Become an influencer Read online

  The influencer industry is not a fad

  Some argue that the influencer market has peaked and that the downturn can already be spotted. However, the Internet certainly isn’t a fad. Similarly, the inherent social nature of humanity also isn’t, which is why I’d argue that social media (in one form or another) is here to stay. As long as the platforms attract users, there will be ways of turning influence on those platforms into income.

  As Mike explains:

  Even brands also realise that if they’re going to play in a social space, they have to actually be social. The brands who are doing well on social [media] are busy using banter, they are self-deprecating when they mess up. Brands now have very distinct personalities. Influencers are similar in that they are also brands, they are commercial properties, commercialised vehicles of audience.

  This very interesting blurring of lines happens every day.

  What brands and influencers have in common is that the foundation of everything they do when building a brand (as an influencer or as a marketer) is credibility. Anything that erodes credibility endangers the essence of what you’re busy building when you’re telling stories and trying to use your influence.

  Joe Scott illustrates how this sets influencers apart from traditional media platforms in a very practical way.

  Traditional media tells me what I should think or how I should behave. Influencers should tell me what they think and how they behave. Their connection to a product should not be a glowing endorsement, but a recommendation based on their personal use. Not “you should use this because its good!” But rather “I use this because it helps me with ___. If you’re like me, you may find value in it as well.” A seemingly subtle difference, but a big one.

  If you’re actively positioning yourself as an independent voice you are also flexing your unique power to speak to a consumer in a way that brands cannot. This unique power, however, hinges on your trustworthiness. Trust is what turns your followers into a loyal community. When it goes missing, so does the work. This happened in Australia in 2019, when one small PR firm took the bold step to stop advising its clients to include social media as part of their PR strategies. The Atticism agency ditched spending on influencer campaigns altogether because it found that the same group of influencers in Australia would constantly be liking and commenting on each other’s posts, which drives up engagement, but in a false manner. The agency claimed that it had bust a group of influencers for actively defrauding its clients, because the industry builds its rates on clicks (likes, comments, views and shares).

  If you cook the books on your metrics, you are misrepresenting what you are delivering to the client. If you are actively skewing the reporting because you don’t have confidence in your ability to deliver real value to your client, you had better know that they will eventually also notice it in their bottom line. They will change their approach sooner or later and the bottom of your influencer business will, ultimately, fall out.

  Playing the long game – which is building a reputation that speaks of integrity and professionalism – is not only something that will stand you in good stead in the world of social media and making any kind of content, but it is also the hallmark of the influencers I interviewed for this book. These are the ones who have outlasted trends, who have earned their blue-ticked verified status, who have outperformed the norm and succeeded against the odds. They happen also to be the ones who under-promise and over-deliver, who treat their clients’ businesses as they would treat their own business.

  Beware the Fyre flop

  The most high-profile reality check for influencers to date came with the unmasking of the famously failed music festival in the Bahamas, the Fyre Festival. The festival promoters, Fyre Media, captured the attention of thousands of fans through a series of sponsored posts shared by some of the most famous models on Instagram: Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin and Emily Ratajkowski, to name a few.

  It was a disaster, though. Bands cancelled at the last minute and guests found tents without beds in them. Nothing lived up to the hype and, ultimately, when the festival was supposed to be at its most fabulous and Instagrammable peak, chaos erupted. It turned out that the influencers involved had not disclosed that they had been paid to promote the event.

  As Matt Higgins outlines in a paper in the University of Cincinnati Law Review:

  To the surprise of no one, lawsuits following the failed Fyre Festival piled up quickly. In a class action complaint ... plaintiffs named 1–100 “Doe Defendants” who deliberately and fraudulently marketed and sold tickets to a lavish, tropical destination music festival.

  The class-action lawsuit against the influencers and the promoters was eventually withdrawn, but this wasn’t the last the influencers would hear of it.

  Multiple influencers – including Jenner – were [also] subpoenaed by the Bankruptcy Trustee in the main Fyre Festival case against the organizers to uncover information regarding Fyre Media’s financial affairs [i.e. where did all the money go?].

  In the United States, the body tasked with policing sponsored content on social media, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has tried to stem the tide at the source.

  The FTC has pursued a claim against Warner Bros. for hiring influencers to promote one of its games without disclosing that they had been paid ... Of course, influencers should not be held as responsible for the actual perpetrators of the fraud, such as the organizers of the Fyre Festival. But, they should be held moderately responsible for their role in assisting and disseminating fraud.

  What Fyre Festival exposed, outside of its inept promoters, is how the lack of regulation in the industry could ultimately cost influencers and consumers dearly. Maybe you’re wondering why the influencers should be the ones asking any further questions of the brands they work with. The influencers were involved only in the promotion of it; they’re not shareholders of the event, after all. They did their job, got paid and went on with their lives.

