My wife and I were just talking about this today, coincidentally.
She follows a few people around the world who are artists or collectors on IG. She pointed out to me that when she started following some of them more than a year ago, they had a few hundred followers, and were posting general stuff, but which all felt heartfelt and 'in the moment'. I think 'genuine' was the word my wife used. Kids doing silly things. Artwork in various stages of completion, etc.
But now, she has noticed a couple of them have rocketed to over hundreds of thousands of followers, and their posts have changed to become quite soulless and fake. Obviously they have been engaged by a marketing or promotional company that sanitises and sets up their posts for them.
All of a sudden, an artist who was formerly struggling to raise a family and make meaningful work is announcing (and posting photos) that they are in [insert brand name here] health spa having a weekend pampering. Continuous shots of not the art or kids, but of bath products, massage companies, drink companies etc. all heavily hashtagged. Following up a few days later are pictures of the kids, but this time around a brand new laptop with the manufacturers name and laptop model hashtagged to the hilt.
As @sAbakumoff pointed out here - this is "Black Mirror" Season 3 Episode 1 come to life. I have nothing against someone doing promotional work to earn money to live, but I do have a problem with people portraying a totally fake and unrealistic life as a reality.
We are just seeing magazines starting to push back against "Generation Photoshop" and go back to 'real' shots of people again (Pirelli 2017 calendar a case in point), but are we now going to replace Photoshop with 'posed reality'? I know a lot of us do that to a certain extent on social media anyway, but not for discounts or monetary compensation, usually.
For anyone not familiar with French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, I recommend reading up on his ideas around 'posed reality', as it were.
____
"Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original.
Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable."
I guess(and hope) more and more people are going to accept the fact, most beautiful photos on social media are fake and crafted reality. The people appeared in a photo just like a cartoon character similarly. What you see is not reality but dream you want to live with. Just like you are watching a movie, sometime you can get out from the movie, but you know it is a movie deep in your heart
But that's not really the point of that episode. It dealt more with alienation and stigma associated with artificial social constructs that have real serious life-threatening consequences than undercover advertising.
Everyone seem to spot those ad-sponsored social network objects/constructs though so I don't know if things are that bad.
I have nothing against someone doing promotional work to earn money to live, but I do have a problem with people portraying a totally fake and unrealistic life as a reality.
They are simply responding to what people want to see. If people wanted to see real life then that's what people would give them.
People want inspiration and to feel like they are associating (by liking and commenting) with people they aspire to be like. That's nothing new, that's basic human behavior.
Same for me. I do rock-climbing (bouldering) and weight-lifting. I used to follow a bunch of "fit men" and "fit women" which were both fun to look at and a little inspirational.
These days the vast majority of the "fitness model"-type accounts exist solely to sell their diet/workout plans, along with supplements. Sometimes this is subtle, but mostly it is not.
>> I do have a problem with people portraying a totally fake and unrealistic life as a reality.
Knowing the real nature of life and your fellow human beings may have some undesired side effects. It may need a greatness of mind for not stopping to love them. Be careful what you wish for.
Sometimes it is better letting people to show a fake and unrealistic picture and acting the fool letting they think you belive what you see.
Unfortunately, society has made its choice that art itself is completely worthless unless artists engage in person cults. It'd be really nice if concepts like Pinterest could change this (in small ways, I'm sure they did).
You should check out the 'Ultimate Bill Hicks' DVD available. Amazon have got it at reduced price at the moment and it is excellent. I laughed and laughed.
Was just thinking about this recently as I started following a few people.
We are increasingly living in a world of fiction. Previously it was mainly fed through television. You'd grow up on television series, and as a young man/woman you'd try to be cool like them, dress like them, talk like them. You build your world view around "influential" portrayals.
Nowadays, we haven't freed ourself from media controlled television at all. It's actually worse, because now advertising is blurring the lines even more between real people and fiction. We eat and breathe fiction, then we live our own life trying to resemble it.
Nothing is new there. But what's new for me is I started to recognize that fiction in and of itself is probably as detrimental to our society as fear is. It's well known that fear drives self centered way of life and when we are in survival mode, we just don't make good choices and we lack compassion.
Lately I'm thinking that fiction, on a collective scale, is just as bad as fear. It keeps us unconscious. Just like fear it dissociates us from what we are, and from one another. It's really detrimental to us as individuals, and as a society. Unlike fear, it isn't immediately felt in the stomach.. so there is no sense of urgency.. And yet it is there... one just looks at the world to see the massive disconnect in our life on a day to day basis. I guess fear and fiction are best friends. Fear drives us to dissociate, and fiction provides the perfect happy place to dissociate.
