Professional Standards- Getting the Best out of Your Influencer Relationships PG Connects Digital #2

to discuss uh talk about professional standards uh and getting the best of infinite influencer relationships we have um we have max uh shoblom from cast and i almost definitely said one of those words wrong but it's okay we'll carry on and pretend we didn't so max um how are you doing max i'm good good how are you in the world max i am in helsinki we finland helsinki that's what i miss i generally miss helsinki yes i managed to get in there just before lockdown for a from see a few people but yeah it feels really weird to uh usually i'm so used to talking pocket camera helsinki which is in the fall so it's a bit colder and a bit you know gloomier and now it's like

full on summer here so it feels a bit odd yeah well we're still we're still working we're gonna do we're definitely gonna have a version of pgc helsinki how much of it will be live and how much be online we're working out but it's not slightly beyond our control even i can't control that but anyway i've started you brilliantly ten minutes late i'm gonna i'm not gonna talk at all i'm just gonna back off so don't don't rush uh enjoy it i'm gonna back off now and let you uh let you launch in and if you need any help just stick your hand up and we'll wave back in but um great over to you sir all right let's start with the screen sharing oh yes excellent uh let me know if there's any problems here um hey my name is um max and yeah um i'll be talking a bit about influencers today uh usually i think i've talked last four pgc helsinki's usually talk about esports that's kind of my main main focus but i've also done some work within influencers um also thanks to the previous speaker

that was really interesting interesting stuff to hear about esl and and no worries uh that went a bit overboard with the questions i think was fine and important questions to ask so we're going to talk about influencers and um when i was thinking about how to approach the subject um i chose to stay pretty general so if you're an influencer marketing expert i'm sorry this might not bring much new to you but i'm trying to kind of uh be inclusive to most people who are watching um to stay pretty general and and then focus a bit on the gaming industry it's also interesting to hear input from people who may be working in not just gaming but other industries as well so to start off um let's see how i get my trying to get my powerpoint working just a second great okay

so uh briefly about me so you know my background um my phd phd from malta university here in finland um my topic was understanding the psychology behind spectators of streaming and esports so that's kind of my my main focus has been on like why do people watch esports and gaming like a common question why do people watch others play games um fairly obvious once you dig into it and if you've done it yourselves you probably know why while you watch um so that's kind of my main main focus and that's kind of the area i'm a i'm an international expert in but also um we did a fair amount of research within the influencer stuff specifically why influencers build content um how they do it so on specifically in youtube and twitch uh alongside specifically my my colleague maria taylor who's an expert in that field so we're gonna be reflecting on some of that in my talk as well currently i'm not no longer in academia

am i uh working as a country manager for forecasts we're a online um watch party software one of the leading leading those in the world so that means kind of getting together with your friends watching stuff together hanging out which has been especially unfortunately really important for many people during lockdowns but yeah that's kind of what i do and if you have any questions about cast feel free to ask me now or later i have my contact information in the last slide so we're going to talk about briefly about what influencers are just starting from the basics then we're talking about how to understand influencers because that's important if you want to achieve things with influencers then we're going to talk about bit about kind of you versus the influencer how you should be handling the situation when talking with people and then finally trying to wrap it up and kind of give some easy easy brief steps to finding success when working with influencers

that's the agenda for today and hopefully i'm able to finish it in 15 minutes with a few minutes left for questions um so briefly what are influencers i think most of you have some kind of idea of what an influencer is i think it's almost impossible uh if you use the internet in the last five years to avoid hearing about influencers on you know youtube or twitch or wherever um i think there's like two main things that uh define pretty broadly what an influencer is so first off the influencer has to have some kind of power to affect people um this can be many types of effects so it can be stuff like how they behave um but maybe for you more relevant how they buy stuff getting them to buy stuff or getting to play a game so uh the the influencer is someone that a group of people listen to and that group of people is

