Social Media of Fyre Festival
Fyre Festival was, in fact, a horrific nightmare. However, there were different parts of the concept of Fyre Fest that had good qualities of social media in them (and not so great qualities that you can learn from). The first positive takeaway that I took from the Fyre Fest documentary is that social media is the best way to get anything to your audience. Especially when your audience is younger viewers that grew up with social media influencers, this was the main idea for the Fyre Festival. Social media was such an important aspect of the reason why everything was sold out and so quickly. Another big important takeaway that I developed from the Fyre Festival was connections with influencers is key. If you do not have a connection with big influencers that have many followers, then your festival will not succeed, well at least the advertisements will not succeed. Even though the festival went to shits, the advertisements that promoted the festival was epic. Influencers promoting the festival on their platforms makes the audience WANT to be there because they think that it is the best place on earth, especially if Gigi Hadid and Hailey Beiber will be there.
The biggest takeaway I believe was a very important aspect of why the Fyre Festival failed was if you know that the festival is not happening, GET OUT while you can. Even if your supervisor tells you not to, for the benefit of the people and the lives at stake, promote a cancellation if you in any way think that the festival will not be occurring. Many of the customers that bought the tickets and paid a lot of money will be mad, of course, but it is better that you do not end up stranded on an island with no way of getting out.
Watching the Fyre Festival documentary from Netflix not only gave me takeaways to learn what not to do in social media but how influencers can be impacted just as much as the public were. Influencers that promoted the Fyre Festival were just doing their job. I think in no way was this their fault. They were told the same exact information that the public was about the festival and they were notified around the same time that this was a scam. Many of the hottest influencers such as Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and many more were amongst the few that were also involved in promoting the festival that went down in history as one of the biggest scams. Kendall posted this picture on her Instagram listing one of the headliners, VIP access passes and the famous #fyrefestival seen below.
Watching this video taught me that not all of the influencers know their facts and are there to promote and make money themselves. Nothing is wrong with that because that is their business, however, it can impact followers in a wrong way. Knowing about this I believe will make followers now, rethink before booking tickets and possibly ever going to something that is not completely known before.
I think what happened on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook was not the root of the problems but I do not know if there is a way that they can make sure everything that is being sold/promoted on their sites is in fact truthful. Unless the developing Social Media manager of the Fyre Festival was meeting with the platforms to promote the festival it is in no way their fault.
During the entire documentary I couldn’t stop thinking ‘If I was Jerry, the social media platform that helped Billy McFarland, I would stop it so far ahead of when they did’. I think that was a big problem of the social media aspect because I would have turned Billy into the public as a scammer, way ahead from when they knew this was not going to succeed. I think that the most embarrassing part for the Fyre Festival employees did not only do the customers of the Fyre Fest not get their money back but all the hard-working people that tried to make it happen, did not get paid at all.