I don't think that we are increasingly living in a world of fiction. We always have. It is human. Kids believe in Santa Claus, adults believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Some believe in Mohammed, Jesus, Jahwe, or Dharma. Some believe they will become rich in Silicon Valley, others on Wallstreet. Some believe in articles from mainstream media, some don't. Many people have dreams for their future, which is just fiction they are telling themselves.
You consider these thoughts dark or cynical. Why? Humans have built an amazing civilization with a global economy and messaging travel across the globe in milliseconds. We did all this as fallible meat bags believing in dreams and telling each other mostly false stories. That is a great story as well. ;)
I find my feed, even though filled with different people is really really repetitive. You've got the ones about their image, sometime sneaking in some never-heard of brand of protein you wouldn't give your dead dog, you've got the arty ones posting their latest work, you've got the "I'm only doing shots of my girlfriend from behind", the cute dogs with the outfits, and so on.
I swear if I could compare it to my timeline from a month, or 3 months ago, it'd be the same.
Turns out, even though a picture is worth a thousand words, we keep writing the same sh#$% over and over!
We live in a society where, because ad dollars drive so much of online commerce, attention _is_ currency. And right now influencer marketing is outperforming many other channels, so naturally a lot of money is headed this direction, allowing many 'ordinary' people to monetize.
I don't think this is a problem - I believe in the power of the internet democratizing revenue opportunities and disrupting outdated media channels.
(Bias disclaimer: I run a startup that helps brands find Instagram influencers to work with - won't plug it here but it's in my profile).
In one way, this is sponsorship taken to a micro level. And sponsorship is fine - and usually open, for the benefit of both parties.
But if I open a random influencer agency website, I can read something like this: "Influencers drive trust". The message here seems to be: Yes, trust is super valuable - and now the price is finally dropping! But is it really?
> “You sell part of your soul. Because no matter what beautiful moment you enjoy in your life, you’re going to want to take a photo and share it. Distinguishing between when is it my life and when am I creating content is a really big burden.”
I didn't realize just how realistic that Black Mirror episode was.
Such a weird article. It's written as if he already had a large following and got on to monetize it. But it looks like a fresh account and in the end, he failed to gain any real momentum. Which goes to show that establishing genuine rapport still matters. Why would you even go from posting cat pictures to vaguely fashion/glamor content? Bloomberg should do what these scouts do - find a person that already has traction and pay them to journal their monetization process.
So he hired a bot for a month to do 30,000 likes. Anyone wonder how many of his own likes are from bots?
All this social media advertisement seems like one big fraud to me - from profile farms to click frauds, has any of the people buying the ads actually attempted to verify the actual increase in sales? Or maybe it just looks good in powerpoints when showing to the clients where the money is spent.
There's a good chance if you do not recognize the user liking your post, it's a bot hoping to get a followback.
Yeah it's fraud up and down the feed, and it looks great in spreadsheets. IG provides metrics on profile views and website clicks, that's one way to measure engagement as bots will usually skip that.
She's just gaming a system that rewards her output. Whether the advertisers are getting a good return on investment is debatable, but apparently they are convinced that advertising on her channel is worth it.
The only drawback is that she might be investing a good part of her career in something that may prove prone to inflation and whim.
I only skimmed it, but I'm feeling this is exploring the world of fashion models more than Instagram per se, or at least being in that world incents a certain behavior.
It's fine to wonder if tech if serving us correctly, but also it's good to know that some people have very different lives from us, and thats ok too.
Influencer marketing will boom with the launch of social commerce.
But startups need to be careful about advertising regulation. If someone has paid for a promotion, then it will have to be tagged as such, like Sponsored Ad.
I don't think tagging with something like #ad or #sponsored does nearly enough, especially if hidden amongst a bunch of other tags. (edit: And #sp - are you kidding me?) Traditional ads are obvious through specific placement on the page (sidebars) and/or a prominent "Advertisement" or "Sponsored" label and/or moreover simply having the general look and feel of a 'traditional' advert.
When your favourite media personality is gushing about some product it's really easy to forget it's an advert and they're being paid for it. I know that's what makes it great for marketing purposes, but it feels seriously dishonest and (to me) represents a decline in our standards.
This is the sole reason why I liked snapchat. But now snapchat is getting so popular, the ads are being forced in my face. I'm gonna a probably jump ship to something less invasive.
In some literary critique sense, it does not so much seem hollow as it seems like authentic expression of our time. The fact that people authentically believe in success in social media does not invalidate their dreams.
I would have liked to see him continue the test without the photography, keeping just the bots and offshore friend farming - I have a feeling that's most of it.
TL;DR:
How to get Instagram followers:
- photo quality is very important, pay for a professional
- submit 3 posts a day, try to make them interesting, but that's only medium important
- pay for bot to like and comment on posts with similar hash tags, so their owners can see your profile and hopefully follow
- use offshore friend farm to boost numbers. They don't outright say it, but the last service had to be that. One day his followers surged for a couple of hours then stopped.
