[Build Backlinks Online] Influencing Social Awesomizers with Personalized Content

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Influencing Social Awesomizers
with Personalized Content'


Posted by JonMorris
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Since the birth of social media, brands have been searching for an effective
way to leverage the power of influencers â those social "awesomizers" who
have a significant following and a powerful voice in their respective
industries. Obtaining a mere mention by the right influencer could boost even
the most niche business to the forefront of social buzz.


But how do you determine who to target? How do you enchant them and convert
them into a brand advocate? Read on to learn about the steps we took at Rise
Interactive in developing and integrating personalized content into a digital
marketing strategy, and the significant impact it had in elevating Rise's
digital presence.

Step 1: Identify your awesomizer


The first thing you need to do is identify your social media awesomizer
â someone with a significant social following and powerful voice in their
industry. Rise Interactive hosts routine digital marketing conferences where we
bring together some of the brightest minds in the industry in our Internet
Marketing Leadership Series (IMLS). At our first event, Travis Wright, global
social media manager at Symantec and self-professed digital disrupter and
marketing provocateur, gave a riveting (and hilarious) presentation about the
power of social media. An avid Kansas City Chiefs fan, Travis described his
experience sparring with the Chiefs through social media.


It all started with the below tweet, which created an unexpected but powerful
ripple effect, due in large part to Travis's broad social media following (more
than 129,000 Twitter followers when he spoke at IMLS).




Soon after this tweet was sent, @kcchiefs rudely replied to Travis, igniting
an explosive and ongoing social media feud. Travis's battle with the Chiefs was
eventually picked up by Reddit, Yahoo, Mashable and more. We like to think that
this negative press contributed to the Chiefs firing their general manager,
Scott Pioli, although we know that it was most likely Kansas City's abysmal 2-14
record.


Travis's story demonstrated the true power of social media and how he
harnessed it to his advantage. He had a compelling story and a large group of
followers, which allowed him to basically accomplish the impossible.


It got us at Rise thinking; could a brand create noise for itself on social
media just as Travis had done? It was time for an experiment.

Key takeaway


Having a direct relationship with a social influencer will definitely help get
your foot in the door, but even if you don't have a personal connection with
them, you can still court them. Find people in your industry that you respect,
that are viewed as influential thought leaders, and that have a large group of
followers. Start developing an online relationship with them â reach out
to them and tell them how much you admired one of their blog posts, or reply to
and share their posts. Be sincere and see where things lead. If you are able to
establish a solid relationship with an awesomizer, consider pitching them your
idea to develop personalized content for them to share with their followers. The
worst thing that could happen is they say no. Big deal â we've all been
rejected before. Reach out to the next influencer, and sooner or later one of
them will welcome the attention and say yes.


While having a pre-established relationship is the best case scenario, it's
not a requirement. If you mine the data, find the story, and create and share
the personalized content, that is definitely enough to start a relationship with
an influencer.

Step 2: Develop personalized content


Travis's story was so compelling and rare, and because it could be structured
with an easy-to-follow timeline of events, we knew it would make for an awesome
infographic. We were excited to test out our experiment â if we created
personalized content for Travis, would he share it across his large group of
followers, and would that help turn him into a brand advocate while also
capturing attention for the Rise Interactive brand? Only one way to find
outâ


We got to work compiling the timeline and getting the facts straight. Our
graphic designer started laying out the infographic. It was a time-consuming
process â reviews, revisions, legal hurdles that we hadn't considered, and
more revisions. But it had to be perfect â this was a gift to our
awesomizer, after all â so we labored on until we had our final product.
We were proud of what we developed, but would Travis really share it? Would it
have any significant impact for Rise?

Key takeaway


First, you need to identify which format your content should take. We chose an
infographic because they're a popular format for sharing easy-to-understand
content, the timeline nature of Travis's story would be easy to represent
graphically, and they're also one of our creative team's specialties. Think
about the best vessel for your content, what you're good at, and then let the
creative juices flow. Even though it's pandering to your influencer, make sure
it's compelling enough to stand alone in case they don't share it. The second
takeaway is that you need to invest a lot of time to guarantee a great final
product. You're creating personalized content for awesomizers, so it should go
without saying that the final product is awesome.

Step 3: Syndicate content


It was the moment of truth. We posted the infographic to Rise Interactive's
blog.Then I personally shared the infographic with Travis on Twitter; we didn't
tweet this out first ourselves. Exclusivity was part of our strategy; we wanted
Travis to be the first to see the infographic and allow him to share it first.




We waited in anticipation. Travis responded to my tweet, thanking us for
creating the infographic. He then created a separate tweet and shared it with
his Twitter followers, all 129,000 of them.




He then proceeded to embed the full infographic on his blog, along with links
to Rise Interactive's blog.




He also tweeted about his new blog post.




Our experiment was a success â Travis was sharing our infographic.
Travis found benefit in our efforts as well. We weren't just building an
infographic; we were starting to build a brand advocate.




On top of Travis's efforts, our SEO team focused on link building to generate
more attention and authority for the infographic by securing links back to
Rise's blog.

Key takeaway


Provide your influencer with exclusivity in viewing and sharing your
personalized content. Allowing them to create the first surge of the sharing
wave will help reinforce that they are an extremely valuable, important part in
the process. But don't rely on them for everything â have a two-pronged
approach and invest in link building efforts to compliment the awesomizer's
reach.

Step 4: Measure results


The last step is to measure the results of all of your efforts. Only the data
can tell you how much of a success the experiment was.


Overall, Rise Interactive's blog received approximately 50 links and 12 total
linking root domains.* Extra Mustard, one of Sports Illustrated's sister sites,
linked to the infographic because of its sports theme, which was a big win
because of the high traffic that the site receives. The first week of the
infographic being live on our blog, the Rise website received approximately
15,500 referral visits; 98 percent of those visits were new visitors.


Aside from the spike in website traffic to Rise's website, we converted Travis
Wright into a brand advocate. He loved the infographic we created for him, and
happily shared it among his vast social network. It was truly a win-win scenario
for both Travis Wright and Rise Interactive.


*It's important to note how we arrived at these numbers: We looked at multiple
different sources (Moz, GWT, BWT, and Majestic) and de-duplicated link data from
each source to arrive at a final number of links and linking root domains.

Key takeaway


Make sure that you have analytics in place to track the success of your
initiative. While it was a great accomplishment that Travis shared the
infographic with his social followers, we needed to have more objective ways to
measure success. Only data can truly show you how successful any digital
marketing investment really is, so make sure you have an analytically driven,
data focused reporting strategy in place to define what success really looks
like.

Conclusion


Ultimately, there are two significant takeaways we can gather from all of
this. The first is that in our experience, developing personalized content for
social awesomizers is an effective way to enchant influencers, convert them into
brand advocates and elevate a brand's digital presence. The second is that
involving multiple channels and uniting them with one common goal can lead to
some innovative strategies and awesome results. Rise's creative, SEO, social,
and event marketing teams all worked together on this project and accomplished
more than any single channel could have accomplished alone.

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