  Not so. Whether you have to avoid a lawsuit or just plain old brand damage, being an influencer on social media is very different to being a model in a traditional advertising campaign. Honour, integrity and trust are essential qualities for being an influencer. Real people cut through the noise, mostly thanks to trust. You always run the risk of an unscrupulous influencer campaign coming back to bite you. Your integrity might survive it, but it also might not. Do you want to risk finding out the hard way?

  Luckily, there is a simple way around this: Would you buy shares in this company with your own money? If so, work with them as an influencer on a campaign. Would you meddle with the metrics of a company you own shares in, if it meant you’d only be doing yourself in? No. So don’t do it to your clients.

  Instead of thinking of yourself as an “influencer”, think of yourself as a shareholder.

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  WHERE DO YOU START?

  Being “popular” is not the same as being an “influencer”

  Joe Scott agrees:

  Anyone can be an influencer. Popular spaces like beauty, fitness and lifestyle are competitive and a bit saturated, but it’s not impossible. Truthfully, one’s influence is more about the quality of their content and consistency of output. A good example of this would be The Elegant Oxford. With over 100k subscribers [across platforms], this influencer built a following based on his dress-shoe restorations and shoe-shines. He was even invited to the Allen Edmonds factory with a select few influencers to witness how their shoes are made from end-to-end. That’s about as niche as it gets.

  “Begin with the end in mind.” This is one of my favourite habits outlined by Dr Stephen R. Covey in his iconic self-help book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

  This is a timeless bit of advice, particularly when you find yourself at the start of a new project. Covey elaborates on this idea by pointing out that “the physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follo
ws a blueprint”.

  What is your blueprint? Mine is that an influencer is someone who creates content – content their audience enjoys so much that they interact with it. The engagement you gain from using your social media soapbox well can then be leveraged for money by partnering with brands.

  Sometimes this relationship starts off as a barter: a brand gives you something that is naturally useful to you; you reciprocate by delivering content worth a similar amount in cash; you tag them in the content, allowing them to repost and engage with you. Progressing from this stage to actually generating cash from this content-producer adventure might feel like the point where you go pro. After all, in sport we consider athletes to be professionals when they start making money from their sporting pursuit.

  However, in the influencer industry, true professional status arrives when you build repeat business – when you deliver such consistent value that the same agencies, brands and people you worked with before start coming back for more. That’s when you’ve created a sustainable business.

  Many influencers still squirm when you call them influencers, even the very successful ones. Others love it. My theory is that it depends on what you had in mind at the beginning of your journey on social media. Did you start off with “influencer” on your vision board? Was it the heading of your blueprint? Or is influence simply a by-product of a pursuit that stretches beyond your work on social media? Do you – deep down – prefer to consider yourself an entrepreneur or a storyteller? The latter is partly true for me. I am not uncomfortable with the title “influencer”, but I do think that I exercise the same skill and obsession on my social media platforms that I continue honing and shaping in radio, TV, digital content and in writing. It’s something I have always been doing in one way or another.

  Adam Liaw is a Malaysian-Australian cook, television presenter and author. He was the winner of the second series of MasterChef Australia but tweets about parenting, race and the influencer industry nearly as much as he does about food.

  When I was 11 years old, my class at school had to do oral presentations on the weather – I think it may have been for English. Pre-teen Elma then drew a poster of a very basic weather map and wrote a short weather-reporter script, closely modelled on what I had seen weather reporters do on television. My teacher was so delighted with the initiative I had shown that she took me around to other classrooms and had me perform my pretend weather report for kids and teachers in other grades.

  I don’t think she did this because it was a particularly useful weather report, since I had made it all up. But what she clearly picked up was the fact that I wasn’t just watching the news and the weather reports every evening after dinner – I was actively studying how they were being delivered: the kind of inflection that was standard practice, the intonation, the correct posture and the arm movements. I mimicked what I had seen as closely as my little pre-teen brain could manage. Of course, it does help that I have no recollection of ever suffering stage fright in my entire life.

  When reading, I have always studied the writing technique of the author, in the same way that I studied TV and listened to the radio. As well as loving stories and becoming fully absorbed in them, a part of my brain is always studying how people tell their stories. I don’t consider it work; it’s just the way I look at the world.

  The point is that someone with an inherent gift for comedy might have used the same assignment to poke fun at the genre of weather reporting and the stereotypes in delivery. I think that a different approach would not have been wrong, but I instinctively knew that my take on “the weather” was to explore how we tell each other the weather story daily.

  I don’t think being an influencer is particularly special; it is just another strand of my business. I am using a skill I have honed by spending time on it; it is a skill that requires some innate talent but, as with everything, it is at least 80% perspiration and only about 20% inspiration. Beyond sport or music, TV or radio, I ultimately consider myself to be a storyteller and I don’t do this for free. It’s my business. I’m entrepreneurial in how I go about it.

