The Age of Influence

About

The Age of Influence: The Power of Influencers to Elevate Your Brand

By Neal Schaffer | Published by HarperCollins Leadership, March 17, 2020 

Download a free preview version of The Age of Influence here

About the Book

 The Age of Influence is the definitive guide to influencer marketing strategy, written by Neal Schaffer — a fractional CMO, global keynote speaker, university educator, and digital marketing strategist. Published by HarperCollins Leadership in 2020, the book fundamentally redefines what influencer marketing means: it is not about paying celebrities to take selfies with your product, but about "leveraging the other" — engaging the trusted voices of employees, customers, fans, and content creators to incite authentic word-of-mouth conversations about your brand in the places where people now spend their time.

Neal Schaffer's central argument is that social media has democratized influence. Communication has been democratized: everybody has reach on their chosen social network, everybody has a platform, and anyone can be a publisher. As Neal writes, paraphrasing George Orwell: "All social media voices are equal, but some are more equal than others." The brands that win in this new landscape are those that learn how to engage the voices being heard — rising above the digital noise by building real relationships with the people their audiences already trust.

The book's enduring relevance comes from its foundational insight: social media was made for people, not for businesses. Social network algorithms will always favor the content of people over brands, which means businesses face a structural disadvantage in organic reach. Influencer marketing — properly understood as a spectrum spanning employee advocacy, brand advocacy, user-generated content, and external creator partnerships — is the strategic answer to that disadvantage. People trust people: Nielsen research shows 92 percent of people trust recommendations from friends, and 63 percent of millennials trust what influencers say about products more than what brands say about themselves.

Drawing on Neal Schaffer's experience advising companies around the world, his work as an influencer himself for brands like All Nippon Airways and Adobe, and his global perspective spanning the United States and Asia (where influencer marketing in China generates thirty times the revenue of Europe), The Age of Influence delivers both the strategic "why" and the operational "how": identifying influencers, the sixteen distinct ways to collaborate with them, building relationships that convert influencers into advocates, selecting tools, measuring ROI, and ultimately becoming an influential brand yourself.

The Age of Influence is organized into four parts across 17 chapters and is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats.

Book Structure and Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

Part One: Why Influencer Marketing?

Chapter 1: The Origins of Influence in the Modern World

Neal opens by establishing that influencer marketing is not a new invention but the latest evolution of a centuries-old principle: tapping into the power of someone with authority, an audience, and followers to spread your message. The chapter traces the history of influence from the first documented endorsement — Josiah Wedgwood earning Queen Charlotte's permission to call his earthenware "Queenware" in the 1760s — through chess master Howard Staunton's endorsement of the chess pieces still used in competition today, Mark Twain lending his name to cigars, and the watershed Nike–Michael Jordan partnership that transformed sports marketing. The core principle: people trust people. Nielsen finds 92 percent of people are likely to trust a recommendation from a friend, and consumer reviews (70 percent) are the second most-trusted source. What has changed is the landscape: the internet and social media have democratized fame, and studies show 63 percent of millennials trust what influencers say about products more than what brands say about themselves. The chapter closes with compelling data from Rakuten's global survey: 87 percent of consumers were inspired to make a purchase based on influencer content, and 80 percent actually made a purchase recommended by an influencer.

Chapter 2: The Emergence of Digital and Social — And the Importance of Content

This chapter charts the fundamental shift in how people consume information and how customers digest brand messages. Digital ad spend surpassed television globally in 2017, and marketers — like consumers — now think digital first. Neal explains how the traditional Buyer's Journey has been disrupted: over 50 percent of purchasing decisions are made before your business is ever contacted, because buyers now research through Google searches, blog posts, social media, forums, and reviews. Brands no longer have a monopoly on information about themselves. The chapter introduces the concept of "digital relationship marketing" or "leveraging the other" — the essence of influencer marketing, where brands appeal to relationships on digital platforms by leveraging the social media presence of employees, fans, and influencers. The key takeaway: content is the currency of social media, and influencers — who are intrinsically content creators — are masters at presenting the trusted human voice that brands struggle to deliver.

Chapter 3: Social Media Was Made for People — The New Rules of Organic Social Media Marketing

The book's foundational chapter explains why brands face a structural disadvantage on social media: the platforms were created for people, and newsfeed algorithms will always favor the content of people over businesses. Neal demystifies the social media algorithm with his simplified formula: News Feed Visibility = Interest x Post x Creator x Type x Recency. He then presents his framework for scaling social media marketing through five elements: People, Process, Tools, Paid Social, and Digital Relationship Marketing. While paid social is essential — Neal compares it to a water fountain you turn on when organic results fall short, noting "if social media is the amplifier, paid social is the accelerator" — it grows increasingly expensive and consumers tune out ads. The fifth element, Digital Relationship Marketing, harnesses the power of people in three ways: employee advocacy (leveraging employees), brand advocacy (leveraging fans), and influencer marketing (leveraging influential social media users). All three are parts of the same pie, governed by the same principle: if social media was made for people and algorithms favor them, it makes sense to make people an integral part of your social media strategy.

