Become an influencer Page 2
People like me, solving problems like mine, with things I can access, where I am.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Traditional marketing relies heavily on the infamous four Ps: product, price, place and promotion. We probably think of social media as 100% promotion and none of the other stuff. But social media can be hyper-local. It creates great opportunities to showcase a product in seamless and incidental ways with embedded links straight to an online store, which, in turn, delivers straight to your door or even your desk.
In an age in which we can rely on actual people over traditional forms of advertising, we tend to trust each other more than we trust the brands we buy. What do I base this on? The numbers. Of the 20 most followed accounts on Instagram, 17 belong to people and only three of them belong to brands.
See for yourself:
Instagram
Figures accurate on 8 February 2020
But perhaps it’s different on Twitter? Nope. Three accounts in the top 20 belong to organisations. The rest are all people.
Twitter
On Facebook, 10 brands clinch spots in the top 20; the other 10 go to individuals:
Facebook
“People do not want to have a conversation with their chips” is a great quote from the Australian marketing guru Professor Mark Ritson. In an online lecture for the Australian Association of National Advertisers in May 2016 (still available on its YouTube channel), he explained that “social media is about people, not brands. 76% of people do not use social media to follow brands.”
An updated, additional definition for the word “influencer” was included in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in May 2019: “a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media”. The editor of the dictionary remarked at the time that “all of us are consumers, even if all we are consuming is information”.
Try to think of the last ten times you interacted with any brand on any social media platform. How many of those times did you simply reach out to complain or at least give critical feedback? We often use social media like a customer service careline, because we’d much rather drag the proverbial shopkeeper into the town square so we can shout at him (hopefully in front of a crowd!) for selling us rotten food than tell him quietly over the phone. When you love a product, chances are you’ll be telling a friend before you reach out to the brand itself. You paid them for it, after all.
I could quote Matthew Kobach’s impressive PhD to explain this, but I find that his Twitter feed serves as an excellent shortcut. He is head of Social at the New York Stock Exchange and is well worth following.
Whether launching your customer service tirades on social media is a good idea (or how to do it in a positive way) when you want to build a business out of partnering with brands is something I’ll cover later in this book. But when it comes to brands marketing their products, social media soon showed marketers and advertising agencies that because people follow people, they would be more effective if they roped in the assistance of those people. Social media is exactly that – social!
Initially, brands and their agencies collaborated with large-scale influencers: athletes, celebrities, models, musicians, reality stars and actors. If you didn’t command the attention of at least a few hundred thousand to a few million followers, you didn’t mean much to brands. Your posts needed to be seen by as many people as possible. The entire digital advertising sales business is traditionally built on impressions: how many people saw the advert? Enough? Success.
But the problem is that even the US president @realDonaldTrump, with his verified account and more than 70 million followers on Twitter, could have as many as 15 million fake followers (according to twitteraudit.com).
What is a fake follower? A fake follower is an account that is not consistently active, has low follower numbers, has been on Twitter for only a short while, does not stick around for long and could very well have been created by so-called bots (an abbreviation for Internet robots). Anyone can buy bot followers and you can also direct these bots to any nominated account you want to inflate. That’s right: you don’t need to be the owner of an account to be able to buy it some perceived support.
Yes, some of these accounts could belong to users who only passively consume content on Twitter from time to time. But most of them are created by programs written to create accounts under real or even imagined identities, because once there is a demand for a shortcut to becoming an influencer (being able to buy more followers, that is) someone will find a way to service that demand. Why some people have fake followers even when they didn’t pay for this shortcut is unclear, but one widely held theory is that these bots follow a random number of accounts to raise the appearance of legitimacy.
Source: Twitteraudit.com
For the sake of transparency, my own account reflects a 7% fake-follower rating, according to the same website, and I have never bought followers. Musician, actor, producer and influencer Bouwer Bosch admitted in an interview for this book that he has been tempted to buy followers before.
The thing about social media is, on the one hand, I feel like it is so filtered and fake. On the other hand, I feel like it’s an amazing marketing platform. The more followers you have, the greater your pay cheque because the more people come to your shows.
The problem with fake followers, though, is that they can’t go to shows.
Yes, but it’s the amount of ego involved that gets to you. In Afrikaans, at one point I was the leading Afrikaans alternative musician, in terms of followers. Maybe because my audience was so young, or maybe because I put a comedy spin on posts. But then suddenly guys like Jo Black and Francois van Coke started overtaking me. Then you start looking at other people, how they grow, and you start wondering about your own identity. You doubt whether people still like you. If it is perhaps your own fault that you’re not keeping up?
