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Abstract

Social media influencers represent a highly visible subset of digital content creators defined by their substantial following, distinctive brand persona, and patterned relationship with commercial sponsors. Despite widespread variance in influencer practices and economies across sites like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, most earn revenue by promoting branded goods and services to their community of followers. Accordingly, because these endorsements are integrated into creators' own arsenals of content, influencer marketing is deemed more “authentic” or “organic” than traditional paid advertising. Influencers also function as digital tastemakers, providing their followers with advice, inspiration, and aspiration. Such standards of emulation are often embedded within a wider system of consumer capitalism that casts women as both shoppers and loyal brand advocates. More broadly, the influencer system is marked by disparities in gender, race, class, and aesthetics—inequalities that challenge the democratic framing of the social media economy.
Social Media Influencers
BROOKE ERIN DUFFY
Cornell University, USA
Social media inuencers are a subset of digital content creators dened by their sig-
nicant online following, distinctive brand persona, and patterned relationships with
commercial sponsors. To earn income, they hype branded goods and services to their
communities of followers; such promotional communication takes the form of informa-
tion, advice, and inspiration. Because inuencers’ brand endorsements are integrated
into their existing arsenals of visual, textual, and/or narrative content, their persuasive
communication is widely understood as more authentic” or organic” than traditional
paid advertising. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that inuencer mar-
keting has witnessed an astonishing uptick in recent years.
Despite the overall growth of inuencers, it isportant to acknowledge that their com-
munities and practices vary widely across platforms and sectors; some, moreover, con-
test the term “inuencer” given its unabashed marketing focus (i.e., the inuence they
purportedly wield is over consumer decisions) (for a discussion of the terminology see
Abidin, 2016). Further, while inuencers are called on to project their branded per-
sonae across the wider social media ecology, most establish themselves on a particular
social networking site—such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, or Weibo. evisuallyori-
ented platform Instagram lends itself particularly well to inuencer marketing; by one
projection, companies were expected to invest more than US$1 billion in Instagram
inuencers in 2018 (Mediakix, 2017).
esubgenresandnichesinwhichinuencers have found entrepreneurial suc-
cess are similarly kaleidoscopic. Forbes’ 2017 ranking of the Top Inuencers,” for
instance, catalogued leader-tastemakers across such areas as fashion, beauty, tness,
parenting, travel, pets, entertainment, tech +business, home, food, kids, and gaming
(Forbes, 2017). With few exceptions, these categories adhere to normative gender
scripts: while female content creators dominate fashion, beauty, and parenting, the
genres of comedy, technology, and gaming are populated by male creators. is
marked division attests to the extent to which stereotypical gender roles inherited from
traditional media—such as women’s magazines and comedic entertainment—become
translated into new cultural contexts (Bishop, 2017).
While social media inuencers are undoubtedly a product of the digital zeitgeist,
their practices harken back to one of the earliest forms of marketing: word of mouth
promotion. By the early 20th century, community-based marketing practices had taken
on a recognizable form, with retailers seeking to harness the presumed trustworthiness
of ordinary citizen-consumers—most especially women (Serazio & Duy, 2018). More
contemporary promotional practices, including multilevel marketing and o-line
brand advocacy, oen deploy a predominantly female sales force to meld sociality
eInternationalEncyclopediaofGender,Media,andCommunication.KarenRoss(Editor-in-Chief),
Ingrid Bachmann, Valentina Cardo, Sujata Moorti, and Marco Scarcelli (Associate Editors).
©2020JohnWiley&Sons,Inc.Published2020byJohnWiley&Sons,Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781119429128.iegmc219
2SOCIAL MEDIA INFL UENCERS
with consumerism. Campbell’s (2011) notion of the “labor of devotion provides a
useful framework for understanding the gendered nature of these persuasive tactics:
brand executives operate under the assumption that men loyally consume their
favorite brands, whereas women actively promote their favorite brands to other
women” (Campbell, 2011, p. 494; emphasis added). Industry discourses about the
value of online product recommendations for female shoppers also reify beliefs about
the gendering of consumerism while providing a foundation for understanding the
staggering ascent of inuencer marketing.
Inuencers are also considered more sincere or trustworthy sources of information
and advice; thus, their communicative practices tap into the wider cultural appeal of
authenticity. Indeed, today’s inuencers are oen cast as individuals “just like us”; as
such, they temper their promotional messages with expressions of realness and ordi-
nariness (Duy, 2017). Despite—or perhaps because of—this emphasis on relatability,
the inuencer economy also draws on the conventions of traditional celebrity (Hearn
& Schoenho, 2016). It is in this vein that scholars like Sen(2013), Marwick (2015),
and Abidin (2016), and others, suggest that contemporary inuencer strategies can be
understood through the framework of microcelebrity, or “the concerted and strategic
cultivation of an audience through social media with a view to attaining celebrity sta-
tus” (Khamis, Ang, & Welling, 2017, p. 196). Both careful impression-management and
deliberate acts of self-branding are central practices among inuencers.
