Author’s Note: This article originally appeared on the AMEX Open Forum blog — I wrote it to get people to seriously think about authority and influence.
I’ve been thinking a lot about influence lately. It seems that I’m not the only one. Influence isn’t just for celebrities any more. Small business has gotten into the game as well. Mike Michalowicz wrote an article that talked about how you can grow your business by connecting with influencers. And Guy Kawasaki gives us a real life example of how you can create a path for influencing behavior by setting up an environment for easy compliance.
Why Influencers Matter to Small Business?
Influencers matter to your small business in the same way that segmentation matters to your marketing message – they simplify and cut the cost of communicating to large groups of people.
We’ve been conditioned to think of celebrities as influencers because a single mention from them can set product sales soaring. During the times of network media domination, small businesses rarely got to participate in this kind of promotion. But the advent of new media with its wide reaching social networks has suddenly made it possible (even easy) for small businesses to reach their target audience by investing their time rather than money.
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