Bouwer is sharing this important insight in the hopes that you realise that:
Even people with 100 000 followers: “go through this identity crisis, but you should know that the algorithm is all about how frequently you post. You need to keep up a very high frequency. And, of course, it also matters what you’re posting. People loved it when Leandie [du Randt, his ex-wife and also a well-known actress and influencer] and I posted stuff together. Maybe because it held some sort of romantic aspiration? Those posts enjoyed so much engagement. That, and ones about feeling vulnerable and battling with depression. It shows you where we are as people, hey? We also want to know that other people are also scared, that they also battle.
The American digital and influencer marketing strategist Joe Scott manages global campaigns for Fortune 500 companies (the top 500 companies in the United States, as rated by Fortune magazine). I had the opportunity to work with him on a campaign during Rugby World Cup 2019 in Japan. Besides boasting a phenomenal karaoke voice and the ability to speak both Korean and German, Joe is an absolute student of the influencer industry. He concedes that brands cannot tell 100% if someone has bought followers, but that there are strong indicators they look for.
With tools becoming more sophisticated, we can measure the activity of the followers, the rate at which the followers grew, and then the location of the accounts. For instance, let’s take John Doe, an American influencer from Chicago, Illinois. This influencer grew from 50 000 to 500 000 followers in two months, without a particularly viral post. We also notice that Doe’s average engagements haven’t increased proportionately with the follower size. Finally, we see that over 25% of Doe’s followers are randomly from the Middle East or another region outside the United States, without a clear connection between that region and the influencer. These could all be coincidence, but it raises many red flags.
I also asked another ad industry specialist – this time a leading voice here in South Africa – for advice on this topic. Mike Sharman (@mikesharm
an) founded Retroviral, an agency that has made more brands “go viral, globally” than any other agency in Africa. You will have seen his work on RocoMamas. Retroviral is the leading creative agency for the Smashburger brand, Russell Hobbs, Martin and Martin brands, and M-Net, to name a few. He has developed campaigns that have been classified as “truly viral” (like the “Last Dictator Standing” ad for Nando’s). He was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s top 200 young South Africans in 2013 and is the co-founder of the influencer marketing platform webfluential.com, as well as retroactive.digital, a disruptive sports storytelling agency. Make sure your next read is his first book, The Best Dick.
Mike warns:
There’s an important distinction between buying bot-followers from click-farms in Asia versus paying to amplify your content, because all social channels now need a paid element. Organic is a very difficult thing to grow your base from.
When you buy bot-followers you might get followers but no engagement and you’ll soon be found out. There’s a whole lot of fraud associated with presenting yourself to a brand as something you’re not. The brand won’t get the sales though. And they’re moving more towards a cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion sort of space. So, there’s a lot of revenue sharing.
This is an interesting new innovation you’ll see more of on webfluential.com and similar platforms. Basically, how this works is: “You drive the sales, you get the value ...” If you punt a company’s sale, you earn commission on click-throughs or sales off the back of that. If you’re a real, authentic influencer, you’ll be able to make more money from conversions than off a paid post. Ultimately, it’s a job, you need to make money. As an influencer your value is determined in your output.
As an influencer you will often deal with people like Mike and Joe, so I thought I’d take this moment to outline a few key terms and phrases that people bandy about in boardrooms and on e-mail in the influencer industry. Knowing this jargon will ease your progress through these conversations.
Ellen Ward-Collins – a planner with the UK-based branch of the advertising giant M&C Saatchi Performance – outlines the top three terms as follows:
•Reach: In order for your campaign to influence the largest number of people possible, the ideal influencer should be one who has an above-average audience size in a specific niche or market. However, as Donald Trump’s millions of Twitter bots may demonstrate, the size of your audience is not actually the most important aspect. The way an influencer engages with their followers, and how lasting an impact they have on them, are much more valuable assets for a brand.
•Resonance: It is essential that the influencer selected for a campaign supplies content that resonates well with their audience, in a way that encourages further action. An influencer who creates content people crave and readily engage with will make a major wave with even a single tweet because the content resonates with their followers. Resonance can be measured via many engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, retweets or shares.
•Relevance: Although influencers are working with advertisers more and more, the vast majority of really successful influencers do this in a way that retains their authenticity: they will not “spam” followers to the detriment of their own brand. Influencers who always ensure that there is a strong overlap in what benefits the brand and what serves their followers maintain high levels of relevance.
Basically, when brands look to select influencers for their campaigns, they do not only look at the total number of followers an influencer has. Joe Scott explains that “every brand is different. Some are looking for the right influencer that matches their brand’s values. Some are still looking for sheer numbers. When we build the profiles and personas for a brand campaign, we typically prioritise the following:
•Engagement: Median or average engagement rate.