kind of per definition has to be kind of a niche audience niche might sound like you're you know only targeting um male rts gamers age 35 to 39 not necessarily that niche like even just a lifestyle lifestyle blogger or instagrammer that's like a niche in itself so usually there's like a core area that the influencer focuses on um that's just kind of how things work um it can be gaming it can be sports it can be whatever but that's important to understand like later on when we get to understanding the the market um platforms exist out there as you're probably aware there's a lot of platforms usually when you think about in the gaming industry we think about twitch we think about the youtube those are pretty much the biggest platforms here in the west there's different platforms in china and korea but talking about the west now

so that's kind of for gaming i think the most important ones but the influencers aren't just on one platform yes they're primarily on one platform but they're usually spread all over so you might have a twitch streamer who also produce content for youtube every day they also are active on twitter they also have an instagram account and so on i think twitch and youtube are probably the primary places you're going to find the influencers you want to work with them but just be aware that they are all over the place and that's kind of expected of you these days when you engage with fan communities then we have kind of another block of instagram tick tock snapchat which are kind of more yeah visual media much like rich in youtube but you know not not not quite the same uh shorter content and then then we have twitter which is again very different even though many people are on there but then you have your own kind of twitter influencer people might be more kind of serious in a way and then i think one interesting thing

to us to not forget about is kind of blogs that's where a lot of this stuff started at least here in finland i'm not sure about other other countries but i think back around 15 or so years ago that's we started getting like the first the new age influencers and they started from like lifestyle beauty uh fashion blogs and then they kind of moved on to do other stuff while still holding some kind of blog activity going there so so that's kind of one area maybe not so relevant for gaming but you know who knows uh and then then we have podcasts which is another growing trend it's been growing quite a lot in recent years um with different services and that's of course a little bit of a different media if you want to approach it think about how to make a campaign for podcasts which is a very like non-visual media but of course it's always good to remember the podcast hosts are also probably on on instagram with their podcast so it's doesn't totally remove the visual aspects and

there's a bunch of other platforms which i haven't included here so uh and a lot of new appear every day like a couple of years ago nobody had heard about tick tock and you know here we are um so then we move on to kind of trying to understand influencers what they do i think it's important here to understand them because you probably won't achieve some kind of goal and whenever i try to achieve some kind of goal i try to interact try to understand kind of what i'm interacting with what are the kind of problems that i'm trying to overcome are there people involved or you know technology or something but there's always stuff to understand and here it's trying to understand these influencer persons um i had some very kind of brief high level ideas here and then i'm going to go into bit more detail on one aspect so first of all the influencers all kind of exist in this this it's called an attention economy so basically that the the pair of eyes that watch you

that's kind of the the primary currency so it's important for you to realize that their audience is in most of the cases way way more important than you and your game and your company i've seen a lot of these cases where people assume that because they're paying some kind of fee for the influencer that you know the influencer has to treat them like god and and uh do exactly what they say but in most cases if you actually want to kind of achieve their stuff it's really important to understand that the audience that the influencer has that's kind of who they actually are catering to and they don't lose that audience so so they're going to choose their partners wisely then kind of what is their stick so kind of what defines them um that starts from everything like what their niche is is it gaming or something else and if it's gaming they probably have some kind of genre day focus and it's maybe like card games or is it rts or is it

mobas or or whatever so understand that but also kind of understand how they approach it because i think a good example is twitch where because of the sessions being so long and they're alive people really kind of in some way show their true colors of course some people have like an added layer of kind of acting on top uh they're almost their true selves but not quite and then we have people who are really aren't their true selves they kind of have a personality um i think it's important to understand this so then you can understand kind of your game and how it relates to working with these people um an example a few people who are familiar with with casey tron who is a twitch streamer she's kind of a very spoken personality and a way of doing things through negativity of kind of braiding the gameplay and then people in her community are also quite negative and that's kind of a thing that she's cultivated as a way of

getting people to engage it's kind of like uh her her negative persona identity so that's kind of an extreme case and then there's other similar but most people are kind of fairly bland even in how they act but just understand the stream or influence or whatever and then uh really kind of think about what their family platform is again we're probably talking about twitch and youtube many cases um and those kind of also interact some degree just understand kind of what's their platform why are they on that platform and kind of how long have they been on there and and so on it's interesting to see also now that there's you know this struggle for streamers if we have services like you know twitch and then we have mixer um youtube live to some extent and kind of poaching streamers from another um to what actually is like from the viewer perspective it doesn't matter that much which platform they are on but before the streamer does so maybe take

