Social Media Influencers: Unilever's influencer campaign in Germany

[Music] This is the Digital Corporate Communication Podcast. Hello, I'm Dr. Mark Battom. And I'm Professor Villaluma-Loha Maho. Together we research corporate communication at Uvaskala University School of Business and Economics. And we are co-editors of the Handbook of Digital Corporate Communication or DCC. In this podcast series we interview some of the best corporate communication scholars across the globe. Each one has written a chapter for the Handbook. We ask what is technology changing or not changing? In corporate communication. And how are we dealing with the influence of technology? [Music] We are talking today with Neil Sporscher from the University of Tubingen, Germany. And he is from the Institute of Media Studies there. His research interests include strategic communication, digital communication and social media influencers. So welcome to the podcast, Neil. Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. Let's start with the definition, Neil. How do you define social media influencers? I mean, who are they and what do they have to do with corporate communication? Yeah, I mean, for some people social media influencers might be the strange people on the internet, right? On Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, who just like have the products which they present to the cameras and well, that's it. But for many others specifically for younger media users, social media influencers basically are other idols. So, influencers have become very central for a lot of media users specifically for younger media users. I'm not only talking about like under-aged media users, but as well people in the trainees in the 30s to kind of bond with social media influencers in the one or other way. So when you're asking about a definition, this is basically as well what I'm aiming at when trying to define social media influencers. And a colleague of mine, not your anchor, and I we have tried to come up with the definition from the perspective of corporate communication. And that basically says that social media influencers are more or less ordinary as social media users who manage to do so. Manage to create a follow-up ship on the on a social media platform or on more than one social media platform. And through this fellowship or in this fellowship, they do have influence or real influence. And they do this by four different activities. And this activities are producing content. And then it's distributing content. Then they usually create a public persona. So they kind of have a friend and they use the self-brand to be starring in their content. So the content is about them. And then as well they moderate discussions. For example, that that happen in the common sections, but as well private messages as well. We not only need to think of social media influencers as a phenomenon that's only in the digital. But for example, there are happenings where you can meet your favorite social media influencers. And so there's this moderation or interaction with the followers as well. Okay. So are they different from or similar to the traditional concept of what we call opinion leaders. I mean, there's a lot of differences. And if you look into the literature and into the discussion about it, many people refer to social media influencers as as opinion leaders. And there's a lot of reasons why you can do so. And what I find most striking is that social media influencers are usually considered as peers. So that's what I meant when I said they are more or less ordinary social media users who happen to grow a following. So they could be like the older sister, a good friend or the girl next door. And so this kind of makes them peers. And this is something which we as well find in the opinion leader concept, right. Where you have like specific people in your social network from which you might get specific information because they might be expert on on a specific topic. Okay. On the other hand side though, I am not very. Yeah, well, could we say satisfied with the saying that social media influencers are just like the same as opinion leaders because there actually are differences. I would claim. So one is that social media influencers really have to follow the social media logics because they need this following and they they kind of have to engage actively all the time with their followers to to maintain their status as micro celebrity as one would say in the in the celebrity research. And as well in the definition, which which I just mentioned, and for example, talked about social media influencers producing content. And so this is something which in the traditional opinion leaders, we wouldn't have like you just like talking to someone over a tea for example, and it's not like that. You do have like a studio with the camera setting and you kind of edit your videos and then you you as well distribute them to the to the audience while platforms. Okay. So do you have to have video to be an influencer and social media or can you be a voice influencer. I will mark so you're heading for your influencer career. No, right. Yes, yes, definitely. I guess the person is saving. No, obviously not. I mean like we often talk about YouTube and TikTok. So there we do have video. We do have like this very strong visual part or component as well in an Instagram. But basically the idea of influencers somehow emerged out of the idea of bloggers and bloggers as you probably remember very much text based in the beginning. So we usually talk as well about bloggers as social media influencers nowadays. So can you describe social media influencers in terms of third party stakeholders in communication processes. I'm just trying to incorporate communication context trying to position these special group in a communication sort of a process. Do you see them as third party stakeholders in communication. I mean, definitely, I mean, definitely because when we think of third party as in their external to the organization, but they definitely are third party stakeholders because like what corporate communicators intent to do usually is to engage with influences in different ways. Usually we think of the campaigns when the influencers kind of get compensated for like posting content that is that is in line with the organization. But we could as well think of other ways of engaging with social media influencers, for example, simply listening to to what they're discussing if it's relevant like from our organization. But the stakeholders would define I nevertheless kind of prefer to refer to influences as secondary stakeholders, which is kind of little difference in the concept. So secondary stakeholders usually means that the influence and it's not necessarily my target group. So I kind of engage with influencers as the corporate