Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication

ABSTRACT

In this editorial, I (1) explain why social media influencers bear relevance for strategic communication, (2) provide a brief introduction to research on social media influencers, and (3) unroll the rationale behind this Special Issue of the International Journal of Strategic Communication.

Social media influencers: New stakeholders in strategic communication

Social media influencers (SMIs) are astonishing beings. Anyone who has tried to pigeonhole SMIs will have noticed that this is a very hard task to do. It is a hard task because SMIs cross traditional boundaries in many ways and oscillate between intimacy and publicity, authenticity and commercialization, ingratiation and critical distance. From a strategic communication perspective, this variability makes SMIs hard to capture: Organizations can cooperate with SMIs to achieve both marketing and PR objectives. SMIs can act as cooperation partners, integrating commercial content into organic narratives, or as independent critics. And finally, SMIs potentially combine different roles, which, have traditionally been occupied by separate actors. For example, SMIs can serve the roles of intermediary, content distributor, creative content producer, community manager, testimonial, strategic counsellor, and event host. The combination of these roles in just one actor opens new opportunities for strategic communication and can produce appreciated synergy effects.

But these roles, in addition to other functions that SMIs fulfill for organizations, can also help to determine the SMI concept more precisely. From a strategic communication perspective, SMIs can be considered “third-party actors that have established a significant number of relevant relationships with a specific quality to and influence on organizational stakeholders through content production, content distribution, interaction, and personal appearance on the social web.” (Enke & Borchers, in this issue) This definition considers the mentioned variability of SMIs in strategic communication; thus, it indicates the complexity organizations face when working with SMIs.

Nevertheless, it is not least its boundary-crossing qualities that make strategic SMI communication – a term Nadja Enke and I (in this issue) suggest adopting instead of influencer marketing or influencer relations to emphasize the versatility of the instrument – a useful strategic communication instrument. And indeed, strategic SMI communication has become a new mass phenomenon within only a few years. For example, 75% of surveyed United States brands cooperated with SMIs in 2018 (Association of National Advertisers, 2018) and 2/3 of U.S. businesses already budgeting strategic SMI communication said they intend to increase their budgets within twelve months (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2019). At the same time, influencer marketing as an industry has more than doubled its figures in the USA between 2016 and 2018 from $1.7 billion to $4.6 billion (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2019).

This popularity rests on a range of considerable advantages which are often, but not necessarily, related to SMIs border-crossing qualities (Enke & Borchers, 2018b). For instance, SMIs have a wide reach in attractive and contested publics, in particular teenagers and young adults, and acceptance rates for SMIs’ promotional activities are high (Defy, 2016). Communication practitioners consider strategic SMI communication a remarkably effective instrument (Linqia, 2017; Mediakix, 2019) that offers them a rare way to create content that audiences perceive as authentic (Olapic, 2018). Furthermore, strategic SMI communication allows for image transfer effects, specifically if organizations and SMIs cooperate on a long-term basis rather than in onetime activities. In terms of variability, organizations can employ strategic SMI communication across various platforms and content formats like text (e.g. blogs), pictures (e.g. Instagram), videos (e.g. YouTube), and, increasingly, live streaming (e.g. Twitch). Finally and arguably, strategic SMI communication might re-establish an illusion of control over at least some part of subjectively substantial (Zerfass, Verčič, Nothhaft, & Werder, 2018) user generated content, an impression that might be of value to those strategic communication practitioners who still cling to a control paradigm (Christodoulides, 2009).

Research on social media influencers: Some selected stages

The boundary-crossing qualities of strategic SMI communication pose a challenge to both practice and research. They do so because they imply that we need to draw on the expertise of various research streams to fully grasp strategic SMI communication. Luckily, ever since their emergence, SMIs have attracted attention from different fields. Historically, research on SMIs has its origins in studies on weblogs – a term coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 (Blood, 2002) – and bloggers, and the “blogosphere.” An early interest in SMIs can be traced back to the mid- to late- 2000s, by which point political blogs had become a debated phenomenon. While we can already find references to the noticeable personal style of bloggers in the respective studies, the main research interest was in blogs as sources of news and (political) information. Research conceived of bloggers as new actors in the public discourse and sought to determine the role of blogs in the public sphere and the information ecology of a society (cf. Carlson, 2007; Johnson & Kaye, 2004; Wall, 2005; Wallsten, 2008). Accordingly, a study on blog users conducted in 2003 found that these users tended to be young, highly educated men with high incomes, whose political involvement predicted their motivations to visit and engage with blogs (Kaye, 2005).