that into consideration as well um just some briefs brief observations about this and then um as i mentioned we had done some some research within within streamers so me and my my colleague maria the other did a survey study on white people stream so looking at their motivations we had about 350 people answer who are primarily video content creators through youtube and twitch so we looked at two different things we looked at what makes them spend time on content creation like which aspects gets them to spend more and more time per week on content creation and then we looked at what makes them want to continue creating content in the future so um those of you who have um ever dabbled in in psychology or motivation heard about uh extrinsic and intrinsic motivation so um to simplify things extrinsic motivations usually come from the outside it can be

stuff like money or or things like that and then intrinsic motivations are you know plainly put things that make you feel good or that you do just because of the thing itself when we look at the why people spend more and more time on content creation uh we saw social inaction is one thing that's increasing intrinsic motivation and then we saw career development and income as extrinsic developments and um that makes sense because um you know if you're spending more and more time on content creation that is time away from something else um if you spend 40 hours on content creation uh per week it probably means you're not working a full-time job um or then you're not sleeping at all um but yeah so it makes sense the kind of this kind of dualistic nature of you need to make money in order to be able to produce more content and so on so it kind of that's how the motivation works but then

on the intent to continue it's interesting to see that we only found intrinsic motivations to be important here so stuff like enjoyment social interaction and skill development i think particularly interesting to see social interaction being being part of both of these which you know makes sense if you think about it often uh when thinking about youtube and twitch we talk about them as social platforms and the fact that people find the communities there and they really spend all their time there and connect with other people so it makes sense for also the content creators to find that to be a meaningful part of this kind of why i'm highlighting this is is well first of all if you want to get deeper into this you can you can read the article or there's also other research we've done other people have done but just to kind of understand that people are not only doing it for the money so you can see here uh the existence of all these intrinsic

motivations uh it tells you the kind of truth that people don't get into you know the influencer industry just to make money sure i mean there's a lot of money to be made these days but it's not easy it's extremely hard these days to get into kind of being a successful twitch streamer and even earn anything from it so so you know you can maybe think about it also as offering influencers something else and just money it's an interesting thought uh but yeah so then now we've covered the kind of the really really really basics of understanding the influencers can move on thinking about kind of how you and the influencers interact with each other um this again pretty you know general stuff think about so first off as mentioned previously their audience is their most important thing that's kind of their primary asset that they have and they don't want to lose it they want to grow it so if you can help them grow it that's

great for them that might be worth more than money especially if you're working with smaller influencers um they might very well welcome the opportunity to work with a gaming company even if you're not paying them at all but then when you contact them and this can be tricky because all the influencers get a lot of contacts so they might just miss your email they might get 100 emails per day so it might be tricky to get like the first contact with them but but when you kind of talk to influencers give them a thorough brief i've heard of so many kind of badly briefed campaigns where the the game company says you know oh we want you to promote our game and the influencer says okay we'll do um and then you know afterwards the gaming company is like mad oh you didn't do this and you didn't do that why weren't you good at playing this game um and then the influencer is like what the hell i mean you never gave me any details on what to do we never brief you never told me

like what your goals were so you know it helps both parties to to really understand like what are you trying to achieve here by you understanding the influencer and they understanding you you really get much more out of it even though it's like more effort but that's the effort you got to go through if you want to work with the influencers and then when you do the brief kind of think about also your own kpis like what are you getting out of this is it like you know mobile games the installs or is it uh just like pure for like uh not free to play game is it conversions and store and how can you track this it can be difficult to track um which puts some limit on like how you can actually see the data they're doing work um also it's worth noting that a lot of influencers don't really like uh models where for example they're only getting paid per install this of course would be probably preferred by most game companies since you know that would actually mean you're only paying when