Chapter 4: How Visual Social Presents New Challenges to Businesses and New Opportunities to Influencers

The rise of visual platforms — Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Stories, live streaming — has accelerated brand-influencer collaboration, because most brands struggle to develop a "visual voice" while influencers are already fluent in visual language. Humans are visual animals: 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visual information is processed up to 60,000 times faster than text. The chapter analyzes how brands like Sephora, Nordstrom, Target, Maersk Line, and Disneyland developed distinctive visual identities (Disneyland by curating fan-created content rather than publishing professional photography). It covers the account takeover strategy — Sour Patch Kids gave influencer Logan Paul free rein over their Snapchat for a week, returning 120,000 new followers and 6.8 million impressions — and the increasingly popular practice of negotiating content usage rights so influencer-created images can fuel a brand's own marketing. A breakout case study covers UK bar chain All Bar One, whose #brunchie campaign with ten female micro-influencers produced a 28 percent customer increase and nearly 600 percent rise in Instagram engagement.

Chapter 5: Your Community Is Always a Subset

This chapter introduces one of the book's most original strategic concepts: the delta of potential user engagement. No matter how large your brand's community is, it is always a small subset of the potential audience — Neal demonstrates with Facebook Ads Manager data showing that even category-leading brands like Clairol and Hertz have engaged less than 6-10 percent of the users interested in their product categories. Bridging this delta with paid social alone would be astronomically expensive with no guarantee of engagement. Influencer marketing is the strategic answer: leveraging your community and community leaders to spread your message through word-of-mouth. The chapter also establishes the book's defining mindset: influencer marketing is about community, not a campaign — and "influencer marketing is a marriage, not a one-night stand." Long-term relationships produce a long tail of returns that continues after any single campaign ends, especially since influencer blog content, Pinterest pins, and hashtagged images can live in search results for years. A breakout case study shows how sparkling water brand LaCroix engaged micro-influencers and fans (reposting content from users with as few as 150 followers), growing its Instagram community from 4,000 to 30,000 in eight months while sales doubled to $225.5 million.

Part Two: Understanding Influencers and the Ways You Can Engage with Them

Chapter 6: Understanding the Influencer Landscape — The Different Types and Levels of Influencers

Neal provides the classification system that brings order to the influencer landscape. By audience size, he defines five tiers: Celebrity influencers (over 1 million followers), Macro influencers (500,000 to 1 million), Middle influencers (50,000 to 500,000), Micro influencers (10,000 to 50,000), and Nano influencers (1,000 to 10,000). Critically, size doesn't always matter: engagement rates peak around 1,000 followers at 8 percent and decline to 2 percent for accounts over a million followers, making micro and nano influencers — who represent 84 percent of sponsored Instagram posts — often the better investment. The chapter's second classification is by brand affinity, and here Neal inverts conventional wisdom: instead of looking for outside influencers first, brands should engage in order of existing affinity — employees first (whose livelihood is tied to your success), then fans and brand advocates (who already love your product), and only then external influencers. Case studies include Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn's 58-influencer ambassador program (23 million impressions across 16 campaigns) and Australian teeth-whitening startup HiSmile, which built a pool of over two thousand influencers starting with product gifting before later investing in celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Conor McGregor.

Chapter 7: The Employee as Influencer

This chapter explores the most overlooked influencer resource: your own employees. Neal builds on the insight from PeopleLinx founder Nathan Egan — "Your organization has thousands of websites, not just one... Your employees are the long tail of your brand identity." Employees are more trusted than the CEO, the marketing department, and industry analysts, and research shows as much as 70 percent of brand perception is determined by interactions with people. The numbers are compelling: Prudential Financial found their 15,000 employees on LinkedIn averaged 160 connections each — a potential message reach of 2.4 million; a Finnish study found employees average 420 Facebook friends, 400 LinkedIn connections, and 360 Twitter followers; and IBM found content shared by employees generated leads that converted at seven times the rate of company-shared content. Neal introduces the concept of Employed Media as a fourth category alongside the traditional paid, owned, and earned media. Case studies include UK supermarket Iceland (450 employee advocates generating 37 million impressions in three months) and Cathay Pacific, whose points-based employee advocacy program revealed that the most avid brand advocates weren't pilots or flight attendants but an engineer in Hong Kong and a call center staffer in Mumbai.

