Influencer Hell
A few years ago I read about a simple music teacher in South Korea that was eking out a living doing one-off music lessons. Then someone gave him the suggestion that he take his craft online and start leveraging himself by offering his lessons over the internet. The idea was initially about sourcing more clients through digital marketing, but also to create a network effect by allowing more students to access his supposedly unique teaching style simultaneously. I imagine he wanted to add to his meager subsistence and was not looking to build a business. However, in education-crazed South Korea, his music lesson product struck the right chord and his online teaching took off. In a very short while, he had become a phenomenon and he was raking in more than $5 million per year and going strong. As I tried to look up the story that popped into my memory, I found countless similar stories about teachers of all kinds, beyond music, earning many millions by taking their teaching skills and leveraging them online. That is a happy note since I suppose we all feel that teaching is a very noble profession that has been meaningfully underpaid and thereby undervalued in our society. I often said to fellow Wall Streeters that the day we added as much value as a fifth grade teacher was the day they could brag about their accomplishments.
I have also seen repeated stories about influencers in today’s world of social media. I never much cared for the notion of popularity in high school or college. I’m certain it had something to do with the fact that while I wasn’t unpopular, I was a long way off from being one of the “in” crowd that rode on a wave of popularity. I never went to a school that had a homecoming king and queen and it was just as well since I would never have made it onto the ballot, even under the most unusual of circumstances. I got my share of awards, but they were always achievement-oriented awards and not based on how cool I was or how many people liked me enough to vote for me. In my senior year in high school, with a class of only 54 boys who wanted nothing to do with anything resembling institutional identification and promotion, I could only get elected Treasurer of my class, presumably because someone thought I would be good at the task. The popular roles as President or Vice President were simply not on the table for me.
In college, I tried to run for Vice President of my fraternity and got defeated resoundingly and ended up as the Pledgemaster, which had minimal status and maximum workload. It was one step up from House Manager. I did rise to be the President of the largest student agency in my senior year, but that was not an elected position, but rather one appointed by one of the Associate Deans, who thought I would do a good job with the task.
Self-awareness is an important personal attribute in my opinion and I have always thought of myself as reasonably self-aware. That may be like thinking you have a good sense of humor when you don’t, but I don’t think that’s the case. I sort of understand why I don’t get highly ranked in terms of broad-based popularity. To begin with, not being a slim handsome sort, but rather a big beefy (aka Fat) guy automatically makes popularity much harder. Sad that such superficialities matter, but they generally do unless you are in Polynesia or somewhere where size is a symbol of greatness. But perhaps more importantly than that, I am simply not a “get-along-at-all-costs” guy who has ever learned how to keep my mouth shut. If I have an opinion, I tend to state it. Opinions can garner support or negativity, but they always bifurcate the audience and good politicians know that’s not something you should do if you can avoid it. Also, I probably have too good of an opinion of myself and that usually comes through to people and is generally not so good at getting people on your side. Psychologists will tell you all day long that you need to like yourself and that pleasing yourself is the only thing that really matters in life, but that certainly isn’t a natural recipe for popularity since you only get one vote about you. Since I do think those traits more often than not give you an edge on the road to success, writ large, I guess I would have to say that I cared more about success than being Mr. Congeniality.
Influencers seem to me to be people who other people like and want to be like. That is the nature of influence. Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936. It sold over 30 million copies worldwide and became a phenomenon that both launched the modern self-help category at the bookstore and probably started the whole Influencer trend.
I was impressed when I heard that a piano teacher was earning millions by leveraging himself online. When I started to hear about the big bucks that Influencers were making online, I was not so much impressed as I was agog. I remember wondering who Paris Hilton was once, many years ago, only to be told that she was a celebrity who’s grandfather was Conrad Hilton and that as an heiress and socialite, who had become the “It girl” in Vanity Fair, she was a celebrity. She wasn’t really a model (though she dabbled in modeling for Donald Trump). She wasn’t an actress, singer or author, though she sort of eventually did a lot of those things without much acclaim. She was a celebrity and perhaps an early Influencer before Social Media really started mass-producing Influencers. I understand Influencers that earned their chops in athletics, entertainment or even academics (think Carl Sagan), but the Kardashians of Jenners and the like are a stretch because the notoriety seems to have come before the accomplishment (I am ignoring Bruce’s Decathlon win). But if you look at the people that are the most influential on the broadest social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, What’App, You-Tube and Tik Tok, they are mostly names you have never heard of (or at least I hadn’t). They have as many as 40 million or more followers and they make eight figures or more just for sharing their preferences and thoughts. I suppose there is little difference between Endorsers and Influencers, but endorsements seem precise and purposeful where influence, by its very definition is “the power to cause changes without directly forcing those changes to happen”. I think it must speak to the power of subtlety in today’s media world.
We are all amazed by the happenings around FTX, the monstrous $32B cryptocurrency exchange that slipped on a massive banana peel and has declared bankruptcy after only a few days of awareness that anything was not right. This situation is still in the “getting worse” stage with new revelations every hour showing more and more disarray and malfeasance inside this large and arcane network that had over one million clients. Every foundational cause of ethical issues is in evidence, money, power, ego and now fear (even sex and justice, if you believe those are root causes).
Today, I see that the celebrities or Influencers who were recruited by FTX to make ads for them, including Tom Brady, Shaquille O’Neal and Larry David, are being sued along with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) in what is trying to be a class action suit for misleading investors by enticing them into the exchange. Should anyone have ever trusted athletes or entertainers about jumping into the deep end of the crypto dark pool? What I find so funny, is that the ads featuring Larry David are actually humorous contrarian ads suggesting that he doesn’t believe in crypto. That, or course, will be argued to be the essence of reverse psychology. All of these named influencers will wish they never heard of FTX as their lives, perhaps their fortunes, and maybe even their very reputations are forever altered by thinking “where’s the harm in shedding a little influence?” Welcome to Influencer Hell.