Documentary - New Kings: The Power of Online Influencers (Influencer Marketing)
There have been so many changes in the past 30 years in the business that they're too numerous to count. The biggest one has been the increase of social media.
We come from a history of humanity that is all about communication between two people and then we go to a broadcast communication style for the last one hundred and fifty years. Once the public was allowed to communicate back with us and this two-way dialogue was established I think it was a game changer for not just the journalism industry but PR marketing across every industry and all sectors.
If there's any one change, it's going from the unusual to the ubiquity of digital and its impact not just on communications but on business overall. If we look at these social media influencers and their ability to publish and amplify content to large audience segments. This is a paradigm shift in how we do business today. Social media influencers are the new royalty.
Influencer has always been an important tool for brands because it is more powerful when someone else is talking about you or your product in a positive way than when you are. It gives you this third-party credibility, a sort of an endorsement. It used to be that the main influences we dealt with is public relations or media. About 5-10 years ago, the conversation used to be about what magazine covers you got on.
People don't even talk about magazines anymore. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit are the places where you see where the cultural conversation is going on, so we've had to adapt to what people are reading about. People are looking less for factual information and looking more for recommendations or what's hot or what people are talking about because not only do they want to have their time sort of mitigated by only paying attention to the things that that are hot or people are talking about they also want to be part of the conversation so those people friends, family people they may follow like influences that you're talking about, sort of sift through the madness and say out of the 300 things that are in front of you right now, these are the five that you should pay attention to.
We just used to have radio, television and print and now you have dozens of social channels for there ways to reach people and also have conversations with them. That changed the whole dynamic of our business. Remember it was novel that a brand would say "Oh my gosh people are talking about us". On Twitter what they do say and they would freak us out because of every little criticism. That really became an awareness of the power of it from a slightly negative standpoint but then there was a growing awareness that we can influence that conversation or we can learn from those valid criticisms and improve our products and build a better relationship by being good listeners and hearing from our customers.I
In the last several years, many companies have seen an opportunity to become much more aggressive about self-publishing, content creation and syndication. The attitude is if we don't tell our story, who will?
Technology social channels platforms and so forth, kind of provide a way in which they can do that so. You know virtually every company today sees themselves as a publisher of one sort or another. It's interesting what some of these large brands are doing now around content marketing. If you look at Marriott and their creation of their content studio, they're putting a flag in the ground and saying look we are a media company having said that, the impact of that Publishing and the impact of that syndication is still directly linked to how effective they are at getting influencers to embrace that content and share that content.
About 85 percent of consumers want more of a humanized two-way communication type of relationship with their companies on social and digital but only about 20 percent believe that that's actually happening. The way they used to create content was in a vacuum, one-way communications. They used to think about what's the new product what's the initiative that we really need to get there? Let's create a picture or a video and we'll put it out across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Now each platform has a different type of person who follows it. Those are different types of content and different types of people are consumers who are very savvy, especially the Millennials, Millennials with savvy, they understand what you're trying to do and if you try to sell them and try to push them they immediately see that to see and when this connection is non-organic they immediately switch the channel they immediately press stop on your browser player. The challenge is to find these content pieces that are obviously connected, to a certain extent, to the brand but also connected to the consumer on an emotional level. In order to do that, you need to really work with people who are part of that group, bringing in what we call now influencers.
I would say the first time I really noticed the power of influencers rising was when I was working at Google and I was helping launch Google+ and at first our primary focus was to identify celebrities. As we were working with celebrities, we realized that there were these other communities of people who had followings that were just as big, if not bigger, and maybe their numbers, when lined through the engagement was a lot bigger. The power that those influencers had in a lot of ways is actually more impactful than the power we saw with the celebrities.
On the internet, there are people who exist outside of that traditional power structure and traditional ways of getting their voice across. Maybe they blog but they're not a journalist but still have a significant following and a significant number of people that are listening to them. We've been influencing behavior one person to another forever but digital and social media have allowed for that to scale at scale is unprecedented. An individual who may or may not be of a postive authority or you know to be famous or have their television show or be a big personality of some kind, they can gain an audience over time and and be an influencer from their living room, from their computer. You know people often ask me why don't I reply to negative comments. That's because I only have two reasons. I really see influencers as the sort of real embodiment of the social media revolution for social media. We've seen tremendous changes from 2000 through 2017 first in the late 1990s and early 2000s the introduction of blogging platforms. We move from there to sites like YouTube that came along in 2005 which was very transformative in how we publish and consume video content. After 2005, we saw Facebook opening to the public, it was no longer only for university students. That became open to the public in 2006. That was the same year that Twitter also launched it was a sort of an odd little platform that had 140 characters on it. 2010 Instagram launched itself 2011 was the beginning of Snapchat that came along. Facebook then bought Instagram in 2012 and Twitter bought a vine platform in 2012. There was tremendous changes in growth.
If I had told you in 2004-2005 that your MySpace page or fabulously bedazzled MySpace page was no longer going to exist in a couple years, most people would not have believed me but the fact of the matter is social media the social web has changed maddingly, in the last 15 years. It's dynamic and doesn't stand still. Social media in general and YouTube specifically and really, all the platforms that have become famous at this point really didn't start as Commerce based society and today we're bringing you the winners who according to Forbes are making Bank this year.
YouTube started in 2005 just to tackle a technological problem at that time which was the difficulties in transfer video. It had no intention to become a video destination or to become an entertainment destination.
Tt was around 2010 or 2011 when once we figured it out the intellectual property protection system and we made peace with everyone that produces intellectual property that's when we started to understand that we had people at the platform creating content and aggregating a very large audience around their content.
Those audiences were going from these intimate crowds that they could know one-to-one into crowds that they were really performing for and know indirectly. They really went from a friend network to an audience and I think a lot of those creators realized that and started to refine what they were doing.
I am your host Corey Vidal and you're watching my show I'm trying to figure out what would make people come back to my videos and and what can keep people's attention for more than five minutes because people lose attention really quickly and this is probably getting too long so I'm going to cut right here,
As found on Youtube
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