Presumably without the professional photography no one would be interested in buying advertising space (product placement, hashtagging brands) on his account, so you need a veneer of 'authenticity'. I guess that at a minimum this means having a model unique to your account (himself in this case) along with the other trimmings of an influencer (the muesli with lime curd blob type of shots).
Here is my recipe for a golden (if ephemeral) business opportunity:
* Live in a country with low costs of living, in a city with a historical city centre (backdrops! texture!)
* Have access to professional photography equipment
* Have access to a bunch of attractive, but cheap (hence the locality, think Odessa, Bratislava, or Baku) generic looking models
* Compose a team of decent writers and photographers
* Create 'inspired', 'authentic' Instagram profiles for each model, provide content
* Profit?
Don't forget to tag each post #bohemian. Guaranteed hit.
The most important is the 20hashtags/post and hiding them eight newlines to be below the fold. Bots can work, but are mostly for inflating numbers to try and game the explore page. Best to have a bot set up to follow other bots and let the hashtags funnel in organic searches.
It's a lame game though. Instagram is a crap platform anything other then mindless scrolling and gaming likes.
I wonder what will happen when AI is good enough to imitate real internet users and ad agencies just spin up some servers in some datacenter that handles millions of bots that are indistinguishable from real people and follow the formula of the influencers.
cyberferret|9 years ago
She follows a few people around the world who are artists or collectors on IG. She pointed out to me that when she started following some of them more than a year ago, they had a few hundred followers, and were posting general stuff, but which all felt heartfelt and 'in the moment'. I think 'genuine' was the word my wife used. Kids doing silly things. Artwork in various stages of completion, etc.
But now, she has noticed a couple of them have rocketed to over hundreds of thousands of followers, and their posts have changed to become quite soulless and fake. Obviously they have been engaged by a marketing or promotional company that sanitises and sets up their posts for them.
All of a sudden, an artist who was formerly struggling to raise a family and make meaningful work is announcing (and posting photos) that they are in [insert brand name here] health spa having a weekend pampering. Continuous shots of not the art or kids, but of bath products, massage companies, drink companies etc. all heavily hashtagged. Following up a few days later are pictures of the kids, but this time around a brand new laptop with the manufacturers name and laptop model hashtagged to the hilt.
As @sAbakumoff pointed out here - this is "Black Mirror" Season 3 Episode 1 come to life. I have nothing against someone doing promotional work to earn money to live, but I do have a problem with people portraying a totally fake and unrealistic life as a reality.
We are just seeing magazines starting to push back against "Generation Photoshop" and go back to 'real' shots of people again (Pirelli 2017 calendar a case in point), but are we now going to replace Photoshop with 'posed reality'? I know a lot of us do that to a certain extent on social media anyway, but not for discounts or monetary compensation, usually.
personlurking|9 years ago
____
"Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original.
Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard
pierrefar|9 years ago
Or ask your favorite search engine about FTC influencer marketing.
shellehs|9 years ago
icebraining|9 years ago
johnchristopher|9 years ago
Everyone seem to spot those ad-sponsored social network objects/constructs though so I don't know if things are that bad.
AndrewKemendo|9 years ago
They are simply responding to what people want to see. If people wanted to see real life then that's what people would give them.
People want inspiration and to feel like they are associating (by liking and commenting) with people they aspire to be like. That's nothing new, that's basic human behavior.
stevekemp|9 years ago
These days the vast majority of the "fitness model"-type accounts exist solely to sell their diet/workout plans, along with supplements. Sometimes this is subtle, but mostly it is not.
NumberCruncher|9 years ago
Knowing the real nature of life and your fellow human beings may have some undesired side effects. It may need a greatness of mind for not stopping to love them. Be careful what you wish for.
Sometimes it is better letting people to show a fake and unrealistic picture and acting the fool letting they think you belive what you see.
_pmf_|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
razakel|9 years ago
I adblock. I pirate. I don't use Facebook or other social networking sites.
I don't want advertising in my life. It's propaganda. It shits in your head.
If there's anybody reading this who works in those industries: you thought Generation X was cynical?
ikeyany|9 years ago
Angostura|9 years ago
mozumder|9 years ago
The entire purpose of life is to market.
You get up in the morning and brush your teeth so that you're more marketable than the slob that doesn't.
Everything you do can be traced back to marketing. The more people understand that, the better off they will be at handling life.
mememachine|9 years ago
johndoe4589|9 years ago
We are increasingly living in a world of fiction. Previously it was mainly fed through television. You'd grow up on television series, and as a young man/woman you'd try to be cool like them, dress like them, talk like them. You build your world view around "influential" portrayals.
Nowadays, we haven't freed ourself from media controlled television at all. It's actually worse, because now advertising is blurring the lines even more between real people and fiction. We eat and breathe fiction, then we live our own life trying to resemble it.