communicator because the influencer has a way to address my primary stakeholders, which basically would be my target group. So it's the followers of the influencer. I'm usually interested in. So in that way, it's a little bit like the older traditional concept of opinion leaders in that a corporation would try to reach their target audiences or target stakeholders through opinion leaders like politicians. And so these types of opinion leaders had their own jobs. It was whether a politician or a journalist and so on. Social media influences, perhaps a different in that. Are they maybe maybe they are not necessarily professional professional politicians or news media. They are their job is to be social media influencers. Oh, are they that's a question. Yeah. Is that a profession in itself like or do social media influencers actually have a second job somewhere? Yeah, I mean, it's it's well, when we talk about profession, the one thing is like, does it pay your rent? Yeah, right. So so can you earn sufficiently for for making this your full time job. And obviously there are some influencers who who basically manage to do that. Yeah. And this is basically what we have in our minds when you think about social media influences, like the limb of the influencers. But as well, I I used to compare this to professional sports. So in Germany, obviously football is kind of the most like European football soccer is the most popular sports. So so a lot of boys specifically, but as well. there were some changes with the success of the women's national team this year. So increasingly as well, girls, they dream of becoming like football players. And some people will manage here, but there's as well a lot to kind of try and then fail on. And then they kind of do it just for fun, for example, right? But it still takes takes like a lot of energy. And so usually think of of like the influences at the top when we think of influences. And I guess it's pretty much depending on markets in Germany as a micro influencer. It might pay parts of your rent. Yeah, you can already earn a couple of hundred years a month as a micro influencer with less than say 10,000 followers. But you probably won't have like the very posh lifestyle. And the other part of of a profession is has it become like a profession like being a doctor. A medical doctor being a lawyer, for example. And we're pretty far away from that, I guess. And although there's like the first initiatives to to cover some common grounds. Like for example, in Germany, we do have a association, a federal association of influencer marketing. The tries to establish some standards. But we're pretty far away from from this being like a profession with with very tightly defined or not even tightly, but with even loosely defined roles. And one of the university of applied science is teaching influencer content. Yeah, I heard about things like in Germany. It's at the moment, it's still like a business model where you do have like workshops where you can get like some insights into the influencer business for a couple of hundred years for two days workshops. So it's more like a business model that strives on as well this idea that influences are idols and kind of we want to be we want to be special usually like in the western world. Right. I know it might be a little bit in Scandinavia, but things are changing there as well. But at least in a very individualistic society. And we do have like this ethics of singularity that right with the German social so geologists talk about. So we want to be special in some way and becoming an influence seems to be is a possibility of becoming special just like becoming like a football player or a musician. Right. Right. So do you always have to have a specific topic that you're good at or can you be good at just speaking? Oh, writing. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's a very tricky question and I haven't helped them it like empirically. But usually so one thing I once did together with the class of mine, we looked through a lot of handbooks on how to become an influencer. So if you search like Amazon, there's like over 100 different manuals for how to become an influencer. And so we looked into these and usually they will tell you that you should be an expert on on something or at least like define what. What what is the theme that your channel circles around? So usually this this would be one of the one of the ideas here, but I'm not completely sure of this right for everyone. Like if you always need to have like this theme like your fashion influence or your gamer or in some cases it's as well going through like the personality because just like your funny or you do have like inspiring thoughts, for example, and doesn't matter too much. What what's the theme? Mm hmm. Right. So if we look at the change that digitalization has brought about did social media influencers exist before digitalization? I mean, was it all about sponsorships? Is that the same thing or is this something that digitalization created? I will claim it's something that was created by digitalization. I know this is probably an archival position, but in my point here is that this idea of connecting to others that are beyond our social local and temporal context like social media influencers. Yeah, they they they kind of in theory. It's it's kind of the guy from next door, but in fact, they are living somewhere in Berlin and I'm doing it. For example, so I probably won't meet them, but I can do so and while social media and so here what we see here is that we have the technical possibility to create peer networks in a scale which we didn't have before social media. Yeah, obviously there's a lot of different things coming in here. So for example, that that recording technique got much cheaper. So we can now use our smartphone nearly everybody has a smartphone. So you can just like produce videos and you do as well have a platform where you can upload the videos so you can reach people. So this is something I would claim is essentially new. So what's the difference between sponsoring then and influencing? So sponsorship deals, I mean brands and organizations have been doing sponsored content, well not sponsored content necessarily only but like sponsorships with individuals who then enforce and and or stir brands. But like sports at least. Yeah, exactly. Is this a similar phenomena or is there something different fundamentally about these? I mean sports is a great example and other examples as well would be like musicians or film stars, yeah, where you kind of would have them as giving testimonial for for your cooperation right. And so my take on this is that basically I'm very much on the side of the writings from from a field that celebrity studies and then celebrity studies you do have like a kind of sometimes it's a little