Chapter 8: The Sixteen Different Ways to Collaborate with Influencers

The book's most referenced chapter catalogs the complete spectrum of influencer collaboration types that Neal Schaffer identified in his research. Traditional types: (1) Gifting Swag — the "Hail Mary" of mailing branded merchandise hoping for a mention; (2) Gifting Product — sending actual product to relevant influencers, exponentially more successful when personalized; (3) Giveaways or Sweepstakes; (4) Affiliate Marketing — with trackable codes; (5) Promotion Codes and Discounts. Content-centric types: (6) Content Curation — the easiest way to begin an influencer relationship; (7) Content Creation Outsourcing — hiring influencers to create content for your brand; (8) Content Amplification; (9) Content Co-Creation — such as roundup posts; (10) Content Sourcing — inviting influencers to contribute to your blog or feed; (11) Sponsored Content Distribution. Newer and experimental types: (12) The Shout Out; (13) The Account Takeover; (14) Event Coverage — inviting influencers to cover your events; (15) Brand Ambassador — ongoing relationships, illustrated by Neal's own experience as an All Nippon Airways ambassador touring their Tokyo maintenance facility and cabin attendant school; and (16) Product Collaboration — the deepest partnership, exemplified by Gary Vaynerchuk's shoe line with K-SWISS and Amazon's "The Drop" program. Case studies include Kleanplate (86 percent influencer response rate, 14x sales volume), the Lord & Taylor paisley dress campaign that triggered the FTC's first influencer marketing crackdown, and VMWare's VMWorld event coverage program (75 influencers, 1.3 million users reached, 20 percent increase in brand awareness).

Part Three: How to Work with Influencers to Generate Massive Results

Chapter 9: To Buy or to Build

Should you pay influencers or build organic relationships? Neal's answer: both, strategically. The more you build, the less you need to buy over time — but buying opens doors. The chapter covers when to use agencies versus going it alone (warning of agencies pushing irrelevant talent, like action sports athletes for a business author), the factors affecting influencer rates (audience size and engagement, gifted products, content usage rights, exclusivity, and partnership length), and the industry rule of thumb that an Instagram influencer costs roughly 1 percent of their follower count per post — $100 per post for 10,000 followers. Neal notes data showing most marketers now spend over 20 percent of their marketing budget on influencer programs, and that nearly 50 percent of marketers work with influencers for six months or longer, reflecting the industry's shift toward relationships. The chapter closes with a practical playbook of six low-cost collaboration paths for small businesses — gifting product, affiliate marketing, content curation, content co-creation, sponsored content distribution with nano-influencers, and event coverage. Case studies include Cora (organic tampon subscriptions promoted by unpaid micro-influencers) and Cleveland's Good Greens Bars, whose thirty local bloggers drove a 50 percent sales increase.

Chapter 10: Developing the Foundations of an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Strategy begins with the end in mind. This chapter introduces the Deming Circle — Plan, Do, Check, Act — which Neal learned while working in Japan, where Professor W. Edwards Deming is revered as the godfather of quality control whose teachings helped companies like Sony and Toyota revolutionize Japanese manufacturing. Neal adapted this continuous improvement cycle as the framework for social media and influencer marketing strategy (a methodology so central to his approach that it later became the name of his agency, PDCA Social, and a full chapter of his book Digital Threads). The chapter covers competitive benchmarking using digital tools, defining objectives before launching (divided into increasing income — brand awareness, community growth, engagement, lead generation, SEO — and decreasing costs), matching each objective to measurable KPIs, and "strategizing through exclusion": deciding what not to do, because a dormant account on the wrong platform damages your brand. Case studies include TUNG Brush (which crowdsourced new product colors through 26 influencers while harvesting 5,000 email addresses), PlayStack's Tiny Armies game launch (a four-influencer Twitch/YouTube tournament generating 9,090 installs at €1.66 eCPI), Swedish watch brand Mockberg (whose seven-ambassador giveaway campaign reached over a million Instagram users), and the Salvation Army's #FightForGoodTour with influencer Chris Strub (over 1 million Twitter impressions during the Red Kettle season).

