Stop Being Surprised Who’s an Influencer. The Creator Economy Is Just Getting Started.

It seems the New York Times has embarked on a never-ending editorial series titled, “Did you know that this group of people are internet influencers? Weird!”

Observe a few samples: (titles are mine, not theirs)

• Brands are working with influencers aged 60+!?Weird! – June 2023
• Look at these Chinese grandparents who are influencers too! – November 2022
• Seriously, old people are influencers! So weird! – May 2022
• Again, grandmas are cooking influencers!?Weeeird! – January 2023
• Wait, old-school watchmakers are influencers too??Weird! – February 2023
• Dads are influencers??Weird! – June 2023
• Toddlers are also influencers! (this could get weird, actually) – March 2019
• Real estate salespeople are teaming up with influencers! – January 2023
• Political strategists are using knitting influencers! – August 2022
• And perhaps the original sin of weirdness: Gen Z shares all this stuff on social media?willingly! – May 2023

On the one hand, I get it. Influencers are still a source of fascination for many. Thanks to its Chinese roots (and the political drama surrounding it), TikTok is a flashpoint for how it fits into people’s daily loves. And even though the tech world has been discussing the creator economy for years, one could argue that we’re only starting to feel its mainstream effects. Without articles like these (and the many articles the NYT spawns elsewhere), many people would not be exposed to these concepts.

(Plus, the commonly discussed definition of an influencer is shifting away from its mid-2010s roots of Kardashian-esque celebrities, and toward a more modern meaning of everyday people with a couple of thousand followers on social media.)

On the other hand: if you work in PR, marketing, or advertising, none of this should surprise you. Why not?

• Social media has been around for a long time. If you consider the MySpace era as roughly the start of the mainstream social media era, that’s about 25 years ago. Some people have been using social media for a quarter of a century and enjoying it for one reason or another. What’s so surprising about that continuing as people age, become parents/grandparents, or shift interests? (also, become aware of your bias if you think all old people stop trying new things as they age. It’s not true.)
• The internet empowers niche interests and the flourishing of sub-cultures. As I’ve been talking about in my classes for half a decade (and many researchers smarter than me have said before that), social media empowers niche interests by giving them a platform to congregate. (So much so that I believe the next age of social media will see an atomization of audiences across various new social media networks that each empower separate niches.) The internet also opens cross-sections where various audience interests, demographics, and/or geographic interests meet; some call these intersections sub-cultures. The internet allows for the flourishing of a near-infinite amount of niche interests and sub-cultures: for example, the grandma cooking influencers or the knitting political influencers mentioned in the New York Times.
• The influencer economy has worked for many. Influencer marketing is no longer the sole provenance of those super-creative, Gen Z-centric brands: it’s a big business growing at a healthy clip. At its most basic definition, an influencer is merely a social media user that commands the attention of a specific audience of people. They’re voices that a group of people trusts by opting in to receive their messages by tapping “follow”. Marketers have used trusted voices to distribute brand messages since before the birth of America. Since people spend lots of time on Instagram and TikTok, it’s a logical next step for brands to explore how to use these channels to market to their target audience. After all, when smart brands form their marketing strategies, they work backward from where their target audience spends their time.

(disclaimer: I run growth at XOMAD, where we built an awesome proprietary tech to find and vet massive armies of creators, including hard-to-vet nano-influencers and micro-influencers. AMA if you’re curious.)

The lesson to be learned here isn’t merely that “your target audience uses social media”. You know that because you’re smart. The lesson here:

• Brainstorm how you can leverage the niche-empowering nature of social media. Think about where the internet opens intersections that enable the growth of sub-cultures desirable for your brand or campaign.
• Investigate where these sub-cultures congregate and who’s influential in that circle. Congratulations, you might have discovered the subject of a future New York Times article – and talent for a breakthrough influencer campaign for your brand.
• Plot out how your brand and this sub-culture collaborate. This potential campaign offers your brand an opportunity to be creative, but the campaign needs to remain authentic for the brand – and for how this sub-culture engages within its community, and on this topic.

Case in point: at XOMAD, we ran a successful campaign in partnership with the North Dakota Hospital Association (NDHA) to help them reach low-income residents and tribal communities In North Dakota with information about Medicaid re-enrollment.

That’s not a target audience one would expect to be influenced by social media, but we found the right creators who existed at the right intersections. Through a clear, authentic campaign, we helped NDHA distribute important information to hundreds of thousands of people they could help – all through an unexpected group of social media influencers.

Tl;dr: the influencer economy isn’t going anywhere and will only get more pervasive and complex in the years ahead. Learn about it now to keep pace.