At a London influencer festival, attendees crossed out "influencer" and replaced it with "creator." The host, who worked with bloggers since 2007, traces how the term shifted from "blogger" to "influencer" to now being seen as pejorative, with creators preferring longer-form content over Instagram posts.
Hey everybody, welcome to episode 3 of Influence Unpacked. And today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about an article I read in Vice, of all places. They don't seem to be very friendly towards influencer marketing judging by the articles they write or the The way they present it. But nonetheless, this particular article caught my eye, and it's about an event called Borderless Live, and it took place in London, and it's a self-proclaimed influencer festival. Now, I don't know anybody that's been to it, at least not that I know of, and if anybody has, I'd love to hear what they thought about it. But the point of the article is this: the reporter goes to the event and with the idea of learning a little bit more about influencer marketing and some of the things going on there and what the influencers themselves think about this whole phenomenon. And it was interesting because it seems that according to this article and the way the reporter wrote about it, the people that he spoke to indicated that the word influencer, the term influencer, the label influencer is becoming a pejorative. So it's something to shy away from. It's not a positive. And there was even some signage at this particular event that had the word influencer crossed out and the word creator underneath it with a little winky emoji. So it's interesting to me because when I started in the business, you know, in 2007, 2008, the word influencer really wasn't even used. I mean, we used to just refer to these people as bloggers because that's what they had. They had blogs and we were trying to work with them to entice them to write about our products and services and things like that, or my clients' products and services. So bloggers, long-form content was very much the item of the day and that's what you wanted to get. But that leads me into the other aspect of this particular article. And it wasn't just about the term influencer, the label influencer, and how it was becoming a negative and something to shy away from. But it was also about how they wanted to write more long-form content and get back into doing more blogging or vlogging, you know, videos, things like that. So it was less about the ephemeral content on Instagram, maybe even Twitter, places like that, and more about the long-form content that they were creating in terms of blogs and YouTube videos and things like that. So I found that to be really interesting because many of the influencers that I deal with for myself, for my clients, most of them don't refer to themselves as influencers. That's a term that we marketers tend to use, but they themselves don't. They refer to themselves as webinar hosts, bloggers, vloggers, just writers, things like that, content creators. I've had one for years telling me I'm not an influencer, I am a content creator. I just happen to create videos. Okay, so maybe the circle's coming back around. I don't know. So I found it interesting. It'll be interesting to see where this leads if it continues. Because the term influencer has come to mean many different things, as I've talked about before in my first episode of this particular series. The term influencer itself to many different people means different things. So I'm curious to what some of you out there think about this. Personally, I see this trend kind of continuing, I think. I think that the word influencer within influencer circles is going to be used less and less. At least on some platforms like YouTube and other places where people post their content, publish their content. Perhaps not on Instagram. I don't see it changing anytime soon. But these other ones, I can see it happening. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please drop a comment, shoot me a message, whatever you want to do. Really curious about what the rest of you think too. Thanks.
