There have always been loads of talented people, natural content creators with amazing and powerful skills to share – ones we would have loved to listen to, to read, to watch and to learn from. But until social media took off, you didn’t need only talent and skill to make it as a content creator; you also needed to be chosen. You had to land a record or book deal, an acting role, a job as a radio DJ or journalist, a residency as a comedian at a comedy club through a manager who would promote you and leverage their access to your chosen industry for a cut of your pay. You had to peddle your content from a soapbox that someone else owned. For about a century, key executives employed by large entertainment platforms mostly made the careers of content creators by choosing them – or not.
Cracks started to show around the turn of the century and, before long, the move away from this hierarchy gained such fierce momentum that it literally felt as though the earth was moving under our feet. Reality television shows such as Idols, Big Brother and Survivor elevated the Average Joe to Household Name nearly overnight. You still had to be chosen, but in this new century, the executive handed over the power to choose to the viewer, a tribe or a celebrity judge – in theory, anyway.
It was a very short journey from having Simon Cowell exercise that choice, to full on user-driven choice as we know it on social media now. Today, you are choosing who gets elevated to household-name status every time you like a post, save it, share it, download it, record it or comment on it – every time you spend more time scrutinising an influencer’s feed than you do your best friend’s.
As a creator you need to choose yourself, choose your audience and ensure that your content is chosen by them in turn. More risk, yes, but also loads more rewards. You don’t need to share nearly as much of your power with an executive and their overlords anymore. However, you do need to remain directly attuned to your consumer, your follower.
Because traditional media executives don’t have the final say about who we read, listen to, watch, laugh at and follow, I think we are increasingly picking our content creators based on more substantive things than their names. We have seen musicians launch new music albums with seemingly all-access documentaries accompanying their actual work, actively profiling and showcasing the real person behind the scenes.
To illustrate this: Lady Gaga makes music through the pain in Five Foot Two; Taylor Swift makes music despite sexual harassment and politics in Miss Americana; and, in 2017, Katy Perry lived in a Big Brother house of her own making (complete with live-streamed psychology sessions) during her YouTube live-streamed weekend called Witness World Wide. She did this to launch her album and generate interest in the themes of her new songs.
Strategists in the entertainment industry realised that we don’t only want Lady Gaga to deliver the fantasy of a spectacular live show; we also want to be able to relate to Stefani Germanotta. We want to know what she looks like without the Gaga get-up, whether she experiences hardships of her own and has family members just like us, because it’s about the followers. This is why the showbiz name, in effect, is over: your followers don’t want to be fooled – not all the time, anyway. You don’t need to choose a bogus name – just elevate the one you were given.
Should I be authentic or aspirational?
When I discussed this topic in quite some detail with Ridhima Pathak, one of my colleagues at the 2019 Cricket World Cup, she shared an interesting insight that underpins her approach to her work on social media.
Ridhima studied engineering but now works as a TV/digital presenter, popular event host and influencer, predominantly in India. During the tournament, she did quite a bit of influencer work, sharing a number of sponsored posts. In the evenings we’d go for a jog and I’d cheerfully share videos on Instagram Stories of my sweaty, red face on my run through the streets of Birmingham, while Ridhima took great care to carefully curate only the most manicured and polished images of herself and her environment for her own feed and stories.
Her theory was that because of the massive wealth gap in India, her broadest base of followers would probably never be able to travel to the United Kingdom themselves – certainly not for a Cricket World Cup tournament, but also probably not even as tourists. She saw it as her responsibility to ensure that her feed remained a form of escapism, of fantasy and aspiration for her followers, of ambition, yearning and desire. The basic idea was that even if I cannot go there and see this for myself, Ridhima is opening a portal into this wonderful world of glamour, wealth and adventure – how the other half lives.
Her approach was to give her followers a look behind the curtain only when it would inspire and delight them. She didn’t bother to include the hard slog that is involved when you’re scheduled to cover back-to-back game days, the late-night travel on jam-packed trains or the early-morning hours spent doing preparation and research. She could have shown the blisters you typically earn from the 30 000 steps we walked each day covering a cricket match, but instead she chose to focus on the excited fans she met.
Obviously, there is no empirically proven wrong or right approach here, but I realised then that I am very aware of the fact that my average follower (from their comments on posts and replies) tends to travel – or, at the very least, considers travelling to somewhere like the United Kingdom as reasonably possible at some point in their life. Travel is
