The Influencers Are the New Wild West
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s campaign is paying social media influencers to inundate Instagram with messages. The campaign is reported to be offering social media influencers $150 to create content that tells why Bloomberg is “electable,” according to The Daily Beast.
Influencers are defined as people with 1,000 to 100,000 Instagram followers. The influencer market or peer market is growing as a worthy marketing audience. According to Horowitz Research, there is a growing “power of peers” on the internet. Yet information on a company’s website is also critically important (not just to search engine robots).
Ads appear to be low on the scale behind peer marketing and video, but it is important to note that the research showed good ads often get shared. Thirty-two percent say they “frequently or occasionally share ads they enjoy with others.”
Also worth noting from this research is the importance of video as a purchase influencer. “Unpacking videos” are video of people taking a product out of the packaging and talking about the product.
The idea of paid influencers/peers is the wild west of marketing. It is for certain going to be more regulated in the future. For now, influencers will continue to influence. Surprisingly, word of mouth advertising — is that traditional or old-world marketing? — has been around since the dawn of civilization and is still a strong, viable marketing technique. One we all should pay attention to.
At least that is what I’ve heard.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.