Chapter 11: The Art and Science of Influencer Identification

Finding the right influencer remains the biggest challenge in influencer marketing, and Neal's counterintuitive advice is to start manually, without tools. Search Google, hashtags, and social platforms the way your customers do — because the influencers your audience actually finds may differ from what a tool's database surfaces. The chapter cites a fascinating experiment in which agencies Onalytica and Formative ran the same client brief through tool-based and manual identification respectively: of nearly 300+ influencers each identified, only 39 overlapped, proving the value of a hybrid approach. Neal provides his complete influencer vetting framework, expanding the industry-standard criteria (quality of content, engagement rates, audience demographics, pre-existing brand affinity, past brand partnerships) with his own additions: relevance (he recounts the cautionary tale of a women's sportswear brand that partnered with a female bodybuilder whose followers were overwhelmingly male), SEO and viral value, personality alignment, and advertising frequency — because if every other post is an #ad, authentic engagement suffers. Case studies include CLIF Kid's 600-influencer campaign (565.5 million impressions), W Hotels finding their ideal photographer within their own Instagram followers, Bumble Bee's long-term partnership with fitness blogger Presley Salmon, mattress brand Leesa (100,000 clicks and 400+ sales from authentic reviewer relationships), and the Hawaii Tourism Bureau's influencer-amplified hashtag campaign reaching over half of all U.S. travelers.

Chapter 12: Creating and Managing Influencer Relationships

Once influencers are identified, this chapter provides Neal Schaffer's eight-step relationship funnel for converting influencers into brand advocates: Identify, Relationship, Response, Outreach, Mutual Benefit, Implement, Long-term, and Advocate. The process starts with sending "social signals" — likes, comments, shares, and follows that put your name in an influencer's notifications before any business proposition, much like dating. The chapter explains what motivates influencers beyond money: a CrowdTap study found 75 percent are motivated by opportunities relevant to their audience, unique experiences for their community, or simply liking the brand, while a TapInfluence study found only 11 percent rank payment as the most important factor — alignment with the brand's core values comes first. Neal provides a proven outreach email template, guidance on FTC compliance and sponsorship disclosure, and an impassioned argument for giving influencers creative freedom: 50 percent of influencers say creative freedom is their favorite part of working with brands, and briefs that read like paid social posts produce inauthentic content that hurts both parties. He illustrates the value exchange with his own experience at Adobe Summit, where the top nine influencers generated more than 227 million impressions — an equivalent advertising value of $4.6 million — at virtually no cost to Adobe beyond travel expenses.

Chapter 13: The Tools of the Influencer Marketing Trade

Rather than focusing on specific tools that quickly become outdated, Neal organizes the influencer marketing technology landscape by category and concept: social listening tools (Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Mention), blogger outreach tools (BuzzStream, Pitchbox), traditional influencer discovery tools (Klear, Onalytica, Traackr), visual-first influencer discovery tools (Upfluence, Mavrck, Hypr, AspireIQ), influencer marketplaces (IZEA, Linqia, Intellifluence, ExpertVoice), influencer marketing agencies, and analysis tools including fake-follower auditing (HypeAuditor). His central advice: never start with tools. Start with process and strategy, then find the tool that makes your process more efficient — "Tools are there to support the work you do, not be the work you do." The chapter explains the trade-offs between opt-in marketplaces (convenient but limited pools) and open search engines (comprehensive but labor-intensive), and details the filters that matter: audience demographics, engagement rate, reach, amplification, relevance, and lookalike matching. A breakout case study shows how Health-Ade Kombucha used the Trend marketplace to generate 135 high-quality influencer images and 15,000 Instagram engagements, and how online retailer jClub turned $2,923 across 33 influencers into $16,255 in sales — a 550 percent return.

Chapter 14: Measuring Your Influencer Marketing ROI

The most important and most challenging aspect of influencer marketing gets a complete framework here. Neal grounds the chapter in McKinsey's concept of "word of mouth equity" (Volume x Impact), then presents the industry's benchmark studies: Burst Media found influencer marketing returns an average of $6.85 for every dollar spent; Tomoson's survey showed an average $6.50 return with the top 13 percent earning over $20 per dollar; and NeoReach's analysis of more than 2,000 campaigns calculated average earned media value of 5.2x per dollar spent. The chapter maps each marketing objective to its measurement: brand awareness to share of voice and impressions, community growth to follower data, lead generation to UTM tracking, SEO to backlinks and rankings. Neal distills ROI measurement into three questions: What was your objective? Did you achieve it? At what cost? He emphasizes that ROI is always relative — influencer marketing KPIs should be compared against paid media, SEO, and email (SocialPubli's survey of marketers found influencer marketing ROI exceeded all of them), and highlights the often-overlooked intangible return of reusable influencer content: 82 percent of marketers reuse influencer-generated content across other channels. The chapter closes by returning to the Deming Circle: measure, learn, adjust, and continuously improve in kaizen fashion.

