What is an influencer? – Stéphane Torregrosa

Andy Warhol once said: “ In the future everyone will have their quarter of an hour of world fame When he uttered this phrase in 1968, Andy Warhol was referring to the fleeting fame of those who are the object of mass media attention. Annoyed at being questioned so often about this statement, he eventually tried to confuse journalists by distorting the meaning of his statement.

Today we live in an era in which this phrase takes on all its meaning. If the fleeting nature of glory was already very present in 1968, not everyone had access to it. You had to stand out for your artistic talent, for a particular action or simply for your physique. Today everyone can make their voice heard, with more or less success, and it can be broadcast all over the world.

Furthermore, this can also happen against our will and cause the famous bad buzz so feared by communication experts. The development of the Internet has favored the appearance and influence of a greater number of opinion leaders, to the point that they can now exercise their influence without passing through traditional media, but through blogs or social networks. If we all influenced people in our inner circle one day, the influencer has an additional impact thanks to the community that follows him.

What is an influencer?

«Influencers ensure the maximum reach of their message thanks to the breadth of their networks, particularly on social media. Like bloggers and journalists, they must maintain independence of thought and expression as much as possible, to offer a non-biased opinion. »
Michele Brito
(reprinted on the influenza.net website)

This definition is already revealing! The influencer it is therefore not a megaphone that praises a brand. Furthermore, this is one of the important points in the brand/influencer relationship. You should never attempt to ban, silence, or hijack an influencer’s message. For the latter to maintain its legitimacy among its community, it is necessary that it does not appear as a simple brand ambassador, that it does not seem sold to it for a few gifts. He must maintain his independence and the brand must respect his freedom of expression in all circumstances.

This is certainly what generates one of the most important limitations of influencer marketing today. Most influencers today look more like sandwich men than real people with lives like any other.

In an ideal world, an influencer would be a consumer like any other who would provide their honest impressions. Unfortunately, the cult of the ego takes over and the influencers’ Instagram accounts resemble catalog pages artificially smeared to show a life as perfect but real as the wood of Ikea furniture. To summarize:

– An influencer is therefore a person capable of influencing the behavior of a significant number of consumers. Produce content, such as a blog or YouTube channel. He has acquired some expertise in his field, advises and recommends the purchase of a product or service.

– He is present on social networks or any other communication channel that can reach the public in significant quantities. Furthermore, we have seen YouTubers bridge the gap that separates the Internet from televisions (see cinema): Cyprien, Norman, etc. involved in advertising campaigns, etc.

– It brings together an active and engaged community. We’ll talk about this later in this article, but this is really one of the important points: the size of the community is not enough!

– It has a strong potential audience on the topic you want to address. It is essential not to just look for an influencer with a large community, it must correspond to your target. It is important to understand that not all themes bring together so many people, some are more attractive than others. If you talk about television, music, cinema, cooking, health, fashion, you have more interesting potential but also a more important comparison in terms of audience, if you talk about refrigeration systems or air fresheners for indoor environments, the interest perhaps will not be the same. In the end it happens that the topic is not important and that the focus is only on the popularity of the influencer among a segment of the population. Norman was then hired by Crunch and Orange due to his popularity among young people.

– He himself is committed to this issue. It happens that very different communities gravitate around a Twitter account and sometimes have little interest in what this account publishes. The fault of Following the Mass which I will talk about a little later. If the community is too disparate, that’s a bad sign.