bit black and white. But the main idea is that we have mainstream celebrities and we do have micro celebrities and influencers with micro celebrities mainstream celebrities would like the multi traditional groups of celebrities like Hollywood stars for example. So if you do have a Hollywood star like. And just clearly they would live somewhere away like from the public eye for example. Yeah, so that's why you have the idea of a of a paparazzi who's trying to take pictures to get some some insight into your life. And so the idea here is that this mainstream celebrity and this is why whereas usually the sponsorships come from yeah. At this mainstream celebrity is based on exclusivity exclusiveness. Mm hmm. While there's micro celebrities the influence they basically invite you to their lives yes so it's it's another idea here it's about being inclusive in sharing your life with the followers. And this is what what we touch upon already a couple of times doing during our talk that influences are usually considered as peers as like someone from from next door. And this is pretty much in the in the fabrics of the phenomenon itself yeah so that this is just some other guy on social media and he got famous or she got famous. But I could as well like if I just like probably would would be a strategic and put as much work into this process and obviously what we often forget is that the algorithm just by usually luck kind of start promoting my my channel. And that's that's pretty much why I'm guessing my most of the people 20 years ago did not want to become a sponsored content or sponsored athlete because it was not really achievable but because of this lower barrier it's now a very trendy wish for you. It looks very easy right. Yeah. Yeah. If you talk to influences for example they always tell you that this well they do have like this 1240 hour days of work and it's not just like taking a picture at the pool but basically a couple of hours of work in finding the location. And shooting editing thinking about what the post would look like what would be the capture sense on and then then deciding as well on a timing for for publication. So you're claiming the nils that digitalization has created social media influences which leads me to the next question then has anything not change despite digitalization of the way corporate communication practitioners work with these types of third party. stakeholder groups to influence their key stakeholders of key staff target audiences. Yeah. I guess so I guess a mark so one thing you mentioned already was this two step flow of communication which basically means we do have like the secondary stakeholders and as a corporate communicating not necessarily interested in working with with the influences and influencing the influences but they are kind of a well should I say tool. Then we dive into the idea of the into discussions of ethics because you shouldn't the influences as tools but in one way or the other they are kind of the means to to talk to your target group like we had with opinion leaders and the two step flow. And another thing which kind of might be seen as not changing or the from maybe a little bit more critical perspective is that this idea of a dialogue between the stakeholders, the primary stakeholders and a corporation is not really fostered by social media influencers. So there was as well again quite some hope that because influences do communicate a lot with their audiences and it's interactive in that influences do have to react on the comments to the comments of their followers, for example, or the messages of their followers and the public demand because their status depends on their followers, right? That there's like new options for engaging into dialogue between the corporation and the well-staycoters. But what we basically see is the tendency of organizations that work with influences to kind of outsource this dialogue to the influencers. So there's a dialogue between the influencer and the followers. It might as well be a dialogue that is connected to the topics that the corporation as the client of the influencer is interested in. But at the same time the the corporation does not really become part of this dialogue. So I would say this is something which has not changed either unfortunately. So with influence comes responsibility as well. So is there a dark side or a downside to digitalization of corporate contractors collaboration with these third-party stakeholders and influencers? Yeah, will Mati Dimension responsibilities? Yes, well, there's an ongoing discussion in Finland about whether social media influencers, if they're recommending products that are for example not 100% proved by science that they work whether that's actually an ethical issue that they should be somehow limited in their awareness and capability of speaking to individuals who are vulnerable to their to their messages and take it all in and then start following sometimes even bad advice. I don't know if that discussion is going on in Germany as well. It's it's somewhere it's not very prominent I would say but I definitely agree with you on this idea of responsibility. So basically I mean the word influencer itself already says that there's someone who wields a specific influence. Right? And we can talk about why they are called influencers. I think that's another story but having influence and as well having influence on on such a big scale so there's influences which have like tens of thousands of followers but less well a hundred of thousands of followers. I would like you that this basically implies that you cannot do whatever you want to but you start to have a responsibility towards your following. And obviously this issue becomes even more crucial when we consider influencers who basically have an underaged following. So then we talk about what you mentioned before the vulnerable target groups and if you if you have to be specifically careful on what you're doing. So in ethical terms I basically would say that the relationship that followers build with influences is a trust relationship and trust relationships basically should not be exploited by the influences. So this is a topic we came in pretty much going into detail but what I just want to mention is that we because we were seeing such things in the discussion as Germany as well so Nathia Enker, the colleague I mentioned before and me we created a code of ethics for the German influencer industry association and one of the points here is definitely as well sincerity. So sincerity in that if you promote a product as an influencer you should really want to promote the product and not sell your opinion to someone just like because they're giving money to you and this is because of the trust relationship that influences have but the audiences. So it might help with our