uh you know customer comes to a door but a lot of influencers would rather have know that they're getting you know they're getting 2 000 euros no matter what and that's good for them they don't want to kind of gamble with with some kind of attribution based stuff but that said if you can work it out with the influencer then great you know do that be it transparent and remember they are people uh they are not some kind of you know automated google ad platform uh they're people they have their own style their own thoughts and stuff and so on and when you're working with them be transparent especially if it's like a game that's been out for a while like try to communicate with them like where you're taking the game changes you're making um try to get them on board maybe get feedback from them earlier on they can a you know alpha beta feature released stuff like that they're really there as kind of your uh communicator towards the general

public or general community around your game so use that to your advantage um then for games specifically think about do you have a new game or something old like if you ever know so say old game if your game has been out there for a while and you already have people creating content um on let's say youtube but you haven't ever done influencer marketing you know the best place to start is with your you know current fans find some kind of smaller youtuber consider working with them paying them for extra content so on if you have a new game is there an existing brand is it similar to some other game your company is made or some other companies made if you can find uh youtubers or streamers or instagramers who have done content around that game and then they may they might like your game as well which platform are you on so i think pc and console games you know open up more doors there's not that many mobile streamers on twitch so if you're a mobile game and you want to do twitch stuff

um it can be more difficult and then something which um not everyone thinks about is like how will my game look when people share it everything from like just screenshots to youtube videos and then especially streaming because streamers need kind of specific layouts to make the games work if you have a some kind of super hardcore rts where the ui is incredibly complex and there's no space to put any stuff a streamer might shy away from it because a they can't put their face on there they can't put their other sponsor banners and so on so i think more and more it's worth thinking about my game is not only getting played it's somebody's also watching it get played so really think about that when you're you know designing uis and thinking about the flow of the game and then finally is your game multiplayer or esports or anything as replayability let's say if you have a very short story based game it's like you know 40 minutes of gameplay uh the stories everything uh to the game

it's very narrative driven maybe uh paying someone to do a let's play is not a great idea because then you're kind of ruining the game for most people who want to buy it and play it so uh these are pretty obvious but i've seen examples of this not working out very well so just thought i would highlight that and then uh as we are quickly approaching there are time let's kind of re-evaluate what we talked about here and find some steps to success so find the right influencers um you know look for gaming influences maybe look outside gaming if you're you know creating some kind of survival game maybe you might also want to look into people who do survival videos on youtube people do like fishing hunting stuff like that uh they don't get that many kind of sponsor you know contract stuff so they might be more willing and it might be a really good fit with their audience uh then i would recommend working with a

longer term partnerships you get much more bang for your buck here rather than just you know contracting one streamer here one streamer there to do do one of campaigns of course there's there's time and place for doing like those those campaigns as well so you know it's kind of a balancing act um if you're not super comfortable working in this field you've never done it before or or you feel unsure you're gonna screw up your budget all your money spent on the wrong kind of influencers there's a lot of people that can help just kind of freelancers or the agencies of course agencies bring the price point up but if you have the budget it might be worth considering but i do think that kind of the the best for the long term is if you're doing it in-house you know people who really understand influencers your community especially around your game uh what you're trying to achieve it's like a new game what kind of community you want to have let's stay one year from now or or so on so that's kind of um ties into community management in general and my final point which is kind

of try to foster a community because if you can get people to want to stream your game and want to create youtube uh videos that's great for you you're getting more exposure more more air time as it were and you're not necessarily paying for it that much you can also by paying certain influence you can get a nice trickle down effect let's say you get like a mid-sized too large influencer to create content for your game and they probably have a lot of smaller influencers following them and then they say okay you know uh this guy made a video for this physics based um car game okay i'm also going to make content because we have kind of the same viewership so then then they create content those 10 streamers and then the super small like micro streamers create content and then you get 100 or a thousand more of those so so that can be a good way to

to enable this if the kind of not just the community around your game but then general influencer and streamer community as well um i think that's pretty much all the time i have thank you for listening this afternoon hopefully you've had a good um online conference so far i guess this is like a new normal for a while yeah thank you this is the new normal definitely yeah uh thanks max for that you shared a lot of uh basic a lot of a lot of information there some introductory some things to think about we have got quite a lot of questions but i haven't got that much time so i'm going to ask you one or two and then i'm going to suggest that you you maybe pop across the discord uh chat which links in window here if you want to answer more people and answer sure so i'm just gonna um what one question i had which i think takes some of the questions here was um about different channels because obviously you listed quite a lot of different channels a lot of different influences there's different types of influencers and in terms of scale and things they cover there's also so many channels now you