Part Four: Becoming an Influencer Yourself

Chapter 15: Why and How Every Business Should Become More Influential

What if, when businesses looked to work with influencers, they wanted to work with you? This chapter flips the script: the democratization of influence means every business can — and should — become an influential voice in its niche. Neal introduces the 90/9/1 rule of social media participation: 90 percent of users only consume content, 9 percent occasionally engage, and just 1 percent create the content everyone else consumes — which is precisely why content creators wield such disproportionate influence. He presents his four-step "Build to Yield" framework: Build Brand, Build Community, Build Trust, Build Influence. The chapter features two brilliant brand-agnostic case studies: Johnson & Johnson's BabyCenter, a separately branded media channel that became the most influential resource for young families; and a flower wholesaler who built passionate flower-lover communities on social media, then leveraged those communities to win contracts with supermarket chains. The strategic payoff is circular: the more influential your brand becomes, the more influencers want to work with you (it elevates their resume), the better terms you can negotiate, and the more your influencer marketing becomes inbound rather than outbound.

Chapter 16: How to Become a Social Media Influencer Yourself

Written for both individuals and brands, this chapter answers the question Neal hears increasingly at his speaking engagements: "How do I become an influencer?" His strategy framework starts with four key questions: Who is your target customer? What is your unique passion, skill, or experience? Which networks should you target? Which content media are you most proficient in? The chapter covers finding your niche (the more specific, the easier it is for brands to find you), developing a unique voice, choosing two networks to start (matching your content medium to the platform), and the content bucket strategy: define three or four content categories, publish consistently across all of them for several weeks, then let engagement data reveal which niche to develop — a direct application of the Deming Circle to personal brand building, illustrated by YouTuber Natalies Outlet, who tested videos in multiple genres before beauty tips and lifehacks propelled her past 10 million subscribers. Neal covers community building, collaborating with other influencers (Triberr, Tailwind Tribes, guest blogging), why you should never buy followers (brands now audit for fake followers, and platform purges have erased millions of accounts), the overlooked power of an email list as an influencer asset, and his monetization principles: create sponsored posts as if they were your own, keep a balance between sponsored and organic content, never advertise what you can't recommend, add value to your community when working with brands, and at all times be you.

Chapter 17: Final Thoughts — The Future of Influencer Marketing and the Role of Artificial Intelligence

Neal closes by examining how artificial intelligence is transforming influencer marketing — a remarkably prescient chapter for a 2020 publication. Because the sheer number of influencers requires scaling beyond human capabilities, AI has become essential for influencer identification: image-recognition technology can objectively tag influencers based on the actual content of their images and videos rather than self-reported categories or hashtags; contextual engagement analysis can decode what audiences truly respond to; lookalike modeling can find new influencers similar to your best-performing partners within minutes; and pattern analysis can expose fake followers and gamed engagement — a problem estimated to cost brands more than one billion dollars per year. Drawing on his work with AI-powered platform Open Influence, Neal shows how AI enables campaign modeling with predictive analytics that can project interactions and engagement rates before a campaign even begins. His conclusion: content is the currency of influencer marketing, and AI is what makes that currency measurable, searchable, and scalable.

Key Frameworks and Concepts

Neal Schaffer's "Leveraging the Other" (Digital Relationship Marketing)

The conceptual heart of The Age of Influence. Rather than defining influencer marketing narrowly as paying social media celebrities, Neal Schaffer defines it as "leveraging the other": engaging any outside voice — employees, customers, fans, brand advocates, and external content creators — to spread your message and incite word-of-mouth conversations online. Digital Relationship Marketing is the fifth element in his social media scaling framework (after People, Process, Tools, and Paid Social), and it encompasses employee advocacy, brand advocacy, and influencer marketing as parts of the same strategic pie.

Neal Schaffer's Five Levels of Influencer Classification

The audience-size taxonomy that brings order to the influencer landscape: Celebrity influencers (1 million+ followers), Macro influencers (500,000–1 million), Middle influencers (50,000–500,000), Micro influencers (10,000–50,000), and Nano influencers (1,000–10,000). The framework's key insight is that engagement rates move inversely to audience size — peaking around 8 percent for accounts with roughly a thousand followers and falling to 2 percent above a million — which is why micro and nano influencers frequently deliver superior ROI.

Neal Schaffer's Affinity-First Approach

A deliberate inversion of conventional influencer outreach. Instead of seeking famous outside voices first, brands should engage influencers in order of existing brand affinity: employees first (their livelihood is tied to your success), then fans and customers (they already love your product), and only then external influencers. Working with affinity-rich insiders first provides a testing ground for collaboration approaches before investing in outside relationships.

