MP Assignment

An influencer is someone who has the ability to influence the thoughts and behaviors of many followers in a particular domain. With social media, influencers today come from a variety of backgrounds beyond just celebrities and public figures. Influencer marketing involves brands leveraging influencers' sway over their followers to promote products and services. It is effective because influencers provide credible recommendations that influence up to 70% of millennials. Key benefits include increased web searches, trust-building, brand awareness growth, and stronger customer relationships. BongPen is a micro-influencer from Kolkata with over 151k followers who focuses on "Calcuttaisms & Bengalisms" through blogs, attracting those interested in Bengali culture. He notes

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MP Assignment

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Influencers

An influencer is one in a particular domain who can influence the behavior, thoughts, and
perceptions of many people. These people are called the followers. With the advent of
social media, the today’s influencers are not just movie stars, celebrities, or famous sports
personalities, but local content creators, micro bloggers or someone who has a considerable
follower base due to engaging and valuable content shared by the influencer.

The influencer is regarded as an expert in their field, which helps them to increase their fan
following. Their followers trust the influencer’s opinions and thus her (his) views or
endorsements have importance.

Today’s influencers fit into the following categories:

 Celebrities
 Micro influencers
 Bloggers and content creators
 Industry hotshots & thought leaders

Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing happens when a brand tries to promote its products/services
leveraging the sway of the influencer on her (his) followers. To do so, the brand also studies
the followers and whether they fit into their target market.

Influencers provides valuable information

about the product which adds to the
credibility of the company. Further 70% of
millennials are influenced by the
recommendations of their peers. Influencers
help in establishing a link between the
company and the target market.

Benefits of using Influencers in marketing:

 Increase in searches over the web
 Builds up trust
 Improves brand awareness
 Builds customer relationships.
Some influencers carve out their own niche with their unique content and appeal to a
exclusive strata of people. One such influencer based out of Kolkata is Mr. Tanmay
Mukherjee, aka BongPen.

BongPen regularly publishes its blogs on FB, Twitter & on its own website. As per Tanmay,
the blogs focus on “Calcuttaisms & Bengalisms”. The content’s quirky & emotionally
stimulating rhetoric is liked by those who love Bengali literature, cinema, food in general
and the city of Kolkata in particular. Mukherjee also curates his posts on current agendas
and links them to his favorite city & culture.

BongPen has 151K followers and creates a strong appeal to brands who want to pitch their
products to bongs connoisseurs.

His followers comprise bongs who are away from their home state but have a strong
nostalgia of the state’s culture and preferences, well-read bong millennials, celebrities like
Indian writer Joy Bhattacharya amongst others.

Let’s have a look at his journey and learn from how makes him good in influencing people.

Interview with BongPen (Mr. Tanmay Mukherjee)

Q: What motivated you to become an
influencer or was it by chance?

BongP: Influencing is not a vocation; it is

usually a byproduct of whatever you are doing.
You cannot claim to be an influencer and then
go about the business. Whatever alignments
or associations that have happened, have
happened naturally. You don’t start off with
the objective of influencing, you start off with
your passion and then the natural synergy
with the brands may happen later.

Q: Who are your followers? What content do you make for them? Are the content unique
for different followers or are they uniform?

BongP: I see myself as a Bengali blogger. Bengali blogging was an

unchartered territory back in 2007. I started talking about the day ins
and day outs of a Bong, their small likes & dislikes. For me the
content has been for people who are Bengalis, especially the people
who are living away from Bengal connect more with my content. This
diaspora has been greatest connection point. People come to my
blog to get a flavor of how Bengal is doing and what are the trending
subjects and so on and so forth.

Q: What are the various social media platforms that you create your content on? Do you
curate your content as per the platforms?

BongP: Once you start interacting with people regularly on social media, you realize that the
audience’s tastes and preferences differ from platform to platform. For example my primary
blog is on a blogger platform, which has more of an archival value. Twitter is one platform
where content has to be different by virtue of its character restrictions. Facebook of course
has also evolved greatly over the last few years in the sense the longform consumption on
Facebook has I think actually has improved over the years. Instagram
of course I'm there but your photograph have to speak more on insta
and text has to be less so while the essential theme remains the same
but the kind of content I am generating of course needs to be
customized because essentially people who are talking to me with on
Facebook they are not talking to me on Twitter and similarly Instagram
is distinct as well so i am speaking to 3 distinct group of people on
each of these platforms so obviously the message has to be
customised as well.

