{"id":19198,"date":"2017-03-16T15:33:43","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T19:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exob2b.com\/?p=19198\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T14:12:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T18:12:35","slug":"linfluence-in-marketing-our-top-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exob2b.com\/en\/linfluence-in-marketing-our-top-30\/","title":{"rendered":"Influence in Marketing: our top 30"},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than ten years, I\u2019ve been working closely (and sometimes from afar), with many of the main Web marketing players in Quebec, but also from elsewhere. I\u2019ve worked alongside or hobnobbed with hundreds of them over the conferences I\u2019ve organized or attended here, in Europe or the USA. Everywhere, I\u2019ve met influential people and long-standing experts. Marketing is now overflowing with them. These influencers take up a lot of room, not only in conversations but also in the strategies of the firms that hire them, sometimes at a substantial cost. Many seek to profit from the influencer\u2019s audience and credibility.<\/p>\n

I wrote a post on the subject<\/a> last year to try to define the profile of these strange creatures we call influencers. And one of them, Lee Odden<\/a>, a bona fide Marketing star, has done an excellent job defining the subject with an absolutely must-read blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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His definition of influence: “In a marketing context, influence is the ability to affect action – not attract 1,000, 100,000 or a million fans, friends and followers. To create action, you need content and relationships.”<\/p>\n

And the ability to do this is not limited to Marketing professionals. In his words, “Beyond the professional influencers and industry experts are members of the media, customers, prospective customers and members of any communities that the brand is active in. All must be considered when developing relationships to grow your brand\u2019s influence and the influence of those you work with\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeking to define them is one thing. Categorizing them, is another. There are hundreds of international or USA rankings listed in Google alone. Each year, several blogs and specialized websites make their list of the 50 or 100 greatest influencers in marketing, social media marketing or B2B marketing.<\/p>\n

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Many are based on pseudo-scientific methods like Traackr<\/a> or other measurement software like Klout and there are many others …<\/p>\n

In short, it isn\u2019t easy to make sense of it all. <\/strong><\/p>\n

So we’re going to try another approach. On the one hand, I examined ten of these rankings published in 2016-17 to see if some influencers are unanimously considered as such, which happens to be the case. But these rankings are based on quantification and not qualification … So, I thought it would be appropriate to drop the strictly numbers-based evaluation and concentrate on ten more qualitative measurements:<\/p>\n