“Influencer Fraud” is a Problem of Measurement
Influencer marketing, a nascent sub-genre of digital marketing, is widely accepted to be at the top of the sales funnel and thus is inherently difficult to measure. Think about other awareness plays: Can you count the number of people who drive by a billboard? How many people are in the cars? How many people in each car saw the billboard? Did it make an impression?
Once a magazine is purchased how do you measure how many people saw which ads, and whether they actually looked or just absentmindedly flipped through (and arguably even absent-minded flipping has value)? Can you tell how many people are watching your commercials (and not taking that 3 minutes to warm up food, grab a blanket or get a glass of water), or even how many people fast forward through the ads on your podcast? None of these things can really be measured. Neither attention or its corollary in this matter, awareness, can be measured.
Awareness is a concept and concepts can’t be quantified.
Now sure, there are proxies. A proxy for the concept of happiness could be laughter. But what counts as a laugh? Only guffaws, or giggles too? Is “hahaha” one unit, or do we count each “ha” separately? And what if there’s only a smile and no laugh? I don’t need to be visibly smiling to be happy. I’m happy to be sitting at my computer writing this right now, but I’m not grinning to myself as I do it!
Somewhere along the way, marketers decided that proxies for awareness would be follows, views, likes and comments. And yet… just because you can measure something in a certain way doesn’t mean you *should* measure it in *that* way.
Imagine that you are an artist of some sort. You have an offer for a piece of work that is valued at $1,000, but you only get that amount if 100 people are in the room. You’re going to do everything you can to get people to show up!
Marketers and influencers are operating in different value systems, different currencies, you could say. An influencer knows their audience is valuable. What’s more important, however, is what it took to earn that audience: “good” content (however the audience defines it). Marketers seem to primarily care about audience size; something that can be an indicator or a byproduct, but not necessarily reflective of, the quality of the work. In order for influencers to get due credit (and compensation), they have to create an exchange rate of sorts to get two different value systems to align.
I would not call Instagram comment pods “influencer fraud”. Instagram has its own opaque value system (the algorithm), so bloggers have to create their own proxies. Comment pods are an attempt by bloggers make sure they can get attention for valuable work that would otherwise be overlooked. Using the metaphor above, it would be getting your friends to show up.
What marketers and the media also need to understand is that blogging itself is a community. At various times in my own blogging career the “pod” construct has happened organically. Loop giveaways are another way for bloggers to reach new audiences, but also to support their friends. Plus, brands shouldn’t dismiss the benefits of influencers circulating content among themselves. I’ve bought shoes, clothes and hair products after seeing them featured by other bloggers. And I have, in turn, posted about them too!
This isn’t fraud as much as it is industry growing pains. I do not condone buying fake followers or unleashing internet bots to grow your following on the Internet. But the truth is that marketers are using metrics that don’t necessarily align with the value of the work being done. Influencers are trying to maintain and strengthen their positions and to equalize methods of exchange in the face of ill-fitting metrics and opaque algorithms; and, in the case of comment pods, banding together as a community in order to achieve this.
We, as an industry, have a responsibility to unflinchingly acknowledge all the forces at play — however inconvenient they may be.
Did I introduce myself? Probably not, because this is my blog. Day-to-day I am an account manager for an influencer marketing technology company. I work with brands and bloggers (and developers) on a daily basis. I wrote my M.A. thesis at Parsons on fashion blogging: a socio-anthropological study of fashion blogging. One more thing to mention — I’ve been a blogger for over 10 years. My most successful and longest running blog is the Fashionista Lab, which I started in 2009, and which inspired the research for my thesis. As a blogger I have worked with brands such as Macy’s, ModCloth, and Benefit Cosmetics. As a scholar my work has been published in the International Journal of Fashion Studies and the Fashion Studies Journal.