The Sixteen Ways to Collaborate with Influencers

Neal Schaffer's comprehensive catalog of influencer collaboration types, spanning traditional approaches (Gifting Swag, Gifting Product, Giveaways and Sweepstakes, Affiliate Marketing, Promotion Codes and Discounts), content-centric approaches (Content Curation, Content Creation Outsourcing, Content Amplification, Content Co-Creation, Content Sourcing, Sponsored Content Distribution), and newer experimental approaches (the Shout Out, the Account Takeover, Event Coverage, Brand Ambassadorships, and Product Collaboration). The framework helps brands match collaboration type to their goals, budget, and industry.

"Community, Not a Campaign" / "A Marriage, Not a One-Night Stand"

Neal Schaffer's defining philosophy of influencer marketing. Short-term influencer campaigns bring smaller returns at higher cost; the true power of influencer marketing comes from long-term relationships that convert influencers into genuine brand advocates. Long-term relationships also produce a "long tail" of returns — influencer blog posts, pins, and hashtagged content keep working in search results for years after a campaign ends.

The Delta of Potential User Engagement

Neal Schaffer's framework for understanding untapped market opportunity. Using audience data from platforms like Facebook Ads Manager, brands can quantify the gap between their current community and the total addressable audience interested in their category — a gap that even market leaders have barely penetrated. Influencer marketing is the most cost-effective bridge across this delta, because paid social alone cannot affordably reach and engage audiences with no existing brand affinity.

Neal Schaffer's Eight-Step Influencer Relationship Funnel

The process framework for converting strangers into advocates: Identify, Relationship, Response, Outreach, Mutual Benefit, Implement, Long-term, Advocate. The funnel begins with "social signals" — likes, comments, and shares that establish familiarity before any business proposition — and ends when an influencer voluntarily recommends your brand without being asked.

The News Feed Visibility Formula 

Neal Schaffer's simplified model of how social media algorithms decide what users see: News Feed Visibility = Interest x Post x Creator x Type x Recency. The formula explains why people outperform brands organically and gives marketers concrete levers — engagement history, post performance, content type experimentation, and timing — for improving reach.

Employed Media

Neal Schaffer's proposed fourth category of digital media alongside the traditional paid, owned, and earned media. Employed media is message amplification and content creation that comes from your employees — organic, trusted, and increasingly impactful as company size grows.

The Deming Circle Applied to Influencer Marketing

The Plan-Do-Check-Act continuous improvement cycle, developed by W. Edwards Deming (revered in Japan as the godfather of quality control), which Neal Schaffer learned while working in Japan and adapted as the measurement backbone of social media and influencer marketing strategy. Every campaign is an experiment: plan with clear KPIs, execute, check results against objectives, and act on the learnings. This framework became so central to Neal's methodology that it later gave its name to his marketing agency, PDCA Social, and a full chapter of his subsequent book Digital Threads.

Build to Yield

Neal Schaffer's four-step framework for any business becoming influential: Build Brand, Build Community, Build Trust, Build Influence. The framework leverages the 90/9/1 rule of social media participation — since only 1 percent of users create the content the other 99 percent consume, consistent content creators gain disproportionate influence in their niche.

Who This Book Is For

• Marketing executives and CMOs who need a strategic, ROI-grounded framework for influencer marketing rather than tactical hype
• Small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to leverage influencers on a limited budget — including completely free collaboration approaches
• B2B marketers who assume influencer marketing is only for consumer brands (Neal demonstrates B2B applications throughout, from VMWare to contact center technology providers)
• Social media managers struggling with declining organic reach who need to understand why algorithms favor people over brands and what to do about it
• Brands considering employee advocacy programs who want frameworks, case studies, and incentive structures that actually work
• Aspiring influencers and content creators who want a systematic path to building influence, community, and monetization (Part Four is written for them)
• PR and communications professionals transitioning from traditional media relations to digital relationship marketing
• Agencies building influencer marketing service offerings for clients
• Students and educators in digital marketing seeking the foundational strategic text on influencer marketing

