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Brands that succeed in social media follow the principles of a gift economy. They build relationships, earn status, and create social currencies.

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.

respondents overall predicted business will become more ethical over the next 5 years. When asked specifically about the PR industry, 9 of 10 predict the profession will be the same or more ethical. This is important because three out of four students tell us that ethics play a very or extremely important role in their choice of PR as a career.

Three-fourths of professionals told us their agency or department has a code of ethics. While 92% also think the PR industry needs its own generally accepted code of ethics, only 59% believe that a dedicated organization should play the role of ethics enforcer.

The lesson from the influencer marketing scandals of the past year is that using people who are influencers merely because of their follower count is a losing proposition. But that doesn’t mean influencer marketing is not valuable. The key is to seek out relationships with influencers who have truly earned their influence. You should be looking for people who have real respect, trust and authority in your industry, or in an area that at least relates to your industry. The pitch here is a genuine exchange of value, where you bring something to the table for the influencer (other than just a hefty check), and they contribute their sincere endorsement and amplification to their audience.

These days, influencer marketing has been so constrained that there may be no value there for your customer or brand. SEO expert and Moz founder Rand Fishkin noted this last year in a tweet, when he observed that influencer marketing used to mean a brand would "discover all the sources that influence your audience and do marketing (of all kinds) in those places.”