influence?
What do you see as the key virtue and skill for becoming an influencer? How do you plan to find rising influencers in a new niche? As a marketer, planning to leverage an influencer’s call for action in order to convey your message, how do you plan to approach her?
Picture credit: umjanedoan
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Keren Dagan
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Keren,
I like how you divided out the characteristics–seems you did much of what you quantified. I’m curious how you see this as different from the spheres of influence that were first tapped, oh not quite 10 years ago, for technology launches. The first-adopter as marketer and influencer phenomenon.
I look forward to reading your comments.
Heidi Sue
Fell out of bed feeling down. This has brihegtned my day!
Hi Heidi,
Thank you for stopping by, your kind words, and sorry for my slow response.
I was not aware of the influential phenomenon 10 years ago, but I will try to address your question.
There are few significant capabilities that I believed did not exist then:
- It is fairly easy, now days, to find and identify an influencer thanks to new real-time people search engine tools like wefollow, twellow and klout.
Actually, most people have way more web presence nowadays.
- We have more visibility into “local” influencers operations via social network and media tools like facebook, twitter, backtype, linkedin and many more
- We have easier access to influential forces online via blog comments, social networks, and offline participating in tweetup, social media breakfasts and conferences.
After reading several books lately about different aspects of online communities, connectivity, trust and influence (tribes, trust agent, six pixels of separation, the long tail, groundswell, and few more) I think that we will see new niche influencers on a daily basis and there is still a lot to be learned about monitoring rising influential forces and activities, engaging with influencers, and about the path for becoming one.
Keren