•Audience: The influencer’s audience demographic. Does their audience match the demographic target we are marketing toward?
•Personal brand: Their look and feel. Does the influencer’s personal brand already communicate values similar to the brand’s? Is there authenticity behind their storytelling and how they interact with the audience? Is the feed stylised and/or consistent?
Exactly how to ensure you generate high engagement isn’t the only lifeblood of any influencer, though. You can certainly find inspiration, useful tips and constant learning opportunities in other places as well – radio presenters, TV producers, musicians and authors. They all spend their time creating content to inform, educate and entertain people.
Nobody does this with the expectation that their work will remain unwatched, unheard or unread. The whole point of the exercise is for it to be consumed. And you know what we really measure success by? Whether the consumer responds, in any way. Does the consumer change their behaviour? Do they tell a friend? Do they reply? Do they disagree and do they say so – on any platform? That is engagement and it is the name of the game, regardless of where or how you aim to inform, entertain or educate people.
Who am I to write this book?
You might have picked up this book not knowing much about me but rather because you’re interested in this topic. In fact, even if you do know who I am, I’m hoping that you’re here for the content, because this is why I wrote it.
In 2019 my career reached a turning point, but not the one most people would think of. I worked on two World Cup tournaments, across two different sports, for two massive global governing bodies as a digital presenter and producer: the International Cricket Council (on the 2019 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup in England and Wales) and World Rugby (on the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan).
From the outside it might have looked as if I had scaled up – I was working for truly global content platforms for the first time. This is true, at least in part. But what I really learnt from the experience was how these organisations leverage the appeal of their sport and, indeed, the appeal of live sport (the most real reality television on earth) on their digital platforms, and how they use a four-yearly event to take massive growth leaps in a matter of weeks.
In both cases, the teams I worked on saw their analytics return amazing results. We set well-documented records in our coverage of both events and I’m incredibly proud of our efforts. It was thrilling, inspiring and absolutely formative. Not only did I gain a much larger and certainly more global audience, but I also started looking very differently at what I was doing on my own platforms.
I described it to many people as going on a paid digital marketing and brand development course: a kind of boot camp where everyone in the team hustles under intense pressure to apply every bit of knowledge and skill they have garnered in their career, testing their knowledge with a live, global audience every day, with metrics and analytics immediately available – a massive departure from the way TV and radio traditionally work. This was a major leap for me, from my traditional broadcasting background, which often relies on quarterly viewer or listenership figures, paid research and a fair share of anecdotal feedback.
What surprised me was that if I had to measure my work in 2019, according to what produced the most lucrative result, it wouldn’t be these massive events I got to work on – not directly, anyway. The value in both was certainly experiential: I built amazing networks, learnt many lessons and then, obviously, they also offered me great brand-building opportunities. But if one takes a closer look at the bottom line of Elma Smit, the business, what really paid in 2019 was social media. The sponsored content. Brands! My Instagram, Facebook and Twitter profiles generated a much greater return on investment than any of the radio, TV, event hosting or digital shows I delivered. You could argue that this was a direct result of the fact that it was the best year of my career, but it could also be argued that this was in spite of all my other activities.
The American thought leader and marketing guru Seth Godin is known for always emphasising that generosity is at the heart
of content. At the end of 2019 I felt that this was truer than ever for me. When I returned to South Africa, I found myself telling people about the lessons I had learnt. Many who crossed my path showed an interest, even those whom I didn’t think would be interested in influencer and content lessons. Too often, we keep a firm guard up and we don’t share what we do and how, often enough.
On his blog, Godin writes:
We choose to be selfish because we feel insufficiency ... Like a drowning person, we cling ever tighter to the life buoy ... The single best way to find sufficiency and confidence and trust and forward motion is to do precisely the opposite of what our instincts might tell us. In an economy based on connection, trust and attention, the posture of generosity is not only the highest-yielding strategy, it’s also the right thing to do. Ideas shared go up in value. Doors opened turn into new opportunities for all.
So, I called up a few people in the influencer industry and asked them to open their books and share their knowledge with me and, ultimately, also with you. Instead of rejection and cynicism, I encountered the most amazing generosity. This shared passion ignited such a great spark of connection with people I’ve mostly admired from afar and we had awesome, compelling (and often very long) conversations – some of the most raw, inspiring and motivating conversations I’ve had in years. These lively conversations informed the writing of this book and they are available in full in an accompanying e-book, Conversations with Influencers.
Ideas shared really do go up in value. Please share yours with all the very generous people I have interviewed for this book. I can assure you that they are a remarkable collection of talented, committed and sharp-eyed experts in their fields. Thank you to each of them.