[MUSIC] Hello, I'm Greg Jarboe and I want to welcome you to this massive open online course on influencers marketing strategy. Now I want to sort of introduce things and the first thing I guess, I need to introduce is myself. I happen to be the president and co-founder of a company called SEO-PR, it's hyphenated. And most people aren't used to putting search engine optimization and public relations together, but you'll discover in the course of things that I like mashing a lot of interesting things up. I'm also the author of a book, YouTube and Video Marketing. It's in its second edition, which means the first edition sold enough that publisher thought a second edition would be useful. And I've also contributed chapters to four other books. In addition, I have been teaching at Rutgers since 2010. I have taught in a number of different courses, in digital marketing, many MBA course. In a social media marketing, many MBA course. But one of the modules that I teach in those courses has focused on engaging influencers through social media. And it was such a popular part of the course that we decided to turn that into this MOOC. And so I'm pretty excited, because the biggest class that I've spoken to at Rutgers is about 30 students. And now we've got, well, you're all over the world. Lord knows what time zone you're in. But what I hope to bring to this course is the same kind of rigor and discipline, and insight that if you were right here, right in front of me in New Brunswick, New Jersey. That we could discuss these things, we could share these ideas. Now, I need to warn you in advance, the title of the course is Influencer Marketing Strategy, and we are going to talk about strategy. But we're also going to talk about tactics. And the reason I do both is basically captured in this quotation, which allegedly was uttered by Sun Tzu. Actually there's no record of it in any of his writings, so it doesn't matter. The quotation is the important part, whether or not he actually wrote it is a whole different kind of thing. But the quotation goes like this, strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. And tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat, and that's why I teach both. Yes, yes, there's a lot of counterintuitive strategies that you can use to be successful in influencer marketing. But if you do not know how the real world works, then your strategies can get you into a lot of trouble. So we're going to do a little bit of both. And at the end, one of the interesting things that you're going to be able to do, is answer this provocative question. What is the value of taking this course? Well, let me put it to you this way. Would you pay $250,000 to Kim Kardashian West to have her chew on your vitamins and post that photo on Instagram. Believe it or not, somebody did, they're called SugarBear Hair, they paid her a quarter of $1 million for a single Instagram post. And the question all of you are going to be faced sooner or later is, is that a useful way to go? Is that the right way to spend your money? And as you'll learn, no, there are actually better things that you can do. But in order to calculate that, we're going to have to teach you how to figure out whether SugarBear Hair got a return on their marketing investment and you're going to learn that in this course. That, in and of itself, will be fun to talk about at parties, but more importantly, it's going to be essential to developing your career. Now, I have to confess upfront that this course is not for beginners. If you are trying to learn what Facebook is or how many characters are in a tweet this week. Although by the way that's about to change, this is not the course for you. There are other courses out there that you can take, that can give you introductions to social media marketing or content marketing for professionals. They are good courses and they are appropriate. This course is an intermediate course. It assumes that you already know the basics. And what we're going to do is we're going to challenge some assumptions. We're going to take apart some of the things that people had been doing for the last several years, because they thought that was the best practice. We going to analyze it, we going to find out why it doesn't work that often. And we're going to figure out what does work more times than that, although there are no guarantees. Now this course is designed specifically for managers and professionals. So whether you're doing this yourself, or you are managing a group of people who are in influencer marketing, that's what this course is designed for. At the end of it, we're going to have requirement that you actually create an influencer marketing strategy. Most of your grade is going to be built around that. However, along the way, this course is structured into six different modules over six different weeks. Each one of those weeks is going to require you create something that you can either show to your boss or show to your perspective employer whatever your circumstance is. And that should enable you, not only to learn, which is the important part, but also to be able to demonstrate what you've learned to other people who aren't in this room. Who aren't taking this course, who frankly don't understand this any more than you do now. So we're going to try to help you with both of those. So let me give you a tip for success. This is an interesting one. You're going to presume that I'm the sage on the stage. And that I'm going to impart all this interesting knowledge to you. And if you listen to it, you're going to become a more effective influence marketer, right? Well, it turns out there's another group of people out there who I will call guides on the side if you participate in the forums, you'll discover them. They are called Coursera mentors. And this course is designed so that if you have questions, if something puzzles you, there are a whole group of volunteers who have already taken this course, already passed it with flying colors, have already been trained on how to interact in forums to keep people on task and learning. And that's the secret o that makes us think scale over, Lord knows how many people. Over how many times that runs over. How many different continents, okay? So interestingly enough, get to know your mentors. They will help you get where you need to go. And watch how they work, because one of the interesting things that I've discovered is that if you understand how influencers work they are suspiciously acting like mentors. Or maybe it's the other way around. The mentors are suspiciously acting like influencers. That's the magic. And I encourage you to take the time to participate in the forums and to learn from you peers, but more importantly, learn from the mentors.