Against the backdrop of this interest in political blogging, Herring, Scheidt, Wright, and Bonus (2005, p. 142), based on a content analysis of 203 blogs, noted in 2005 that researchers (as well as journalists and bloggers themselves) “underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression.” It was celebrity and popular culture studies that started engaging with these aspects of blogging. In her seminal work “Camgirls,” Senft (2008) studied women who broadcast themselves over the web. To more thoroughly theorize the phenomenon she was observing, Senft introduced “microcelebrity,” a concept that is able to capture many specific features of SMI communication. According to Senft (2013, p. 346), microcelebrity designates a specific form of celebrity that is characterized by a “commitment to deploying and maintaining one’s online identity as if it were a branded good, with the expectation that others do the same.” Microcelebrity is distinct from traditional mainstream celebrity because it originates from establishing connections to other social media users. In contrast, mainstream celebrity rests on distancing strategies that elevate celebrity rather than emphasizing that bloggers (or vloggers) and their audiences meet on equal grounds (Jerslev, 2016; Senft, 2008). Senft’s research has paved the way for a whole range of comprehensive studies that tackle issues such as self-branding (Khamis, Ang, & Welling, 2017), relationship building (García-Rapp, 2017), the construction of intimacy (Abidin, 2015), and aspirational labor (Duffy, 2017). Many of these issues might actually be of interest to strategic communication scholars, particularly the works that examine the various ways in which SMIs and their audiences mutually relate to one another.

It took some more time for research in strategic communication to realize the relevance of bloggers, vloggers, and streamers, etc., as new organizational stakeholders. Yes, some early works do exist that discuss the relevance of bloggers for strategic communication (Halvorsen, Hoffmann, Coste-Manière, & Stankeviciute, 2013; Schmallegger & Carson, 2008; Smith, 2010). Yet in general, research activities have been sparse and only recently have begun to pick up speed. To start drawing a more comprehensive picture of the current state of research on strategic SMI communication, it is, I argue, useful to apply conceptual frameworks that help to inform and systematize research activities. Such a framework is the process model of strategic SMI communication (see Enke & Borchers in this issue for a process model of SMI communication). The model identifies actors within the field of SMI communication and how they are interconnected. Research activities can then be organized along the actor groups on which the activity is focused. In the field of strategic communication, one can identify studies that focus on SMI clients (i.e., organizations and agencies that cooperate with SMIs) (Hutchins & Tindall, 2016; Uzunoğlu & Misci Kip, 2014; Wolf & Archer, 2018) and on SMIs and their involvement in strategic communication activities (Archer & Harrigan, 2016; Pang, Tan, Lim, Kwan, & Lakhanpal, 2016; Walden, Bortree, & DiStaso, 2015). I have the impression, however, that research that focuses on SMI audiences has gathered the most traction, particularly research on effects of SMI postings (cf. de Veirman, Cauberghe, & Hudders, 2017; Evans, Phua, Lim, & Jun, 2017; Van Reijmersdal et al., 2016).

Yet even despite these important and insightful pioneer studies, to date we still know comparably little about the specific practices of strategic SMI communication, its challenges and opportunities, and how it is organized within organizational contexts (see the literature review by Sundermann and Raabe in this issue). From a conceptual perspective, we lack proposals how to define strategic SMI communication and to integrate it within the framework of strategic communication (see Enke & Borchers in this issue for a suggestion). Against this background, this Special Issue seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on SMIs and specifically on SMIs in strategic communication.

Drawing a comprehensive picture of strategic social media influencer communication

This Special Issue is organized in four sections. The first section seeks to provide conceptual foundations for studying SMIs in strategic communication. The remaining three sections follow another logic. Here, the focus is on specific key actor groups within the process of strategic influencer communication: (1) SMI clients, e.g., client organizations and agencies; (2) SMIs themselves; and (3) SMI audiences.

The first section starts with an article by Nadja Enke and I, “Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication: A Conceptual Framework for Strategic Social Media Influencer Communication.” In this article, we seek to establish conceptual grounds for research on SMIs from a strategic communication perspective. Specifically, we define SMIs on the basis of the functions that they fulfill for organizations. We also distinguish the concept from other concepts that have likewise been tagged with the “influencer” label, i.e., mainstream celebrities, ordinary internet users, and corporate influencers. The widespread use of the influencer tag has caused some confusion in research, as I have also noticed while editing this Special Issue. In a next step, Nadja Enke and I use the SMI definition to define strategic SMI communication and to further elaborate on the concept. Finally, we develop a process model of strategic SMI communication that, hopefully, can serve as a framework to inform and systemize research agendas. If we strategic communication researchers are to gain a deeper understanding of SMIs as organizational stakeholders, we require appropriate concepts that help theorize our empirical observations and add conceptual clarity to our arguments.