know you used to youtube twitch and now it's what instagram you're worried about and twitter and and tick tock and i mean there's so many and new things emerging all the time yeah yeah but cast i mean who knows what these platforms going so how do you as a developer how do you go about picking which platform or does it does it not matter do you do should you be picking by to by influencer or by platform or by general channel how does that work uh yeah i think that's a good question um i think it depends a bit on your game um let's say well you know what you shouldn't do maybe like if you have a mobile game twitch might not be the best for you but youtube might work and you know instagram might work well um just because you know um it's not you can set up to play mobile games on twitch and there are but it's kind of more complex and and i would say most people go to twitch for

other type of gameplay so just that's kind of the platform thing um i think the most natural at the moment at least to go if you're if you're looking for influencers in gaming specifically is it's with twitch and youtube but that of course means that there's also a lot of other people doing the same thing so yeah i mean that ties into the question somebody asked about whether you know a non-gaming platform like instagram could have results have you seen campaigns yes i mean i'm sure that i mean also i get a lot of instagram especially ads and and then kind of also influencer based ads for games and i'm sure like you can make successful tick-tock um campaigns um around games and maybe gaming itself could be a good thing um it's i think tiktok has all the potential to create like virality where you get again more bang for your buck yeah um so yeah definitely like you shouldn't shy away from those channels it's just that depends on how much resources you have

and how much know-how kind of um it i think it takes more effort to do good tick-tock stuff um for gaming whereas you know you can go to some agency and buy 10 influencers to play your newly released mobile game on youtube and you know for a week and that's on that note i'm going to combine two quick questions together i'm going to have to eject you afraid but one is is about that how do you from how do you who'd you deal with because yeah as you say there is so many layers there's the influencers direct they've got management there's there's a direct agency there's often like agencies aggregate influences like things like match made or prevent i think do you think some of that and and how did you decide who to work with and then also besides that as a smaller developer like an indie indie developer who doesn't have a massive budget to spend you know how what advice could you offer them is is it is it looking in different areas like looking developing markets or looking in smaller channels or how who to talk to

and for an india is any tips yeah so especially if you're a smaller developer and you don't really have a big budget i think there's a couple of things you can do so first of all forget you know pewdiepie first of all um don't go at the super big ones you know you're you're going to be spending you know 50k or on one person or 100k or i'm not sure what pewdiepie charges these days but anyway i guess i bet for less 100k i'm sure you know yeah doesn't need to so you can you and especially like the i think it's been researched that the effect you get is is better at like a mid level especially if you think about streamers like um the engagement people have with their audience is at the very best when it's kind of a mid-sized stream which is kind of let's say um somewhere between like a 500 and a thousand concurrent viewers that's kind of gets you a good mix of both having enough people there and also them being really kind of engaged

kind of that they really believe what the streamer is saying because if you have a really big channel uh let's say like a 15 000 concurrent viewers on twitch that's kind of like a like work a stadium atmosphere you go there to to yell at the stadium kind of uh so so it's kind of more believable when it's in the smaller channel so maybe rather than get a person with uh 10k concurrent viewers you get like 10 people with with 500 concurrent viewers something and also they you know charge much much less and then the second the point is that you know ask your game developer friends usually someone has a friend who is a streamer might be a smaller streamer um for example here in health in finland the game development community is known for kind of helping each other out we have different forms so maybe you know ask about a other people's experiences with influencers in your market and then ask people know youtubers or streamers who you know could help usually like if you don't have almost any money you can still find something probably

you know for uh you can get a small streamer to help you for like a bottle of whiskey or something okay for a bottle of whiskey that is that is the currency in helsinki booth which is quite it's probably more expensive than dollars no chris bucks here i'm afraid this time around but nick yeah thank you max for your time um um yes there might be some more people that want questions if so um direct reach out to max direct we'll try and find the discord group or what have you um have a uh nice to have you on thank you very much i'm gonna now give me away thank you