Q: How was your journey like as an influencer?

BongP: As I said you do something because you love doing it so you keep blogging even if no
one is reading and that's how it always starts for most people that's how I started. I think
there are 2 parts to the word influence, one is of course you are reaching out to a large
number of people that's great but the other factor is how well are you reaching out to some
of the other influencers. Influencers are important for other influencers as well I mean if
that is an ecosystem we can talk about right. For example if a journalist is reading my
personal opinions on the Bengali life and he or she is connecting and we are conversing that
also has added value which you cannot necessarily measure in terms of numbers and hits so
that is another way to look at it. I think the depth of your reach as well as the width both
matters. I would say it was not difficult because I never had this intention of reaching a
certain number. Nobody I think starts with number
milestone in mind but yes I think for me particularly in
2007 like as I said Bengali Internet was in a very nascent
stage so I think I really had to wait for 5 years to have a
group of people with whom I would connect regularly.
There are other influences I got connected to & then
there were groups who helped me to discover new
avenues new opportunities. See I think difficulty is not the
word but yes it happened very gradually.

Q: How to identify influencers and how can brands use influencer marketing?

BongP: I think I cannot talk much from the

perspective of a deep rooted student of marketing
but I can definitely share my opinions firstly as
somebody who is a consumer secondly as someone
who has played some role being an influencer if you
put it that way and thirdly as I mentioned like in my
day job I need to put on my marketing cap as well.
See the consumer is a very alert and agile
component these days so just someone with like a
billion followers and coming and telling me that this
product is good might not float the boat for me because consumers are aware that
influencing happens these days and influencing is often paid. I think the real challenge for
the brand should be to discover if a true alignment is there. So for example I might be a fan
of a particular cricketer but I may not decide to choose a brand based on his
recommendation, because in my mind I would know that there is some give and take
involved in that and that may not be the most genuine reflection. So finding that natural
synergy is always the biggest challenge both for the influencer as well as for the brands and
I think a lot of commercialization has also happened which I don't think it's great in the
sense so there is lot of scepticism, so people are very much aware that lot of money is
flowing and lot of paid promotions are there so people are very careful but having said that
if you can strike the right synergy it can just be great . So if I'm promoting let’s say a music
album I like or a Bengali TV show that I like it always comes from the point of view of my
real personal choice so I have to like it first and then it can be endorsed. I think today's
consumers are smart enough to see through the difference between genuine and ingenuine
endorsements. If that endorsement is genuine then that will be expressed adequately. If I'm
thinking as a brand I would really see whether the person who is endorsing the connect is
natural or not and whether he or she is generally aligned with the product.

Q: Marketers would love to see the number & demography of people an influencer is
reaching out to. Do you use the analytics to see how many people you are reaching out to?

BongP: When I talked about passion, passion doesn't relate to checking for analytics for
every post, but I think that's a very stark reality today. Every platform has got a very robust
analytics system and you can get a proper idea to know the impressions your posts are
making .So now I do have an idea that what kind of post works on which kind of platforms,
what kind of post works with which kind of population, what kind of post works at which
time of the day,once you are involved in it you get to know. It is important that you time
your post well while you calibrate the length of your post accordingly and I think as a
student of numbers as someone who has some comfort with numbers this is also actually a
very joyful exercise. It can develop a very clear picture and it always makes sense to time
and place your creation so it reaches the most of people. Having said that I would also like
to place a bit of a caveat, that being this numbers and translations are not always not
always be proportional and for example if a post from X has reached let's say 5 Crore people
and post from Y has reached 3 and half crore people there is no guarantee that my product
will sell more through X and not Y. What depends is also how well I align my brand with X or
Y. There are lot of factors as well so if I have to choose an influencer, numbers will be one of
the factors but it will not be a very defining factor; there will be n number of other factors
which will be in place.