How to Unashamedly Use People to Promote You, Your Brand, and Your Business

When do you know you have a hugely successful social media marketing campaign? You know when it goes viral, when other people are doing your promotion for you. The same thing can be said about "word-of-mouth" advertising.

So "using" other people to promote commerce is nothing new. What is new is our ability to know almost everything about anybody via the Internet, and that makes our power to use other people greater than ever before.

Here are ways you can "use people" to further your brand – either personal or business.

Gathering Intelligence

Thanks to our vanity, a cottage industry has grown up around the creation of "influencers." Everyone wants to earn the influencer label, so companies such as LinkedIn and various business publications hand out the title rather often.

You can use these influencers a few different ways and each tactic begins by studying the influencers' social media presence and their connections. You can pull together an initial a variety of ways. Two of the easiest are to scour LinkedIn's Pulse Discover and query Google for influencers in your industry, searching for something like "social media influencers." The second method will usually deliver some nicely curated lists from major publications.

With that information, find them on the social media. See who connects to them and what their social media posting habits are. You may not be able to connect to Guy Kawasaki – at least not at first – but should plan to use some people he engages.

Be methodical about it. Start a spreadsheet so you can keep track of what you do to "use" these people and which people give you results.

Riding the Coattails

Once you've started to build your list, begin moving to the next step: engagement. Going back to Guy Kawasaki, he tweeted a list of top 10 women marketers. The list itself includes Twitter handles for many of them. Further, I can also see who retweeted. This opens up many avenues of engagement.

As you're conducting your intelligence, find which influencers have blogs and engage on that level. Specifically you need to:

• Promote their posts on social media (retweet, etc.)
• Comment on posts
• Ask for reprint permission
• Position yourself to request a guest blog

Automate Your Program

You can grow your audience significantly by leveraging the social reach of others; however, it can be a time-consuming process, unless you do a little automation. There are some great tools to automate the Twitter arm of your strategy. Here are two:

• TweetAdder. With this app you can enter a list of people you pulled together in your intelligence gathering.
• li. This creates a "newspaper" for you on a daily basis. You can create it from Twitter sources. You've probably seen the tweet: "The Blah Blah Daily is Out!" with Twitter handles. People mentioned in those tweets invariably retweet.

These strategies work. A colleague who handles Twitter accounts recently scored four major sponsorships for one of his clients following these steps.

Finally, you may not be the best person in your organization to take charge of this project. Do you have any hyper-connected employees? They might be ideal to get your cart hitched to some more highly placed industry influencers.

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