Harnessing Communities of Influencers. An Interview with Perlu’s Andres Echenique

Gathering the internet into communities has been happening for years. The wisdom of the crowd has been proven valuable for marketers who are interested in understanding their brand positions within the greater ecosystem. But Perlu is taking crowd gathering in a more focused direction by harnessing influencers into hyper-niche groups of experts. 

Owned by parent company Terrakeet, Perlu has been around for almost four years and has constructed influencer groups across a wide range of products and services in addition to being a networking opportunity for these opinion leaders. CEO Andres Echenique, explained, “We have two missions: first, providing tools, resources, and a community to help influencers work together to establish and develop their careers as influencers. Second, we provide brands with tools, services and proprietary data to quickly and easily engage this community for research, planning, content production, and campaigns.” 

Charlene Weisler: How do you define influencers?

Andres Echenique: For some, influencers can be anyone with a social account, relevant content and a following. But in our experience, the best candidates are trusted partners who add value beyond just an audience. These influencers are known and respected by other influencers, as well as their audiences, and have a track record of collaboration with both influencers and brands.

Weisler: How are you best able to monitor and consolidate influencer groups and what are some examples of the groups?

Echenique: The community organizes itself into groups: influencers will form groups of other influencers they collaborate with, share content with or simply respect on the basis of shared interests and content quality. There are thousands of these influencer micro-communities on Perlu (called “Packs”) collaborate with each other to help grow their audiences, share and source content and work together on various projects for mutual benefit. Examples of packs include “Black Solo Female Travel”, “Vegan Desserts”, “Keto Moms”, “Skin Care Addicts”, “Multiple Sclerosis Warriors.” Pack creators manage their packs, curating membership to suit their needs for partnerships and professional networking. As the Pack owners curate their Packs, inactive and low-quality influencers are left out -- thus, keeping them out of the mainstream of discovery and collaboration with both other influencers and brands.

Weisler: How do you bring in brands?

Echenique: Through agency partners, professional connections and advertising.  Brands can join Perlu for free and have community facing profiles on Perlu just like influencers do. 

Weisler: What is the promise of matching and collaborating?

 Echenique: Brands partner with influencers for a number of outcomes: gaining insight, producing content, driving sales, creating awareness, growing audiences, building a reputation, etc. The challenge is finding and engaging exactly the right influencer partners for these outcomes quickly, reliably and at scale. “Right” varies dramatically depending on the desired outcome, not the least of which is the influencer’s interest in partnering with the brand. Many brands assume every qualified influencer is ready and willing to partner with them but the reality is that influencers are selective in who they partner with, further complicating the brands’ searches for influencer partners.

When brands have needs for projects for influencers, they advertise their needs to Packs they choose, and members of Packs will raise their hands to let brands know they’re willing to work together. This approach eliminates the process of searching for influencers, replacing it with screening qualified applicants. Questions to tens or even hundreds of influencers can be fielded in a few clicks, with nearly immediate responses. 

Weisler: What are the challenges that you’re facing?

Echenique: The COVID-19 pandemic, the uncertain political outlook, and the unrest associated with social inequalities have disrupted the marketing landscape significantly. Marketers are unsure about operating in this new reality and are trying hard to avoid mistakes that either worsen their market shares or, worse, offend customers. This puts extra emphasis on making good decisions about influencer partners, getting input and feedback on campaigns before launch and operating with agility to find competitive advantages quickly. 

Weisler: Have you made any changes to the business because of the pandemic? 

Echenique: We see COVID-19 driving a huge shift over the coming year. As store closures and consumers’ fears drive purchases online, authenticity issues in product ratings on e-commerce sites become a huge risk for many brands.  As brands are forced to compete in an even more crowded online space (and can rely less on retail sales), influencers represent a huge opportunity for brands to counterbalance and augment questionable e-commerce ratings with influencer-driven authentic reporting on experiences and recommendations for brands and products.

Weisler: What data do you collect? And do you break up influencer by demographic categories such as age and gender?

Echenique: When influencers join Perlu, they can authorize us to access their social accounts giving us access to a range of information about them: follower counts, engagement rates and other key audience metrics. Influencer members can also connect their blogs and we analyze the content of their pages to automatically assign subject and category tags to their content. They can also supplement their Perlu profiles with audience demographics for their audiences as well as their own geographic details. We also build proprietary activity profiles that serve to further classify and validate our members. 

Weisler: Where do you see your company two years from now?

Echenique: Our mission is to become the de facto professional network for influencers - a place where influencers can congregate and collaborate to develop their personal brands and their audiences, and learn how to grow and develop their influence and expertise. Our professional community attracts brands in every category eager to partner with advocates for their products and services for a wide range of business purposes. As our community and proprietary data set grows, we will continue developing innovative tools not only for brands to gain and work with influencer partners but also to help influencers develop and enhance their careers.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com