Kaitlyn Tiffany was greeted with an email from Influencer Intelligence last Tuesday morning. Influencer Intelligence is an analytics company that works with people who desire to hire influencers and celebrities to advertise things.
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“Authenticity is the most critical attribute to building influence,” the company’s website reads. The email was about, as emails often are, a recently compiled report about the business of selling things on Instagram, which promised to “tackle the concept of what authenticity really means today.” The PDF’s cover was an image of a beautiful white woman wearing pink eye shadow and putting her hand to her mouth—which was, needless to say, open.
Inside, Kaitlyn found advice on how to determine the authenticity of an influencer.
Request Google Analytics information from her (to prove that her numbers “add up”), ask for quantitative results of previous “brand campaigns,” map her audience demographics—all told, fairly standard stuff. The report also suggested the use of “soft metrics,” which apparently entails looking at a person’s Instagram profile and taking note of the tone and frequency of her responses to her “audience,” judging how “natural and authentic the content feels,” and deciding whether the influencer really “lives and breathes what they are presenting.”
For Kaitlyn, it’s a weird question to ask a person if she’s authentically living and breathing what she’s presenting. After all, what she’s presenting is herself. “That’s literally how our body works.” But then again, what she’s presenting is not herself, and “that’s literally how Instagram works.”
Coincidentally, this email arrived the same day as a new essay collection by the New York fashion and culture writer Natasha Stagg, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, from Semiotext(e). Stagg is best known for her fashion work—particularly as an editor at V magazine—but Sleeveless also touches on her brief tech career. She remembers working on an app that could “recommend all the ways to become beautiful,” then an app that took “mood selfies.”
But the most interesting thing, at least perhaps for Kaitlyn, is that Stagg zones in on the question of what the modern “It Girl” is like.
But why is loneliness “the hottest trend in Instagram”? Find out over at The Atlantic.
(Image Credit: ijmaki/ Pixabay)
Source: neatorama