Have you seen this documentary on Netflix called the American Meme? It documents these "social-celebrities" or "social-ebrities" who have made themselves famous just by being on social media. Paris Hilton is featured influencer throughout the documentary, mainly because she's sort of the grandmother of this industry, but it also features The Fat Jewish, Britney Furlan, Kirill, and a lot of other folks across the space.
Now because of this documentary and the recent Fyre Festival flick, influencer marketing has gotten into main stream culture, and a lot of people think it's these big massive influencers that we're talking about when we're talking influencer marketing. Their world is so different than the micro-influencers that we deal with on a regular basis. Here's why.
The social-ebrities have to do the next, most outrageous thing to sort of feed the beast because what they're selling is typically their personality. They have to keep doing the next big thing beyond what they did yesterday to keep getting their fans and their followers. When they get paid they often get paid for attending live events, they get a significant amount of money, and that's how they monetize their presence. If you watch the American Meme, it's actually kind of sad how grueling their lives are.
Now let's contrast that with the micro-influencers we work here with every day at Carusele. They may have 20,000, 250,000 total follows across their social networks, of course it can be more, sometimes it may be less, but these people are typically so different. They have a passion for fashion or beauty or fitness. Whatever sort of lifestyle thing they're really passionate about, they create content around and they wrap that in with sponsored content periodically. They tend to get paid frequently throughout the year, in smaller dollar amounts, for creating this content in their own environment.
So micro-influencers are who we're talking about and seeing driving sales for brands - it's so different than what you see with some of these celebrities featured in the Fyre Festival documentar and The American Meme documentary. It's important that in your head, this is not all influencer marketing. This is not just one broad brush that we can paint in the industry. So social-ebrities, micro influences, two really different things.