Don’t hate the player, hate the influencer marketing game.
Your team made it to the UEFA Euro 2016 Final and there is one last match to play. You versus Portugal. It’s still 0–0 and the match is about to go into a penalty shoot-out, but Eder scores an almost physically impossible goal for Portugal in the eleventh hour sending your dreams into a downward spiral of despair. Eder is the reason you can’t celebrate. Mon dieu, you curse the wind, you slam the gates and begin the world’s biggest tantrum. Your friend turns to you and says:
“Hey mon ami, don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
It is all too easy to pass blame on to people. But what’s the point of hating on Eder, when he was only playing by the rules of the beautiful game? You could apply the same analogy to influencer marketing.
Hating on influencers
Over the past year influencers have increasingly come under scrutiny. Some reports say that up to 20% of mid-level influencers’ followers are likely to be fake. Bots and bought followers are rife in the industry. And the more we look, the more shady dealings we see: in 2018 the New York Times found that 15% of Twitter users were automated pretending to be real people. Unsurprisingly there has been a backlash. Brands like Unilever have stepped up to say they are taking a stand against influencers with fake followers. And Instagram has announced plans to clamp-down on third-party apps that support influencer fraud.
Is it right to blame the players without questioning the game? Why did “vanity metrics” (i.e. reach and follower count) become so blindly important that impressive figures on a spreadsheet became the measure of success? Why did working with the biggest influencers rather than those with the most relevance to their audience become the desirable choice, when the very point of influencers was to find a more relatable marketing method? How did empowering third parties to communicate about brands and products their own way become so tightly coordinated that 70% of influencers feel they lack any creative freedom?
Buying followers and faking engagement are dirty tactics, but it was never a fair game. For all the influencers making money there are just as many feeling tied to a static, inauthentic identity. As we wrote about previously 23% of influencers do not feel they can be authentic when they produce brand-sponsored content. They also feel a great pressure to interact with their audiences at all hours and to always appear available without taking breaks. All of these factors take on their psychological toll.
Changing the rules of the game
The influencer marketing game might need some course correction, but there is no doubt it has value. A study conducted by Twitter and Annalect found that users report a 5.2X increase in purchase intent when exposed to promotional content by influencers.
That said, no one is under any illusions that there has been a major breakdown in trust between brands and influencers, influencers and platforms, influencers and consumers, brands and consumers, and well, just about everyone. So how do we get the trust back?
However fake or phoney influencers have come to be portrayed, authenticity is actually a #1 priority in determining whether they would work with a brand. Influencer marketing is effectively a collaboration between two different brands and in doing so, both brands are at stake. The influencer acts as a human ambassador for the company, giving a face to the corporate name. The value is lost if that human face and message feels heavily contrived and controlled, it’s really just straight back to blatant advertising.
If brands want the human face and message to be honest then they need to start with some truth and word-of-mouth recommendations are as truthful as marketing gets. They are honest endorsements from one person to another and not because the person was paid to say it. Word of mouth has a high potential to convert into sales and billions of word-of-mouth recommendations are made everyday online. The real challenge is turning them into a measurable, scalable marketing strategy: scale those obstacles and influencer marketing, and influencers themselves, have a better future ahead.
Bringing word of mouth to blockchain
This is where the WOM Token wants to bring change. Forget macro, micro or nano influencers for a moment. Disregard the vanity metrics. Just think about the qualities an influential piece of content would need to have to influence people to purchase a particular brand, product, service or experience. It would need to be honest, not paid for upfront. It would need to be relevant to the audience. And it would need to make the brand or product feel desirable. If it has met those criteria then it would need to be fairly rewarded.
The WOM Protocol works by creating an ecosystem of brands, creators, curators and platforms all working together. Genuine fans are encouraged to create recommendations for the products they love, it doesn’t matter whether the brand is globally known or a small independent. No brand can pay a fan to create promotional content, they can only contribute towards a rewards pool that ensures all content creators are rewarded in WOM Tokens for their effort. Curators step in to quality-check content before it gets rewarded to filter out anything fake or inauthentic. These are also members of the community who choose to earn their rewards by keeping the system honest. And above all participants sit a sophisticated set of checks and balances, such as staking tokens upfront — both by the creators and the curators — to eliminate the chances of foul play.
The WOM Token enables people to become advocates for their favorite brands. It gives influencers a more authentic way to monetize and a freedom of choice over who they promote. Passion, creativity and honesty are the key vital elements that can turn around influencer marketing and rebuild trust for everyone. The game isn’t over, the rules have just changed.
