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Lets call this relationship “author alignment”.  When you get it right, you will occasionally get unicorns.

we provided our creators with the opportunity to earn royalties of $0.10 to $0.50 for unique visitors they moved to our branded sites over a three month window, with a cap on total performance.

Given incentives, the average influencer moved an average of ~500 additional monthly visitors to their content.

It became clear that one secret of the unicorns, the most effective and consistent influencers, was creating a kind of promotional permanence.

“being huge on Twitter” doesn’t truly equate to influence. The ephemeral nature of social media, and the incentives of the social media platform owners, means that even the biggest social media audience doesn’t  translate into an audience for the content an influencer creates. Promotional permanence is what drives outsized results, which means alignment is critical.

intangible incentives such as Autonomy, Reputation, and Mastery are fundamental to creating content that rises above the merely “good enough” for influencers

we have found that “unpaid influencer” costs often outpace the costs of the compensated approach due to missed deadlines, recruiting challenges, concessions to author autonomy, and mismatched expectations about the value exchange..

once tangible incentives are involved,  intangible incentives tend to be quickly forgotten.  Once a price is established, many marketers ignore intangibles completely, assuming the relationship more closely resembles the paid freelancer.

we have found that combining tangible and intangible incentives leads to a result that delivers substantial incremental value (an audience worth $200-$400 per article) over 90% of the time.

Give back to your influencer.

When it comes to Facebook, our reach for the same period was about 900,000. So our Facebook posts were seen by about 1/5th the number of people on Twitter, which could make one assume that Twitter is the better social platform. In reality, the answer is more complicated. Like many publishers, we share far less on Facebook than on Twitter. Increasing our share rate might increase our overall reach. More important, however, is that one of our key hopes with social sharing is to drive traffic back to our site. According to Twitter’s stats, those 4.4 million impressions generated 7,300 clicks to our content. But Facebook, with far less impressions, generated 10 times that number of clicks to our content, about 70,000 over the past month.

you can provide the influencer with some pointers. Would you prefer they include keywords in the title of their product review blog to boost your SEO? How many hashtags do you want them to use, and are fans likelier to adopt shorter ones over longer ones? Should they use emojis? (The answer is almost always yes.) Which CTA performs better, “Save 15% off now with my promo code” or “Use my promo code now”?

Speaking of promo codes, what learnings can you apply from sales you’ve run in the past? Does a percentage or dollar off amount drive more conversions? Does what works for sales on your own website work just as well in the context of an influencer promotion?

Perhaps influencers’ fans are more excited about getting a free sample or trial instead of a discount. In this scenario, try testing free sample promotions with some influencers against discount offers with other influencers. Just be sure to choose influencers with similar audiences, industries, and/or locations to keep the other variables as similar as possible.

A/B test the heck out of your influencer landing pages. Try different CTA button placements and colors, test removing the navigation, and see how personalizing the page for the influencer’s audience affects conversions.

Not all your influencer marketing content is published by the influencer. Sometimes, as with the landing pages, you are using the influencers in your own content. A/B test the items under your branded control, too.

if you feature an influencer in an email newsletter, is it best to call that out in the subject line, via the sender name, through a hero image at the top, or some combination of the above? Should you target different subscriber lists for different featured influencers

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

Approximately two-thirds of the marketers indicate they will outsource one or more projects involving content creation, creative development, ad unit creation and online production/services.

Event spending will rise sharply as 70% of respondents plan on increases for 2012 with a significant shift to small/local roundtable programs and virtual events.

An amazing 95% of the respondents watch tech videos and three-quarters of them share or post video.  What respondents look for in video varies from one region to another with in-depth product reviews and how-to videos being of most interest.  Most people said they watch on their computers with the majority of viewings after business hours and on weekends.