The second article in this section is a literature review by Gerrit Sundermann and Thorsten Raabe, “Strategic Communication through Social Media Influencers: Current State of Research and Desiderata.” To my knowledge, it is the first systematic literature review on research in strategic SMI communication (or on SMIs in general, for that matter). In their review, Sundermann and Raabe provide a much-desired overview that systemizes and synthesizes the current body of knowledge. Equally important, the authors identify research desiderata that can serve as possible directions for future research. Among others, they argue that implications of SMI communication for strategic planning are understudied. Moreover, the literature review reveals that research on SMI in strategic communication resembles “a rag rug of fragmented research questions, combined with a lack of theoretical integration and a widespread methodological monism.” This state is, I would argue, somewhat typical for a subfield in the making. At the same time, however, this conclusion is an unmistakable call for further substantial and coordinated research initiatives … a call that, by the way, also provides legitimation for this Special Issue.

The second section of this Special Issue tackles organizations that cooperate with SMIs. In their article, “Social Media Influencers as a Crisis Risk in Strategic Communication: Impact of Indiscretions on Professional Endorsements,” Kylie Sng, Tsi Ying Au, and Augustine Pang discuss how SMIs can trigger organizational crises and how organizations may try to manage these. Their study delves into image transfer effects that cooperation between organization and SMI may produce. But while organizations desire these image transfer effects as long as they are positive, the effects become problematic as soon as the cooperating SMIs act in a way that contradicts organizational values. Kylie Sng and her co-authors are interested in exactly these negative outcomes. They discuss five cases in which SMIs’ personal indiscretions actually triggered paracrises. From this discussion, the authors develop a valuable framework for crisis identification and response strategies. This way, their article offers profound insights into how organizations can manage the eventualities of strategic SMI communication.

The next section brings into focus the very actor group around which this Special Issue circles: the SMIs. Jamie Woodcock and Mark Johnson in their article, “Live Streamers on Twitch.tv as Social Media Influencers: Chances and Challenges for Strategic Communication,” present the first study on strategic SMI communication on the live streaming platform Twitch. Thusfar, Twitch has remained in the shadows of Instagram and YouTube, the leading platforms in strategic SMI communication. Twitch is, however, a real heavyweight that attracts 200 million viewers, most of them teenagers and young adults, and 2 million regular “streamers.” Drawing on their expertise on Twitch gained through several years of ethnographic research into the platform, Johnson and Woodcock discuss the implications of live streaming for strategic communication. Given that practitioners regard live streaming as a promising new direction in strategic SMI communication (Enke & Borchers, 2018a), the authors provide sought-after insights into the actuality of strategic SMI communication practices on a platform on which influencing via live streaming is already firmly established. In addition, their article offers useful insights into how strategic communication messages should be integrated into SMI content so that they gain acceptance within Twitch’s life streaming community.

Finally, the last section of the Special Issue is dedicated to SMI audiences. The article “A Call for Authenticity: Audience Responses to Social Media Influencer Endorsements in Strategic Communication,” by Essi Pöyry, Matilde Pelkonen, Emma Naumanen, and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, allows for a smooth transition to this last section: In a two-step empirical procedure, Essi Pöyry and her co-authors surveyed both SMIs and their followers. The authors are interested in studying attitudes toward SMI content and purchase intentions. Specifically, they look upon differences between sponsored and non-sponsored Instagram posts and disclosure practices. Essi Pöyry et al. find that an exact fit between organization and SMI is central for effective SMI communication. Thus, their study contributes to a growing body of research into the effects of SMI communication.

Authenticity also plays a decisive role in the final article of this Special Issue: In “Primed Authenticity: How Priming Impacts Authenticity Perception of Social Media Influencers,” Vilma Luoma-aho, Tuisku Pirttimäki, Devdeep Maity, Juha Munnukka, and Hanna Reinikainen study how audience expectations and engagement influence the perceived authenticity of SMI posts. Luoma-aho and her co-authors find that the same sponsored vlog post can bring about significantly different effects, depending on the way in which viewers engage with the post. This way, the authors demonstrate the relevance of addressing stakeholders in appropriate situations, i.e., situations in which they are actually willing to engage with the SMI content. Bad news for SMIs: Posting content that viewers perceive as inauthentic is held mainly against the SMIs and not against the cooperating organizations. This way, the article makes a valuable contribution to advance our understanding of authenticity, a central concept in strategic SMI communication and a suggested main driver of the instrument’s effectivity.

As this short overview demonstrates, the idea of this Special Issue is to draw a comprehensive picture of the current state of SMIs in strategic communication. To possibly achieve this aim, the articles in this Special Issue tackle strategic SMI communication from multi-disciplinary perspectives, from varying actor foci, and from different methodological frameworks and methods. In addition, they also constructively engage with specific advantages of strategic SMI communication – advantages that I discussed above.

Despite these efforts, this Special Issue is only a piece in a far larger jigsaw puzzle. Many issues of relevance to strategic communication remain untouched. This is why, personally, I hope that the Special Issue might give the extra push needed to stimulate further research activities on strategic SMI communication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.