Ah the challenges of having an original idea! In the process of transferring my longer-form posts here to my new domain JayOh.net, I find that the themes in my last post Influencer marketing: two speculative stories were prefigured by Tom Ewing over a year ago:

There are “influencers” who live in the world of “social media”, and if you influence these “influencers” they will say nice stuff about you and your brand will do better.

The reason they are “influencers” is that people who aren’t influencers - let’s call them, oh, “nobodies”, that’s catchy - anyway these nobodies listen to the influencers and spend money on stuff they mention.

So what you need to do is find a way of measuring who’s an influencer and who’s a nobody, and then be really nice to the influencers and give them free stuff - no strings attached of course, since otherwise you would go against BLOGGING ETHICS.

Of course in order to become influencers you need to have lots of nobodies who will listen to you. Some of them will be your friends, so what the brands are doing is giving you free stuff and specifically not giving it to your friends, in the hope that you’ll show it off to them.

This isn’t a brilliant concept of friendship TBH. It’s pretty much the way street teams operate but they’re aimed at 14 year old boys. The lack of reciprocity here also isn’t a problem if you’re a Social Media Rock Star and all your real life friends are Social Media Rock Stars too because they’ll also be getting the free stuff.

So, OK, what if you’re a nobody? (I am a nobody, by the way - I used to be an “influencer” but I guess I haven’t been tweeting enough lately.) DON’T WORRY though, you can easily become an influencer too. Then as your influence increases you will have nobodies of your own to influence and you will get free stuff too.

How do you get influence? Spend more time on social media building your “relationships”. A good start might be retweeting the influencers you know, so they notice you.

If you think this sounds like a massive Ponzi Scheme, you’d be COMPLETELY RIGHT.

Influencing the Influencer on tomewing.tumblr.com