I’ve been having an interesting discussion with a few people in the media personality and influencer business. What follows is some of the meat and potatoes of that discussion. In the sailing and cruising niche, there are a lot of cruisers who look at social media to fund their cruising. Others consider social media as a way to cement family and friend relationships. It’s the profit-driven group we’ll look at first. Looking at the Social Media tradeoffs of Derp, there are some interesting relationships. We’ve walked through some scenarios.
- Media personalities want privacy, but they need engagement from an audience to make money.
- Media personalities want to profit off their role but must give up privacy to have engagement.
- Media personalities want to be known for their craft/creativity but need authenticity to make a profit.
- Media personalities want to be authentic but must adapt their creativity to others’ needs to make a profit.
Consequently, you can have any two of the three in each triangle. However, if you pick profit, it is going to impact influence and content, removing some of your choices.
Unlike writing novels or travel guides. Creating content within the social media sphere requires a certain level of being social. When you move from the static picture to the dynamic video realm, this becomes even more important. Engagement and authenticity are pillars that expand on the focus of profit. In the realm of privacy and creativity, you trade off them to gain profit. Each of these trade-offs is unique to each creator but consistent between them.
I tell the story of pork chop friends often enough. When momma said I was so ugly, she had to tie a pork chop around my neck to make the dog play with me. Thank you, Rodney Dangerfield, for the line. Social media personalities trade on that model with subscriptions and Patreon pledges.
Parasocial relationships are the actual term for this. Where fans of a celebrity build up a mental model of a relationship that is cognitively and totally within their mind. People know a lot about social media celebrities, but the celebrities know very little about their fans. Other than the ones that somebody like Pat Flynn might recognize as super fans.
These parasocial relationships make a celebrity rise in the rankings, and the best social media celebrities make people feel like they are seen and known by their persona. Over the 5 years, I’ve engaged in an in-depth study of all the factors I could define in how a sailing and cruising enthusiast becomes a social media celebrity. I set out initially to be a reflection-social media celebrity. The goal was that every engagement with a social media personality resulted in a positive, unique, authentic value that they wanted to be our friends.
The junction of profit leads to significant risks of abuse for creators and audience alike. With the risk of parasocial relationships and the fundamental risks of abuse, how do you engage healthily and responsibly? Some of the things we tried worked, and some didn’t. In a nutshell, we set out to provide engagement, privacy, creativity, and authenticity to anybody who engaged with us and did so in a way that was genuine to a fault.
Some things we tried.
- Liking all of the content of a social media creator was found to be of low value.
- Making positive comments on content from social media creators was of moderate value.
- Offering advice or responding to calls to action was found to be detrimental.
- Perception of risk/reward and engagement was found to be negative.
The linkage of profit in the creator’s tradeoffs was a confounding variable for an audience. There were a few things we wanted to make sure for us were never part of the equation. We weren’t interested in transactional relationships. So, if we gave some social media personality something, we were very specific; nothing was expected in return. No call out. No discussion. We hope they were having fun and got something out of the interaction. Whatever. No pork chops here.
Part of this was about learning to be more social in a world we don’t understand. The element of profit was expected but made the audience take up an adaption on the way to super fan status problematic. Casey Niestat had millions of subscribers before he even turned advertisements on with his YouTube channel. To be sure, nothing in any of our crew’s lives prepared us for being social or aware of how to negotiate what we think of as just people. We’re not anti-social, but we aren’t social butterflies, to be sure. This was an exciting way to expand our horizons and learn how social media worked while enjoying some of its elements.
Some social media personalities absolutely would have taken advantage of us if we had thought in transactional ways about the relationship. The drive for profit can be a crucial motivator in the bread and beans on the table kind of way. It is hard to explain to a world highly focused on transactions. A creator provides content, and you give them patronage. As an emergent parasocial relationship, that seems appropriate. What if you give them thousands of dollars? You will likely be disappointed if you expect something in return from this one-way relationship. If you are OK with transactional relationships more power to you. If you want to see this in action, watch to see how people are treated when not providing compensation to the relationship.
The lesson about how positive relationships work is important. At all costs, we eschewed and avoided any form of parasocial engagement. The relationships were not transactional; they were about giving and not taking; they were about listening, not talking (still working on that one), and they were about authenticity. You would be surprised how many people treat their family in a transactional way. We walked away from the influencers who were so popular they couldn’t engage or so unbalanced they wouldn’t engage. We had no use for one-sided relationships. We used the dinner test. Did the person invite us to their boat for dinner, and did they come to our boat for dinner? We even gave people coins who did that.
We’ve grown some fantastic relationships by flipping the social media trade-offs on their head and ignoring the profit portion. This post isn’t just about social media celebrities. That’s why you read it. That’s what you got. But it is much deeper into how to think about relationships and everything related in many ways to our day-to-day interactions.