Presumably, the comingling of authenticity and brand promotion raises critical ques-
tions about the ethics of inuencer marketing. To reconcile these seemingly conicting
imperatives, inuencers supply a common refrain: they only promote products or ser-
vices that they really love; such aective statements serve as a buer against critiques of
crass commercialism. Yet it is precisely such imprecision that makes the inuencer mar-
keting industry dicult to patrol—especially given regulatory guidelines across many
West e r n nati o n s mand a t ing th a t i nuencers must disclose product sponsorships.
In recent years, social media inuencing has undergone a process of industrialization,
as evidenced by the emergence of social media talent agencies along with management
companies oering to broker deals between brands and inuencers. Aliate adver-
tisers, in particular, are billed as resources to help content creators monetize their
promotional eorts. rough apps like LIKEtoKNOW.it, social media users express
interest in products worn or showcased by their favorite inuencer; revenue earnings
are based on the percentage of these recommendations that are converted to sales.
Inuencers operate in a currency of exchange exclusive to the so-called attention
economy: social media metrics. To monetize their following, content creators must
demonstrate their ability to wield sway with veriable evidence: YouTube subscribers,
Instagram/Twitter followers, Facebook Likes, and Weibo comments—along with
more elusive symbols of engagement” or “impact.” Marketers have also developed
a new industry vernacular to describe those social media personalities with smaller,
but ostensibly more engaged, audiences: micro-inuencers,” “mid-tier inuencers,”
“mega-inuencers,” and “macro-inuencers.”
In an age when entrepreneurship is a much-hyped career goal, it is perhaps not
surprising that “YouTuber” and social media star rank among young peoples top
career choices (Weiss, 2017). Our cultural celebration of careers born of digital media,
SOCIAL MEDIA INFL UENCERS 3
however, glosses over a less auspicious reality about social media inuencers. For one,
this career requires considerable labor behind the screens, as individuals are expected
to dedicate time and energy to creating, editing, and promoting their content. Young
women, who have long been expected to provide “soskills” in both personal and
professional pursuits, face these demands accurately.
Moreover, despite considerable attention lavished on inuencers who have achieved
staggering fame success, social media sites are also brimming with aspiring inuencers.
Instead of free trips, those lacking the requisite digital sway are expected to pay their
own way to events, an investment that they hope will “pay o”throughsocialand
economic capital. Instead of free swag, lower and middle tier bloggers are compelled
to invest their own capital in the latest fashions and accessories. eir expressions of
brand devotion are undercompensated, leaving participants to shill brand merchandise
in exchange for free products or the mere promise of exposure (Duy, 2017 ) .
Not only do few content creators make a living as a full-time inuencer, but those
who do tend to conform to existing cultural codes. Indeed, marketers’ denition of
social media inuence is a narrow one that unfolds within what Banet-Weiser describes
as “preexisting gendered and racial scripts and their attendant grammars of exclusion”
(Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 89). einuencer economy, in other words, remains marked
by the same imbalances that have long dened the media and culture industries.
SEE ALSO: Celebrity Bloggers and Vloggers; Vloggers
References
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Further Reading
Ashton, D., & Patel, K. (2018). Vlogging careers: Everyday expertise, collaboration and authen-
ticity. In S. Taylor & S. Luckman (Eds.), enewnormalofworkinglives(pp. 147–169). Cham,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Consumer Culture, 8(1), 197–217.
Luvaas, B. (2017). What does a fashion inuencer look like? Portraits of the Instafamous. Fashion,
Style, & Popular Culture, 4(3), 341–364.
McQuarrie, E. F., Miller, J., & Phillips, B. J. (2012). emegaphoneeect: Taste and audience in
fashion blogging. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(1), 136–158.
Pham, M. H. T. (2015). Asians wear clothes on the internet: Race, gender, and the work of personal
style blogging. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rocamora, A. (2018). elabouroffashionblogging.InL.Armstrong&F.McDowell(Eds.),
Fashioning professionals: Identity and representation at work in the creative industries.London,
UK: Bloomsbury.
Brooke Erin Duyis an assistant professor in the Department of Communication,
Cornell University, New York, USA. Her research interests span social media and soci-
ety, gender and feminist media studies, and the impact of new technologies on creative
work and labor. She is the author of (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gen-
der, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017) and Remake,
Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013). In
addition, her work has appeared in New Media & Society, the International Journal of
Communication, Information, Communication & Society, and Social Media +Society,
among others.
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The notion of self-branding has drawn myriad academic responses over the last decade. First popularised in a provocative piece published in Fast Company, self-branding has been criticised by some on theoretical, practical and ethical grounds, while others have endorsed and propelled the idea. This article considers how and why the concept of self-branding has become so prevalent. We contend that it parallels the growth of digital technology (particularly social media) embedded in the current political climate: neoliberal individualism. Another objective here is to imbue the concept of self-branding with a marketing perspective and show how the ‘celebrities’ of self-branding manifest at a marketing media nexus distinct to the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Building on literature from mostly media and cultural studies, this critique sees self-branding as a distortion of key branding principles that has obvious implications for its practitioners and advocates. The article shows that, despite inherent tensions and problematic ironies, self-branding persists through the rise of Social Media Influencers; we consider three of these whose fame and following was achieved via the practices and phenomena under consideration.