Nothing is new there. But what's new for me is I started to recognize that fiction in and of itself is probably as detrimental to our society as fear is. It's well known that fear drives self centered way of life and when we are in survival mode, we just don't make good choices and we lack compassion.
Lately I'm thinking that fiction, on a collective scale, is just as bad as fear. It keeps us unconscious. Just like fear it dissociates us from what we are, and from one another. It's really detrimental to us as individuals, and as a society. Unlike fear, it isn't immediately felt in the stomach.. so there is no sense of urgency.. And yet it is there... one just looks at the world to see the massive disconnect in our life on a day to day basis. I guess fear and fiction are best friends. Fear drives us to dissociate, and fiction provides the perfect happy place to dissociate.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
"But where is this other way of life?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY
qznc|9 years ago
You consider these thoughts dark or cynical. Why? Humans have built an amazing civilization with a global economy and messaging travel across the globe in milliseconds. We did all this as fallible meat bags believing in dreams and telling each other mostly false stories. That is a great story as well. ;)
eutropia|9 years ago
artur_makly|9 years ago
keyle|9 years ago
I swear if I could compare it to my timeline from a month, or 3 months ago, it'd be the same.
Turns out, even though a picture is worth a thousand words, we keep writing the same sh#$% over and over!
panorama|9 years ago
I don't think this is a problem - I believe in the power of the internet democratizing revenue opportunities and disrupting outdated media channels.
(Bias disclaimer: I run a startup that helps brands find Instagram influencers to work with - won't plug it here but it's in my profile).
j1vms|9 years ago
mtrn|9 years ago
But if I open a random influencer agency website, I can read something like this: "Influencers drive trust". The message here seems to be: Yes, trust is super valuable - and now the price is finally dropping! But is it really?
tempestn|9 years ago
I didn't realize just how realistic that Black Mirror episode was.
auganov|9 years ago
Illniyar|9 years ago
All this social media advertisement seems like one big fraud to me - from profile farms to click frauds, has any of the people buying the ads actually attempted to verify the actual increase in sales? Or maybe it just looks good in powerpoints when showing to the clients where the money is spent.
SuperPaintMan|9 years ago
Yeah it's fraud up and down the feed, and it looks great in spreadsheets. IG provides metrics on profile views and website clicks, that's one way to measure engagement as bots will usually skip that.
askdjso|9 years ago
She publishes all her "songs" on Youtube for free, and lives off sponsored content on Instagram and media appearances.
Is she lazy and getting "free-money"? no.
Is she talented? also no.
Freak_NL|9 years ago
The only drawback is that she might be investing a good part of her career in something that may prove prone to inflation and whim.
WA|9 years ago
sAbakumoff|9 years ago
platz|9 years ago
jokoon|9 years ago
razakel|9 years ago
It wouldn't be popular. People crave escapism.
The very fact that you're satirising exactly that is what defeats the purpose.
johndoez|9 years ago
Guyag|9 years ago
When your favourite media personality is gushing about some product it's really easy to forget it's an advert and they're being paid for it. I know that's what makes it great for marketing purposes, but it feels seriously dishonest and (to me) represents a decline in our standards.
nojvek|9 years ago
alkonaut|9 years ago
Idk who enjoys following what's essentially just an ad? You can get glossy ad pics in a magazine?
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
yk|9 years ago
In some literary critique sense, it does not so much seem hollow as it seems like authentic expression of our time. The fact that people authentically believe in success in social media does not invalidate their dreams.
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
thinkloop|9 years ago
TL;DR:
How to get Instagram followers:
- photo quality is very important, pay for a professional
- submit 3 posts a day, try to make them interesting, but that's only medium important
- pay for bot to like and comment on posts with similar hash tags, so their owners can see your profile and hopefully follow
- use offshore friend farm to boost numbers. They don't outright say it, but the last service had to be that. One day his followers surged for a couple of hours then stopped.
Freak_NL|9 years ago
Here is my recipe for a golden (if ephemeral) business opportunity:
* Live in a country with low costs of living, in a city with a historical city centre (backdrops! texture!)
* Have access to professional photography equipment
* Have access to a bunch of attractive, but cheap (hence the locality, think Odessa, Bratislava, or Baku) generic looking models
* Compose a team of decent writers and photographers
* Create 'inspired', 'authentic' Instagram profiles for each model, provide content
* Profit?
Don't forget to tag each post #bohemian. Guaranteed hit.
SuperPaintMan|9 years ago
It's a lame game though. Instagram is a crap platform anything other then mindless scrolling and gaming likes.
>exp: Went from 0-2k followers in a week
mrtksn|9 years ago
chris_wot|9 years ago
It's bad enough I use Facebook, but the Instagrams of our time are just ridiculous.