Research Essay Draft
Brianna Douglas
Instructor Camilleri
ENG160
4 November, 2021
Info from sources
- “And in July, rapper Kanye West told Forbes that he believed a coronavirus vaccine could “put chips inside of us.” West has more than four million followers on Instagram. The additional challenge is that oxygen can create more oxygen — a celebrity tweeting a rumor or falsehood can become a news story in itself, causing even more people to be exposed, as we saw when Harrelson and other celebrities’ posts about 5G tipped a fringe conspiracy theory into the mainstream. The groundless rumors about 5G resulted in real-world harm, with phone masts being burned to the ground in the UK.”
- “The role of emotion is often overlooked in media literacy campaigns even though it is a strong driver of shares on social media, and therefore a powerful force in disinformation campaigns.”
- Summary- 2020 was a year in which people who had great influence on society caused confusion as they spread misleading or incomplete information on their social media platforms.
- 5 things to be influencer 7 monetize platform: clarify niche, prioritize monetary goals, connect with audience, teach, educate & inspire audience
- Act like it’s a business- financial freedom purpose
- Clear mindset that’s driven to a certain target
- Start whenever you want
- Budget & backup plans
- Beware of scammers
- Find niche and popular topics to post about
- Finding a posting schedule is beneficial
- Trending vids, vids fitting niche or asking followers if you don’t know what to post and fill it as a calendar
- Don’t quit your job without backup
- Highs and lows of YouTube- keep it up through the lows and just persevere so YouTube can push your videos out
- Steady income you don’t need a team behind you maybe take a course in business for signing contracts and partnerships, pitching brands or follow ups or understanding how to negotiate
- 5 people=influencer
- Collab=2-3 thousand subscribers with brand= 5 thousand when they reach out
- Finding niche= vids you watch + want to create
- Videos aligned with passion
- DM brands if you want to partner with them and they haven’t reached out after you showed you “organically” like their products
- Short, sweet right to point if reaching out to brand or organization- they don’t have a lot of time to read a lot
- Post often to gain a large following
- Get inspiration from others on the same platform
- Hashtags give you more popularity- use them (not fyp hashtags but general and specific ones)
- Answer comments by shouting out other platforms for social media you have, improve engagement with the audience by asking questions, and comment yourself something relating to the video
- Adding subtitles is a bonus
- Look into what you want viewers to gain from you
- Once you reach a certain following that is large you can begin to fix your niche and do more personal videos or posts
- Easier when niche is on username, so people know what your page is about or if you don’t know niche then type it in the bio when you figure it out
- Content calendar= organization and easy to
- Try reaching out to sponsored people if they don’t reach out to you
- TIKTOK has two different ways to earn money; creative learning fund and creative fund
- Phone tripods are nice to use along with iMovie
- Shares posts and what the backlash/ result was of those posts that the celebrities created
- From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of the U.S. population with a social media profile has grown from 10% to a whopping 77% (Statista, Percent of U.S. population, 2018)
- t. The influence from celebrities because of their saturation in mainstream media has made revolutionary impacts on fashion, beauty, and lifestyle habits of the general public. For example, we saw this happen with James Dean’s popularization of jeans from the 1950s movie Rebel Without a Cause.
- Consumers typically replicate styles of celebrities when they feel they relate to a them, which justifies their reasoning to buy into the fashion trends (Stone, 2007).
- Since we are no longer limited to traditional celebrities, categorized as actors, musicians, and models, to influence our opinions about what we desire, consumers are exposed to and impacted by masses of influential “micro-celebrities”, or non-traditional celebrities who have become famous through online media usage.
- This is elucidated by their ability to create communities where users feel more connected to the influencer through higher levels of engagement, authenticity, and relatability.
- Microcelebrity produces the self as brand and commodity; online processes of celebrification today merge commodification and branding smoothly with intimacy and authenticity (Jerslev & Mortensen, 2015).
- According to Marshall (2016), online celebrity practices unfold in accordance with a particular temporal and spatial logic characterized by what is referred to as “narrowing of the gap” between celebrities and their fans or followers
- the Instafamous tend to be conventionally good-looking, work in “cool” industries such as modeling or tattoo artistry, and emulate the tropes and symbols of traditional celebrity culture, such as glamorous self-portraits, designer goods, or luxury cars (Marwick, 2015).