listeners if we now move on to the if you could tell us a bit about the example of the uni-leaver influencer campaign in Germany and what lessons can we learn from that example. Oh yeah I like that example because this is an example which very clearly shows how like old logics of working in the let's call it communicative industries don't necessarily work with influences so basically what happened this is from the earlier days of influencer campaigns in 2017 uni-leaver started a campaign with some 40 influences in Germany to promote a washing detergent which is called choral yeah and so what happened is that on Instagram a lot of influencers posted pictures of choral as part of the daily life so basically what we would think influencers would do yeah so they integrate share their own life with their followers and so products are because we're living in a consumption society right and so products naturally are part of essentially a part of their everyday lives but this bottle with the detergent showed up at very uncommon places like for example on Sunday morning in bed together with a boyfriend yeah or like next to a street graffiti wall where the influence was posing like more in a well probably rap music style so what happened then is that obviously there was a lot of criticism from the followers side yeah and so followers didn't like this because there's pretty close to accusations of selling out so the idea was okay we do accept that you promote products and I think that's one of the main thing about the influencer industry that promoting products is essentially part of the genre yeah so it's widely accepted that influencers promote products for different reasons and but this should not be overstretched and the choral campaign by uni-leaver overstretched this by having very tight control on what would happen there so basically here the influencers didn't have like the possibilities to kind of authentically integrate the product into their social media posts but they had two strict derogulations on what this should look like and so this kind of created the speculist so one thing is the selling out discussion the other thing is that there were a lot of satirical pictures on the internet where people just like took the choral bottle to in it's Italian restaurant and put it on the table on them tonight for example and they weren't taking your advice of being sincere no but I definitely I do see how this would bounce around as hijacked media in the online environment so this could actually turn out to be a fun thing in the future where you know bringing a choral thing anywhere you go I don't know if that happened I mean this is what it was for some time in a specific bubble yeah so it's a couple of years ago we don't do that anymore in Germany so you won't find like a choral bottle it's just like randomly yeah standing somewhere but the idea here is that so this very strict control was something which was pretty much possible and the case when for example you worked together with advertising agencies right so you would get storyboards for example and you could choose from different options and then you would discuss in detail how the how the commercial for example would look like and this is something it seems that doesn't work with influencers anymore yeah yeah that's right well Niels we're coming almost to the end of this so my final question is what advice would you give for brands and organizations hoping to work with influencers where should they start haha yeah well so I'm basically not working in an influencer agency so be careful with my advice but what I know from my research is that a very crucial thing in influencer campaigns is when you're really working with influencers and kind of one one work on a contractual basis for the influencers is to choose your influencers wisely so a lot of people from the industry basically told me that this is the crucial part of a campaign to to know with whom you want to work and why you want to work with this specific person yeah and another thing is not just like to jump on the influencer train so this is something which we have seen a lot specifically in 2019 2020 maybe not so much in 2022 anymore but but a lot of a cooperation just like wanted to work with influencers because everyone else worked with influencers and so it might be helpful to work with influencers there they're definitely advantages but this letting go of control seems to be really an obstacle for for a lot of people from the industry so ask yourself are you you're really ready to let go of control. The end of last, while I was maybe would be, and this is something which we don't really see at the moment in the industry is to try to find ways how to integrate your influencer activities in your general communication strategy, so that the influencer campaign really kind of works together in an integrated communication approach with the other parts of your campaigns and your communication. You mentioned the advice that companies should be prepared to lose control, and I can understand that is a difficulty because if a company does a really good job of communicating a message through social media influences, what happens if that social media influence is through a scandal, and yet the image of that social media influence is tied to the brand of the company that sponsored or had a relationship with him or her. That's a real challenge that probably frightens corporate communication managers. Yeah, definitely. Does frighten the communication manager? And this is just like kind of the tip of the iceberg, basically, what are you afraid of? The other thing is that your boss won't like it, right? And you are the one in your company who's responsible for the campaign and said at one point, if it didn't perform like it should, or the influencer used like language, which you're not usually not using for promoting your brand that you have to justify this. So it's very different levels. On the other hand, influences usually cooperate with a lot of companies. And so if an influencer is involved in a scandal, you not necessarily know all the companies that once work together with the influencer will be as well affected by the scandal. I mean, we've seen a couple of examples where companies were really fast and distancing themselves from the influencers, which is fine, but unless this influence is not kind of the very face of your campaign, I wouldn't bother too much, actually. Well, I don't have a job to lose either. [LAUGHTER] That is true. Neil, we can't thank you enough for being part of this podcast. So thanks for coming. Thanks for telling everything about the social media influencers. And we'll continue onward with the book. Yeah, very great. So thank you for having me. And this was really fun. You were listening to the Digital Corporate Communication BCC podcast.