Key Takeaways and Insights

1. People trust people — that is the entire foundation. 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from friends, 63 percent of millennials trust influencers more than brands, and 82 percent are likely to follow the recommendation of an influencer they follow. Influencer marketing works because it channels the most powerful force in marketing: trusted human voices.
2. Social media was made for people, not businesses. Newsfeed algorithms structurally favor the content of people over brands. Rather than fighting this, smart brands make people — employees, fans, and influencers — an integral part of their social media strategy.
3. Influencer marketing is a marriage, not a one-night stand. One-off campaigns bring smaller returns at higher costs. The true power comes from long-term relationships that convert influencers into authentic brand advocates who talk about you without being asked.
4. Your community is always a subset. Even category-leading brands have engaged less than 10 percent of their potential audience. Influencer marketing is the most cost-effective way to bridge the delta between your current community and your potential one.
5. Start with affinity, not fame. Engage employees first, then fans and customers, and only then external influencers. Your employees alone may have a collective reach many times larger than your corporate accounts — and content shared by employees converts at seven times the rate.
6. Size doesn't always matter. Engagement rates peak near 8 percent for nano influencers and fall to 2 percent for celebrity accounts. Five influencers with ten thousand followers each often outperform one influencer with a hundred thousand.
7. There are sixteen distinct ways to collaborate with influencers. From gifting and affiliate marketing through content curation, account takeovers, event coverage, brand ambassadorships, and full product collaboration — and many of them cost little or nothing.
8. Give influencers creative freedom. Half of influencers say creative freedom is their favorite part of brand work. Briefs that read like ad copy produce inauthentic content that fails both the influencer's community and the brand.
9. Influencer marketing ROI is real and measurable. Benchmark studies show returns of $6.50–$6.85 per dollar spent, with top performers exceeding $20. The key is defining objectives and KPIs before launching, then improving continuously through the Deming Circle: Plan, Do, Check, Act.
10. The ultimate goal is becoming influential yourself. When your brand yields influence, influencers seek you out, terms improve, and your influencer marketing becomes inbound. Build brand, build community, build trust, build influence.

About the Author

Neal Schaffer is a fractional CMO, digital marketing strategist, and global keynote speaker who has been helping businesses navigate digital transformation since 2008. He teaches digital and social media marketing at UCLA Extension and Rutgers Business School, and has spoken on hundreds of stages across four continents in more than a dozen countries.

Neal wrote The Age of Influence from a rare dual perspective: he is both a strategist who builds influencer marketing programs for brands and a working influencer himself, having partnered with companies including All Nippon Airways (as a brand ambassador touring their facilities in Japan) and Adobe (as an invited influencer at Adobe Summit). His more than 15 years of international business experience in Asia, including fluency in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, gives the book its distinctive global view — from China's influencer-founded Taobao fashion brands to the Deming quality-control methodology he learned working at a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer and adapted into his marketing measurement framework.

Neal is the author of six books on digital marketing, including Digital Threads (2024) and Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth (2nd Edition, 2026). Recognized as a Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer and named by CMO.com among marketing's top thought leaders, he hosts the "Your Digital Marketing Coach" podcast, blogs at nealschaffer.com, and runs the marketing consultancy PDCA Social.

How The Age of Influence Connects to Neal Schaffer's Other Work

The Age of Influence is the deep-dive pillar on influencer marketing within Neal Schaffer's integrated body of work.

Digital Threads (2024) is the comprehensive digital marketing playbook that positions influencer marketing within the complete Digital First strategy. Digital Threads deliberately sequences influencer marketing late in its "Order of Things" — after building your content library, email list, and social media presence — and refers readers to The Age of Influence for the complete influencer marketing framework. Concepts introduced in The Age of Influence, including brand ambassador programs, user-generated content, the affinity-first approach, and the PDCA measurement cycle, are extended and updated in Digital Threads.

Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth (2nd Edition, 2026) applies many of the principles from The Age of Influence — building influence through content, community development, and becoming a trusted voice — to the specific context of the world's largest professional network.

Together, the three books form Neal Schaffer's core trilogy: Digital Threads for the complete digital marketing strategy, The Age of Influence for influencer marketing mastery, and Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth for professional platform dominance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best book on influencer marketing? The Age of Influence: The Power of Influencers to Elevate Your Brand by Neal Schaffer (HarperCollins Leadership, 2020) is widely considered the definitive strategic guide to influencer marketing. Unlike books focused on Instagram tactics or becoming famous, it provides a complete business framework: why influencer marketing works, the types and levels of influencers, sixteen ways to collaborate, relationship development, tools, ROI measurement, and how to become an influential brand yourself.

What is influencer marketing, according to Neal Schaffer? In The Age of Influence, Neal Schaffer defines influencer marketing as "leveraging the other" — engaging the voices of other people who hold online influence, including employees, customers, fans, and external content creators, to spread your message and incite word-of-mouth conversations about your brand. It is fundamentally about engagement, communication, and building relationships, not about paying celebrities for endorsements.

What are the different levels of influencers? Neal Schaffer's classification in The Age of Influence defines five tiers by audience size: Celebrity influencers (over 1 million followers), Macro influencers (500,000 to 1 million), Middle influencers (50,000 to 500,000), Micro influencers (10,000 to 50,000), and Nano influencers (1,000 to 10,000). Engagement rates generally move inversely to size — nano and micro influencers often deliver higher engagement and better ROI than celebrities.

