The power of Influence – a new type of celebrity marketing

If you were a high profile celebrity, how would you value your influence? More importantly how would you make money out of it? What if you were a successful business person and you wanted to sell your business? Once the business is sold, what profile and reach will you have?

Every high profile person needs to consider how digital channels will drive their income in the future – either directly or indirectly. When successful people step away from their key talent (and source of income) be it acting, singing, modelling, sports, business – all they have is their reputation based on everything they achieved during their career. Influence is something that should always be enhanced and commercialised, even when the person in question has hung up their boots, so to speak. Celebrities need to make themselves relevant to brands who now operate in a digital world.

“Like a business, they need to understand what their personal brand is as well as a strong web presence.”

Too many high profile people, leave their long term careers to other people to shape and dictate, including managers, journalists and the general public. They aren’t thinking of what their commerical reach is going to be in 3, 5 or 10 years. A celebrity, no matter what they are famous for, is a business, and it needs a clear brand, strategy and business plan to map out the plans for the next number of years.

Like a business, they need to understand what their personal brand is as well as a strong web presence and in many cases a .com website, where they can build the profile they want to build, rather than leaving it to newspapers to do this for them. A persons website can also be a great way of managing any difficult stores or messages that hit the press. It can be the one source of official facts. Taking control at least buying, if not setting up, and managing your personal website is crucial. Too many celebs rely on Twitter as their key branding and communications channel.

Anyone who knows the pro’s and con’s of Twitter knows that it’s a ficle platform, and very difficult to control. A lot can be misconstrued in 140 characters.

Celebrities who have international aspirations are being googled by agents, business people and others from abroad. So its important to stand back and see what results your online research finds. A Wikipedia page with potentially inaccurate information? A Twitter page with no contact information? Press articles? A personal brand website allows you to take control, and have an ‘official’ source of news online.

The biggest reason for creating a website is the commerical benefits, a celebrity will never know what commerical deals they lost out on by not having one, and it should pay for itself several times over with in the first few months. Many high profile people cannot even be contacted online – even by a big brand, with big budgets. What money are these celebs missing out on by not taking control of their online brand? Allows the celebrity some distance from the brand – they don’t have to be involved in any contract negotiations.

My top advice to high profile people? At least buy the .com domain for your name, and the versions for the key markets that you are going after. At least then you are in a stronger position for if and when you want to consider launching your own site. This is essential for your future business – particularly if you haven’t made the big time yet!

At izest Influence, we are the first agency to offer digital branding, management and commercial agency just for celebrities. As part of our services we will advise on the value of an individuals digital influence, create digital commercial strategies and negotiate on the clients behalf.

If in need of the above why not take the next step and reach out!