  Most photographers start taking photos as a hobby. Some manage to turn it into a business venture while others spend their free time doing it for fun. I tend to think of all of us who have social media accounts as hobbyists. The ones who manage to leverage this into a paying business with return clients are the professionals – the influencers.

  I have no qualms about admitting that a lot of what I do, when I tell stories, is a commercial pursuit. I’m helping someone, somewhere, make money and I also get paid for it. You need to be mature about this and be careful not to underestimate your audience. They know that most of the content they enjoy is making someone, somewhere, some money or at least some equity. Earning some financial benefit from what you deliver to them is fair and justifiable. There is no need to be coy or embarrassed about it. It is also not particularly impressive because this is how commercial media has always worked. Influencers are not reinventing the wheel; they are just using it to explore new territories.

  When I’m on radio in the mornings, we sell airtime (not only adverts, but also competitions and even entire events) to our clients, our advertisers – brands, as we call them in the influencer space. When the microphone goes on, it is our job as on-air staff to create value for those brands, because that is what our station requires to pay our salaries.

  When radio listeners hear adverts and other commercial content that is well made, they often don’t mind being sold something. It is only when the content does not create value for the listener (and in turn, the advertiser) that they tune out. The same goes for television, digital media and, of course, social media.

  Having a logo on the shirt of your favourite athlete is not going to make you stop supporting them, is it? So why should sponsorships tank social media? If it is done well, is fully disclosed and creates value, it’s a win-win relationship for all involved.

  Choose to take up that space that Zozibini Tunzi, South Africa’s Miss Universe 2019, spoke about. If she hadn’t believed that a black woman with natural hair was inherently beautiful enough to win a global beauty title, no other opinion would have mattered. Yes, that belief alone didn’t win her the title – it took many other things as well. But if you don’t start with the belief that you have what it takes to create value for a group of followers out there, then no amount of effort will matter. Claim who you are – really own it. Own those things you innately do. Scale it up – that person you already are. Project that onto the screens of more people. Keep making the content. Don’t wait for someone to come and pluck you from obscurity.

  Stay alert! Stay alive!

  Dr Covey also wisely points out that “if you don’t make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default”. Dig below the surface-level motivation – beyond wanting loads of followers, which is obviously what all influencers are looking for to prove their worth. Ensure that you can set yourself apart; take some time to figure out what you naturally do. Who are you when no one cares or is looking?

  What are you always doing, even when you’re on summer holiday with your family; when you’re wasting time between work or studies? Bounce your ideas around with people who know you well and with whom you can’t pretend to be anything you’re not, because they’ll tell you or call you out. Boil your essence down to as simple a practice as you can and remember that some fields of interest are fleeting.

  Back in 2010, when I was busy planning my wedding, Pinterest hadn’t taken off yet. The Internet tells me that it was created that year, but we certainly hadn’t yet noticed it in South Africa. Either way, a wedding needed to be planned and, luckily, I found a variety of amazing wedding blogs, particularly American ones. I built Pinterest-like folders full of bits and pieces I loved, which I then used as references or briefs for flowers, hair,
make-up and even the search for The Dress.

  A lot of work also went into sourcing venue and entertainment options, and comparing photographers and the various packages they all offered. I was writing colour-coded running orders (like the ones we use on TV productions) for the weekend and the big day, to ensure everyone knew where they had to be and what had to happen at any given moment. Once I looked at all the work I had put in, I realised that I might as well start a wedding blog of my own. I had been studying the wedding industry so obsessively for my own purposes, that I had built up a treasure trove of useful information that I could share with the few followers I had found on Twitter, my Facebook audience and even the few souls who listened to me on 5FM. The American wedding bloggers I was following made it seem like such a cool field to specialise in and my TV work meant that I already had a bit of a following among people in their early to mid-20s – people who were also getting engaged and planning weddings. I decided that I’d review this urge to create a blog as soon as we got back from our honeymoon, to see if it was something I’d still enjoy once my own wedding was no longer on the agenda.

  As it turned out, I never created that wedding blog, because once my own wedding was over, I never had the urge to open those wedding folders again. Instead of creating beautiful and practical tips and resources for brides – a noble enough pursuit – I realised that I always tend to gravitate towards a challenge and the chance to do something other than what is expected of me.

  I needed the thrill of conquering a forbidden domain. It has always been this way for me. In primary school I spent my break times playing rugby and cricket with the boys. Later, I shaved my hair in the same year that I became a beauty pageant finalist. When I started working in radio, I was told again and again that an Afrikaans girl like me, with my accent, would never work on air at 5FM – but I proved them wrong.