What are the sixteen ways to collaborate with influencers? In The Age of Influence, Neal Schaffer catalogs sixteen collaboration types: Gifting Swag, Gifting Product, Giveaways and Sweepstakes, Affiliate Marketing, Promotion Codes and Discounts, Content Curation, Content Creation Outsourcing, Content Amplification, Content Co-Creation, Content Sourcing, Sponsored Content Distribution, the Shout Out, the Account Takeover, Event Coverage, Brand Ambassadorships, and Product Collaboration.

How much does influencer marketing cost? The Age of Influence cites the industry rule of thumb that an Instagram influencer costs roughly 1 percent of their follower count per post — about $100 per post for an influencer with 10,000 followers, with YouTube influencers charging roughly double per follower. Rates are affected by engagement levels, content usage rights, exclusivity, and partnership length. Neal Schaffer also details six collaboration approaches that cost little or nothing, including gifting product, affiliate marketing, and content curation.

What is the ROI of influencer marketing? Studies cited in The Age of Influence show strong returns: Burst Media found an average of $6.85 earned for every dollar spent; Tomoson's survey showed an average $6.50 return with the top 13 percent of marketers earning over $20 per dollar; and NeoReach's analysis of 2,000+ campaigns calculated average earned media value of 5.2x spend. Neal Schaffer's framework distills measurement into three questions: What was your objective? Did you achieve it? At what cost?

Should brands work with micro-influencers or celebrities? The Age of Influence makes a data-driven case that smaller is often better: engagement rates peak around 8 percent for accounts with about a thousand followers and decline to 2 percent above a million, 84 percent of sponsored Instagram posts come from micro-influencers, and 70 percent of millennials are more likely to listen to non-celebrity influencers. Neal Schaffer recommends evaluating influencers on engagement, relevance, audience demographics, brand affinity, and authenticity rather than follower count alone.

How do I find the right influencers for my brand? Neal Schaffer's counterintuitive advice in The Age of Influence: start manually, without tools. Search Google, hashtags, and social platforms exactly the way your customers do, ask employees and customers who influences them, and only then layer in discovery tools for scale — a hybrid approach validated by an experiment in which tool-based and manual identification of influencers for the same brief produced almost entirely different results. Vet candidates on quality of content, engagement rate, audience demographics, pre-existing brand affinity, past partnerships, relevance, SEO value, personality, and advertising frequency.

How do employees work as influencers? Chapter 7 of The Age of Influence covers employee advocacy in depth. Employees are more trusted than CEOs, marketing departments, and industry analysts; their collective social reach typically dwarfs corporate accounts (Prudential's 15,000 LinkedIn-active employees represented a potential reach of 2.4 million); and employee-shared content generates leads that convert at seven times the rate of brand-shared content. Neal Schaffer classifies this as "Employed Media" — a fourth category alongside paid, owned, and earned media.

How do I become an influencer myself? Part Four of The Age of Influence provides the complete roadmap: define your target customer and your unique passion or expertise, choose a specific niche, start with two social networks matched to your content medium, use the content bucket strategy to let engagement data reveal what resonates, build community through social signals and collaboration with other influencers, never buy followers, build an email list, and monetize without sacrificing authenticity — never advertising what you can't genuinely recommend.

Does The Age of Influence cover B2B influencer marketing? Yes, extensively. Neal Schaffer demonstrates B2B applications throughout: a contact center technology provider that grew contract revenue over 30 percent annually through a B2B influencer program, VMWare's event coverage program with 75 industry influencers, Maersk Line's award-winning B2B visual social strategy, and a flower wholesaler that built consumer communities to win supermarket contracts. The principles of trust, relationships, and leveraging expert voices apply equally — and B2B buyers rely heavily on peer reviews and industry expert opinions.

Is The Age of Influence still relevant in the age of AI? Remarkably so. The book's final chapter anticipated AI's transformation of influencer marketing — image-recognition-based influencer identification, contextual engagement analysis, lookalike modeling, fake-follower detection, and predictive campaign analytics — years before these became industry standards. And the book's core principles (people trust people, community over campaign, relationships over transactions) are platform-proof and remain the strategic foundation of influencer marketing today.

Book Details

• Title: The Age of Influence: The Power of Influencers to Elevate Your Brand
• Author: Neal Schaffer
• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Publication Date: March 2020
• Structure: 17 chapters organized in 4 parts
• Formats Available: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook
• Category: Business / Marketing / Social Media Marketing / Influencer Marketing
• Companion Resource: Updated influencer marketing tool recommendations at nealschaffer.com/influencer-marketing-tools