The class-action lawsuit against the influencers and the promoters was eventually withdrawn, but this wasn’t the last the influencers would hear of it.
Multiple influencers – including Jenner – were [also] subpoenaed by the Bankruptcy Trustee in the main Fyre Festival case against the organizers to uncover information regarding Fyre Media’s financial affairs [i.e. where did all the money go?].
In the United States, the body tasked with policing sponsored content on social media, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has tried to stem the tide at the source.
The FTC has pursued a claim against Warner Bros. for hiring influencers to promote one of its games without disclosing that they had been paid ... Of course, influencers should not be held as responsible for the actual perpetrators of the fraud, such as the organizers of the Fyre Festival. But, they should be held moderately responsible for their role in assisting and disseminating fraud.
What Fyre Festival exposed, outside of its inept promoters, is how the lack of regulation in the industry could ultimately cost influencers and consumers dearly. Maybe you’re wondering why the influencers should be the ones asking any further questions of the brands they work with. The influencers were involved only in the promotion of it; they’re not shareholders of the event, after all. They did their job, got paid and went on with their lives.
Not so. Whether you have to avoid a lawsuit or just plain old brand damage, being an influencer on social media is very different to being a model in a traditional advertising campaign. Honour, integrity and trust are essential qualities for being an influencer. Real people cut through the noise, mostly thanks to trust. You always run the risk of an unscrupulous influencer campaign coming back to bite you. Your integrity might survive it, but it also might not. Do you want to risk finding out the hard way?
Luckily, there is a simple way around this: Would you buy shares in this company with your own money? If so, work with them as an influencer on a campaign. Would you meddle with the metrics of a company you own shares in, if it meant you’d only be doing yourself in? No. So don’t do it to your clients.
Instead of thinking of yourself as an “influencer”, think of yourself as a shareholder.
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WHERE DO YOU START?
Being “popular” is not the same as being an “influencer”
Joe Scott agrees:
Anyone can be an influencer. Popular spaces like beauty, fitness and lifestyle are competitive and a bit saturated, but it’s not impossible. Truthfully, one’s influence is more about the quality of their content and consistency of output. A good example of this would be The Elegant Oxford. With over 100k subscribers [across platforms], this influencer built a following based on his dress-shoe restorations and shoe-shines. He was even invited to the Allen Edmonds factory with a select few influencers to witness how their shoes are made from end-to-end. That’s about as niche as it gets.
“Begin with the end in mind.” This is one of my favourite habits outlined by Dr Stephen R. Covey in his iconic self-help book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
This is a timeless bit of advice, particularly when you find yourself at the start of a new project. Covey elaborates on this idea by pointing out that “the physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint”.
What is your blueprint? Mine is that an influencer is someone who creates content – content their audience enjoys so much that they interact with it. The engagement you gain from using your social media soapbox well can then be leveraged for money by partnering with brands.
Sometimes this relationship starts off as a barter: a brand gives you something that is naturally useful to you; you reciprocate by delivering content worth a similar amount in cash; you tag them in the content, allowing them to repost and engage with you. Progressing from this stage to actually generating cash from this content-producer adventure might feel like the point where you go pro. After all, in sport we consider athletes to be professionals when they start making money from their sporting pursuit.
However, in the influencer industry, true professional status arrives when you build repeat business – when you deliver such consistent value that the same agencies, brands and people you worked with before start coming back for more. That’s when you’ve created a sustainable business.
Many influencers still squirm when you call them influencers, even the very successful ones. Others love it. My theory is that it depends on what you had in mind at the beginning of your journey on social media. Did you start off with “influencer” on your vision board? Was it the heading of your blueprint? Or is influence simply a by-product of a pursuit that stretches beyond your work on social media? Do you – deep down – prefer to consider yourself an entrepreneur or a storyteller? The latter is partly true for me. I am not uncomfortable with the title “influencer”, but I do think that I exercise the same skill and obsession on my social media platforms that I continue honing and shaping in radio, TV, digital content and in writing. It’s something I have always been doing in one way or another.
Adam Liaw is a Malaysian-Australian cook, television presenter and author. He was the winner of the second series of MasterChef Australia but tweets about parenting, race and the influencer industry nearly as much as he does about food.
When I was 11 years old, my class at school had to do oral presentations on the weather – I think it may have been for English. Pre-teen Elma then drew a poster of a very basic weather map and wrote a short weather-reporter script, closely modelled on what I had seen weather reporters do on television. My teacher was so delighted with the initiative I had shown that she took me around to other classrooms and
