An article in the Washington Post about vaccine hesitancy caught my eye recently, but for a weird tangential reason. The post is titled “How wellness influencers are fueling the anti-vaccine movement“, and it is about how “influencers” are impacting the vaccination drive in America.
Glance at Jessica Alix Hesser’s Instagram page and you may feel a little like you’ve just opened up a pamphlet for a meditation retreat. Amid photos of lagoons and a waterfall, Hesser (eyes closed, one hand touching the side of her face) is awash in rainbow-hued lens glare or soaking in a bath with flowers floating on top. Her website contains blog posts recommending natural cardamom floss and Gregorian chants.
Sprinkled throughout, however, are posts where Hesser urges her nearly 37,000 followers to question the safety of the coronavirus vaccines. “Would you sign your children up to be part of a pharmaceutical trial and take them into a lab to get shot up with some experimental drug created by a criminal company?” she asks in one June post. In another from April, she writes that “many of you have heard about the large number of poke-free women” experiencing changes in their menstrual cycles “after spending time with people who got the jab.” Medical experts say that’s impossible. Hesser did not respond to requests for comment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/12/wellness-influencers-vaccine-misinformation/
But there are influencers and there are influencers, it would seem:
Still, it’s those with anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 followers — sometimes known as “microinfluencers” — who are believed within the marketing industry to have an especially outsize impact on their followers. In a post last year for a blog owned by the Association of National Advertisers, Lesley Vos wrote that social media users “don’t trust celebs or experts with more than 100,000 followers anymore.” Micro-influencers, on the other hand — and their even more niche cousins, nanoinfluencers, with fewer than 10,000 followers — can seem less sold-out and more authentic, approachable or relatable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/12/wellness-influencers-vaccine-misinformation/
So who are micro-influencers, and what is special about them?
Micro-influencers aren’t typical celebrities, experts, or public figures. They specialize in a particular vertical and share content about their interests only. Their audiences are hyper-engaged; so, if a brand works with a highly-relevant micro-influencer, it can extend the reach and user engagement significantly.
https://www.ana.net/blogs/show/id/mm-blog-2020-02-micro-influencers-better-content
No surprise: consumers are more likely to buy from someone they know and trust. So if a micro-influencer whom they follow recommends something, they’ll trust this recommendation more than a direct ad from a brand. It’s where word-of-mouth marketing takes the stage.
This, apparently, is different from the market dominated by influencers without prefixes:
The problem is that users don’t trust celebs or experts with more than 100,000 followers anymore. Only 4 percent trust what influencers say online: People understand they post about a brand because it paid them for this ad. Authenticity and relatability are more important than popularity now. So, if you still want to get the most out of your influencer marketing endeavors, make sure to focus on micro-influencers in 2020.
https://www.ana.net/blogs/show/id/mm-blog-2020-02-micro-influencers-better-content
Solve, as they say, for the equilibrium.
Hint: if we should be making sure to “focus on micro-influencers in 2020”, who should we be focusing on in 2021? 2022? 2023?
In plain English, here is what is happening: the incentive to monetize your following goes up with the number of followers you have. Alas, the folks who have reached “influencer” status have monetized their following a little bit too much, to the extent that there has been, it would seem, an erosion of trust.
That erosion is apparently across the board – for all influencers. Not just a particular influencer. And so the conclusion is that we should not trust influencers altogether, but rather trust micro- and nano-influencers. But then advertisers will want to, well, influence micro- and nano-influencers to influence their followers, and down the spiral we go.
I will note two things:
- There are a little less than four thousand people who follow this blog, and I can assure you that I have not been paid to hawk any good or service on these pages.
- I am not sure if I am a micro or a nano influencer, but if my urging you makes the *slightest* difference, please, go and get yourself vaccinated! 🙂
EconForEverybody 