You Ask, I Answer: Brand Collaboration Requirements for Influencers?

In today's episode, we continue with our questions from the B2B Influencer Marketing Summit held by SAP and Analytica. As a reminder, it was a panel discussion, uh 30 minutes for four folks and a moderator to answer uh a bunch of questions and you know in those situations. You never really get to say everything that comes to mind, because you want to make sure that you're you're giving airtime to everybody else. Everyone has a chance to contribute equally. So uh this series is all the stuff that I would have said if there'd been more time.

Uh today's question, what makes you say yes to a brand collaboration? What makes you say no? Um it depends. And I think that's probably the the most accurate and most frustrating answer um I can give to the to this. Uh what matters?

Uh the reason I would I choose um a brand collaboration. There's a few. Um I'll say no to companies that are direct competitors of mine of of Trust Insights, right? That's kind of a a no-brainer. If a company is a direct competitor, probably don't want to be undermining my own business interests, which is a valid consideration, right?

Um I have talked with brands who've said, hey, you know, you seem to be an influencer for IBM, so we probably don't want to work with you because we're a competitor of IBM. That goes both ways, right? A brand would say like, eh, not sure that that's a good fit. Um things that do matter uh besides something obvious like that, values matter, right? Does the brand do things that make the world an objectively better or worse place?

Yeah, when I worked at my old agency, we would get clients who their job was to make the world a worse place, right? They did stuff like um petroleum extraction uh from places you probably shouldn't be extracting petroleum from. Is it profitable? Yes. Does it create a a good lifestyle and and wages and jobs for people in those places?

Yes. Does it also substantially damage the environment? Also, yes. Is that a concern? You bet it is.

And so values alignment is really important when looking at a brand and saying, do I want to work with this brand? Things that matter. The brand needs to have to open up access to stakeholders and talent, right? Particularly in B2B marketing. There's a lot of software companies.

There's a lot of, you know, SaaS services, things like that. And I am, as a buyer and as an influencer, I am very wary of somebody that will not let me kick the tires unescorted, right? Uh I know it drives some people crazy, but I will say to somebody, yeah, just give me a log into the product. Like, no, no, we need to do the onboarding and the tour and all stuff. Like, no.

If I can't figure it out, and I'm you know a reasonably intelligent person. If I can't figure out how to use your product with no guidance, then your product needs improvement, right? Think about something like an iPad. You can hand an iPad to a four-year-old, and pretty quickly they can figure out what to do. They don't need a whole lot of onboarding to use an iPad and to get benefit out of it.

That's the bar. That is the bar that all software and service companies need to be able to provide. Just to say, like, yeah, it will help if you read the manual or do the onboarding, but you don't need to to be able to get immediate value from the product. Another thing that I particularly look for, because I talk to a lot of data science and AI companies, let me talk to someone in engineering, unescorted. Again, both as an influencer and as a buyer.

Let me talk to somebody who's there isn't a brand marketer or reputation manager like looking over our shoulder the whole time. I've had the experience where a salesperson said, Oh, yeah, our product does this, that, and the other thing. And I talked to the engineer, and the engineer's like, no, I don't do any of that. That's not what this product does. And you can usually get more candor and more uh more truth out of engineering, um at least in the space that I work, than you will out of sales or marketing.

In a lot of cases, I will have questions where the marketer isn't equipped to handle the answers. Um, they they just don't know the answers. Uh I was talking um a number of years ago with the folks at Analytica, and I was at their booth at the B2B uh forum, and we're talking about graph networks, and and you know, the person at the booth saying, Oh yeah, uh our software has this type of you know proprietary blah blah blah for for identifying influencers. And I said, Well, let me talk to somebody who uh who is on the software side who's the engineering side, and we got to they there was someone there, I got to chatting with them, and they explained like here's the algorithm we use, here's the the specific technique. And to me, that gives the brand credibility.

It says we're we're willing to let you look under the hood and say, huh, this is what's under the look, it's hamsters. No, I'm not, I'm just kidding. Um conversely, a brand that won't, don't work with them, don't buy from them, don't uh don't work, don't have an influencer relationship with them because they got something to hide. If you won't let engineering speak unescorted with a prospect or an influencer, you got something to hide, and that's not good. Um ideally, your influencers should know your product as well as you do.

Ideally, your influencers should know its strengths and its weaknesses and be able to talk credibly about that to say, like, yeah, this product is not for you, right? To to the people who it's not for. You know, for a real simple example, IBM software, for the most part, if you are not a Fortune 500, IBM software is not a great fit most of the time, right? DB2 is a gigantic database. It is highly reliable, it is highly secure, it is highly a pain in the butt to configure.

Um, and you need to know the ins and outs of it, right? Uh the IBM Z mainframe. Your average mom and pop shop does not need that. They no one needs a mainframe if you've got like less than a thousand employees. Um there's certain lines of business where that makes total sense.

And if you if you don't let your influencers see the inner workings of the products and services, you're doing them a disservice and you're doing yourself a disservice because they are going to then say things that may not be true, or in my case, it just won't work with you because it you can't trust what you don't see. So what's the back end? Uh I'll give you another example. The folks over at Go Charlie, the marketing uh AI software company. I got a chance to sit down and chat with their chief AI officer, uh, Despino Christo, and we got super technical.

I was asking about uh vectorization, embeddings, positional encodings, all this stuff that's part of you know uh large language models, and she was very uh frank. She explained where things were, where things weren't, uh, with the product and stuff, and as a result of that conversation, I trust that product because the person who's representing it knows what they're doing, right? So that's what makes me say yes to a brand collaboration. Uh the last thing, of course, is fair value exchange, right? Is are both parties getting mutual equitable value?

Right? It doesn't necessarily have to be money, although money never hurts, but can we use the product? Um can we use the product like a customer would? Um can we get exposure to a new audience, an audience that maybe we don't have access to? Um, so there's there's a different ways to provide value, but the value exchange has to be bilateral and it has to be mutual.

Um access to stakeholders, experts, things like that. Um all sorts of things that that there are value in. So that's what makes me say yes or no to a brand collaboration. Um that's the third question from uh the B2B Influencer Marketing Summit. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.