Influencer marketing is increasing in popularity, but the question of who to engage with raises an interesting quandary.
Brands are finding that employing celebrities and mega-connectors comes with a high risk, and it doesn’t necessarily translate into a reasonable return. These placements also tend to be “one and done” — not a relationship that builds and grows over time. Micro influencers, on the other hand, are often performing better than celebrities overall, but it is hard to manage them at scale, or even find the right people to partner with in the first place.
Today, the Ayzenberg Group has launched its new AI-powered platform, Soulmates.ai, which is designed to help solve this tricky problem. The fascinating thing? It is being developed in conjunction with Dr. J. Galen Buckwalter Ph.D., the former chief founding scientist at eHarmony.com.
In short, the solution is attempting to match your brand with suitable influencers using multiple signs of compatibility.
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Soulmates.ai uses artificial intelligence to read, analyze, understand, and categorize public social media messages, looking for people who have both reach and relevance but who also are already advocates for your brand. In essence, it helps you to find micro influencers who already have some resonance with your brand, at scale.
“When brands learn more about their own identity, it’s thrilling,” Eric Burgess, VP of product at Ayzenberg Group, told me. “Capturing the perspectives of like-minded creators can open the value of their products in new ways. They can collaborate on content that will delight the audiences that are organically targeted to receive it.”
Combining natural language processing with a contextualization engine and psychometric analysis, it grades conversations, identifies risks, and ultimately pairs brands with the influencers that are most likely to fit their personality.
So how does it work?
You start by typing in a keyword, username, or hashtag. Terms can be combined, so it is easy — for example — to ask Soulmates.ai to search for influencers who use keywords or hashtags in a particular geographical area.
Once the search has completed, you are presented with a broad range of filters to help narrow down the list of influencers to those you would want to work with. You can decide which channels to focus on, such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. There is a wide range of personality filters too, such as choosing how extroverted, conscientious, agreeable, open, and even neurotic the influencer is, according to the AI’s interpretation of their public social media messages.
The resulting list shows the influencers that match your preferences: their profile, their traits, and their latest posts. From there, you can visit their profile. That’s where the Soulmates.irm browser plugin comes into play. This companion solution lets you add the influencer to a campaign directly from the influencer’s social media account. Once inside Soulmates.irm — the “IRM” here stands for “influencer relationship manager” — you can build a list of influencers and manage everything from approval through to contact, contract negotiation through to production.
Soulmates.ai, and the companion Soulmates.irm, are both available from today. IRM has a free base version with upgrades to add functionality, including access to Soulmates.ai. Soulmates.ai itself has enterprise pricing tailored to each client’s use.