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The rise in ‘entrepreneurial vlogging’ has attracted widespread attention in the global media, with articles emerging about the superstar vloggers who are earning a lot of money for pursuing their professed passions. The phenomenon of vlogging is positioned as something that ‘anyone’ can do, with YouTube appearing to offer the opportunity to combine freedom of creative expression with the possibility of making a living. The idea that anyone can vlog and make a career out of it is pervasive, yet only a few manage to do so. For those who are successful, there follows hostility from some critics (Bish, 2014) and stories of failure. Some of the most popular vloggers attract a great deal of criticism for attention-seeking when seemingly doing little more than sitting in front of the camera and talking. Critique that focuses on the celebrity however, tends to obscure the additional labour that is involved alongside the creation of video content. The effort in designing, creating, and sharing that goes into these videos is little acknowledged. These complementary activities and the specialist subject knowledge that is often in evidence highlight the expertise required by vloggers. To examine vlogging’s status as part of the ‘new normal’ of cultural work, we show how signalling expertise is a key aspect of vloggers’ online self-presentation as they build their cultural work career. This chapter is organised into two main parts. In part one, we reference a range of media sources to examine the increasing public visibility of vlogging as a cultural work career. Of particular note is the curiosity around vlogging as a commercially viable undertaking and the how-to guidance materials that have emerged to steer would-be YouTube entrepreneurs onto a successful path. The notion of career paths is particularly relevant to our discussion of the ‘new normal’ and the ways in which vlogging can be understood both as a stepping stone towards established careers in media, journalism, fashion and so on, and as a distinctive occupation in its own right. In bringing together a mixture of ‘how-to’ materials and more general journalistic coverage, we consider how ‘starting up’ and ‘sustaining’ oneself as a vlogger are explored. Having considered some of the broader stories of the successes and failures of vlogging and questions of career-building, part two examines the importance of expertise for vlogging careers. In part two, we specifically focus on how expertise is signalled by four prominent vloggers from around the world: UK, Ireland and Korea. The vloggers were involved in gaming, fashion, make-up and comedy. These areas were chosen because they require a degree of knowledge and skill on behalf of the vlogger, and we wanted to analyse how such forms of expertise were presented. We analysed the social media presence of each vlogger to address how signalling-expertise strategies may be tailored to suit multiple platforms and multiple audiences. Our discussion for this chapter focuses on two themes from our analysis. The first is the ways in which associations with other vloggers formed an important part of how they signalled their expertise and helped to attract more fans. The second is the ways in which expertise is signalled in the staging of authentic vlogging identities and locations. Beyond the more obvious work involved in creating and uploading a video, our analysis highlights the extensive range of other activities and undertakings that help to signal expertise as vloggers negotiate their ‘career’.<br/
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While several critics have analyzed the rise of the ?micro-celebrity? in the online era, few have worked to historicize the developments. Assessments of ?micro-celebrity? also tend to ignore the central role played by celebrity/brand measurement mechanisms, in and through which celebrity value is identified and determined. This chapter attempts to fill these gaps by providing a historical sketch of expressions of celebrity value in the twentieth century: as product, industry, property, endorser and brand. It traces these processes as they appear in the phenomenon of the reality television participant in the 1990s and 2000s and the internet micro-celebrity, specifically the social media influencer (SMI), in the twenty-first century. The chapter then focuses on contemporary ?influence? measurement metrics. Finally, it critically assesses how and in what ways celebrity value may have changed, and who really benefits from the dispersal of the logics of celebrity value-production in the age of social media.
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Influencer commerce has experienced an exponential growth, resulting in new forms of digital practices among young women. Influencers are one form of microcelebrity who accumulate a following on blogs and social media through textual and visual narrations of their personal, everyday lives, upon which advertorials for products and services are premised. In Singapore, Influencers are predominantly young women whose commercial practices are most noted on Instagram. In response, everyday users are beginning to model after Influencers through tags, reposts and #OOTDs (Outfit Of The Day), unwittingly producing volumes of advertising content that is not only encouraged by Influencers and brands but also publicly utilised with little compensation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Instagram Influencers and followers in Singapore, this article investigates the visibility labour in which followers engage on follower-anchored Instagram advertorials, in an attention economy that has swiftly profited off work that is quietly creative but insidiously exploitative.
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Given its corporate ownership, iVillage.com constitutes a useful case study of the forces shaping online communities in the midst of what has been identified as television-Internet convergence. Not only does iVillage.com complicate conventional understandings of online communities, it also offers compelling insights into how media corporations construct online markets along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. By positioning online communities as vehicles for the targeted delivery of brand messages, media corporations seek to render these online communities commodities in much the way they have historically sought to render commercial television audiences commodities that can be sold to advertisers. Building on the work of Smythe (1977), Jhally and Livant (1986), Terranova (2000), Andrejevic (2004), Postigo (2009), and Bermejo (2010) this study identifies a new mode of consumer work emerging from these corporate-engineered online communities-the "labor of devotion" -where consumers participate in the promotion of corporate brands through interactive media.