Ed Keller, Brad Fay and Matt Dodd

Admap Magazine, February 2019

The social media era has placed a spotlight on those celebrity and near-celebrity “influencers” with thousands, even millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms, most of them paid to endorse brands. Largely on the strength of these online influencers, Business Insider Intelligence has estimated that the industry will reach $5 to $10 billion by 2022.

While these paid influencers can drive surges in demand, marketers have a much more sustainable opportunity to engage everyday influencers whose value comes from personal relationships with their closest friends and families. Because of the fascination with paid influencers, we believe marketers overlook a massive—and proven—opportunity to cultivate strategies that would put the power of these everyday influencers to work on their behalf.

This is a theme we have sounded regularly over the years in Admap (April 2009; December 2012). Most recently, we have joined with colleague Rick Larkin and professor Koen Pauwels of Northeastern University to write “Deriving Value from Conversations about Your Brand” in the MIT Sloan Management Review (Winter 2019). The article shows that 19% of all consumer purchases are motivated by consumer conversations and recommendations—about half of which are driven by offline conversations, and half by online discussions in social media. As part of this extensive analytics undertaking, we have been able to prove the impact of everyday influencers in driving business outcomes.

Read the full WARC Admap article, here.

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