Back in 1974, Alice Sheldon (aka ‘James Tiptree, Jr.’) won a Hugo for “The Girl Who Was Plugged In“, a dystopian narrative about an ugly, ghetto-trapped teenager given an opportunity to join the media celebrities she idolizes. All she has to do is agree to risky experimental surgery that will allow her to pilot a gorgeous, brain-pithed android-drone who can maximize product placement in a world where ‘advertising’ is banned. Her reaction? Show me the fire I have to walk through.
That was the story that convinced me Tiptree-the-author must be a woman (at the same time, IIRC, a famous sf critic publicly announced that no mere ‘lady writer’ could produce prose so muscular). Sheldon / Tiptree had the foresight to imagine the arc from 18th-century merchants ‘quietly’ advertising their royal customers, to 19th-century proto-celebrities taking payments to use Pears soap, to the 20th-century legitimation of PR agents, to the 21st-century protype Reality TV. But I don’t think even she predicted the Uberization of the form, where every product-shiller would have to hustle themselves as a “brand”.
The proudly libertarian Atlantic should be thrilled at such viral commodification, and yet, something about the unwieldiness of the current process seems to perturb them…
Three years ago, Lisa Linh quit her full-time job to travel the world and document it on Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers; since then, she has stayed in breathtaking hotels everywhere from Mexico to Quebec to the Cook Islands. Often, she stays for free.
Linh is part of an ever-growing class of people who have leveraged their social media clout to travel the world, frequently in luxury. While Linh and other elite influencers are usually personally invited by hotel brands, an onslaught of lesser-known wannabes has left hotels scrambling to deal with a deluge of requests for all-expense-paid vacations in exchange for some social media posts.
Kate Jones, marketing and communications manager at the Dusit Thani, a five-star resort in the Maldives, said that her hotel receives at least six requests from self-described influencers per day, typically through Instagram direct message.
“Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It’s people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I’m an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating…
But to influencers themselves, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the value exchange. Instagram has ballooned to more than 800 million monthly active users, many of whom come to it for travel ideas, and influencers argue that the promotions they offer allow hotels to directly market to new audiences in an authentic way…
Some of these issues can just be a miscommunication. Miragliotta said he’s invested in making clients happy—but hotels need to make sure they’re organized and prepared for influencer stays.
“I went to one Mexico resort and three different people were giving me different hashtags and handles,” he said. “I was with five other influencers and we were excited to post, but there was limited Wi-Fi. If you don’t have the simplest things ready for us, then that makes it difficult to produce the content you need, or do it correctly.”…
As an introvert and aspiring agoraphobe, just looking at the sampled Instagram pics convinces me that I’d rather eat glass doing this ‘social influencer’ thing is indeed a job. It is, after all, not that different than any other form of… what was Melania’s old job title… modeling, is it?
Interesting Read: “Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy”Post + Comments (199)