- It is perhaps not surprising that designer goods are also central to bloggers’ staging of “the glam life”; the blogs and Instagram feeds analyzed in Erin Duffy & Hund’s study displayed a compendium of Valentino pumps, Chanel handbags, and Céline sunglasses, luxury goods offset by the occasional thrift store purchase or product identified with a discount retailer such as Kohl’s or Old Navy (Erin Duffy & Hund, 2015)
- Instagram celebrities focus a bit more on the luxurious aspects of life and perfection, rather than showing their authentic selves (ex. bad pictures, hardships of life), because this is what is more likely to attract more followers. Yet, even so, Instagram influencers are still able to create a relationships with their audience by directly interacting through comments, making them seem more ‘real’ and accessible, along with taking advantage of the Instagram user’s tendency to look up to these influencers as celebrities and take their opinions into high regard.
- The active processes of celebrification at play within YouTube’s beauty community necessarily combine the social side of sharing personal information, footage of daily activities and building affective connections, with commercial aspects: namely self-branding, achieving high status and maintaining good reputations as professional, responsible and influential personalities (García-Rapp 2017).
- Particularly on YouTube, as a highly commercial platform based on ‘delivering attention to ads’ (Burgess 2011, 326), values such as authenticity and honesty are appreciated and even demanded on the platform. As we can see here, since we are able to see more of a person’s personality through video rather than pictures, the YouTube platform celebrities often gain popularity because of their tasteful sense of humor or relatability
- (left off on page 10)
- Celebrities use social media managers
- Writes examples like Kanye West and 50 Cent
- Citation: Morgan, KC. “15 Celebs Who Don’t Actually Run Their Own Social Media Accounts.” Theclever, Theclever, 18 Apr. 2017, https://www.theclever.com/15-celebs-who-dont-actually-run-their-own-social-media-accounts/.
- Celebrity Influence Politics, Persuasion and issue based advocacy by Mark Havey
- Chapter 2: how do Celebrities Influence others?3(pgs 30-62)
- Chapter 3: the power of spotlighting: celebrities and issue advocacy in the media(pgs 63-82)
- Appendix E Methodology on Credibility Study (pgs181-186)
Social media influencers vary from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and more media forms. How do these social media influencers become such a good influence you ask; engaging with their audience as they post regularly, it helps them to build more followers and reach more of an audience. Influencers first create this thing called a niche which is what the person decides they want to be the focus of their channel or media form. There are many niches ranging from vlogs to DIYs and more specific ones like investing or fashion in whatever city you’re in. After creating a niche, these influencers make sure to post on a regular basis and engage in conversation with their followers by asking them to follow their other social media pages, or even asking them what content they would like to see. Depending on the social media form they use hashtags to gain more of a following as Sway Sway says when you do use this method you want to “not use for you page hashtags but general and specific ones” because by doing this you’ll get more of a focused group of people looking for your content. The focused people you’re looking for will get more of a chance of noticing your post using this method your posts won’t be at the bottom of the search engine. People can easily recognize you faster and be more likely to like and/or follow you. The more of a following you have the more people you influence and Katie Musser states that to be an influencer you only need to reach out to about 5 people which will still make a change on those people’s lives, but it won’t be getting you paid on any form of social media.
TV show Celebrities tend to create posts that don’t necessarily engage the audience because their audience becomes engaged with them through their roles on TV. Once people have noted who their celebrities are they then can be on the look for their names on those social media platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. By doing this people then can get to know more about their personal life but KC Morgan on The Clever tells us that these celebrities we idolize, and follow don’t always control the media you are seeing as they are very busy people and so many of them have hired companies or people to be their social media managers. By hiring media managers, they have a disconnect with their viewers and can no longer fully relate with them while the managers tend to promote them and the things they are doing. KC Morgan makes a point to note that if you look at Kanye West’s blog, he has told news that he hired someone to do that because it leaves him time after doing many things for his career to spend time with his family. It is also noted that TV celebrity, 50 Cent, has also hired people to run his social media as he has to do things like run lines and taking care of himself through exercising. By noting how celebrities from TV have run their social media, we can see that it’s safe to say that their social media managers are the ones generally giving the public this influence on their behalf.
But how are these things impacting society you ask? Well, the TV show celebrity because of not running their social media as much tends to post more photos as stated in an essay published by Melody Nouri; The Power of Influence: Traditional Celebrities vs Social Media Celebrities. Melody Nouri also goes into stating how these different social media outlets like Instagram versus YouTube also have a different setting which connects people in different ways and so YouTube engages people to watch something while Instagram engages people more to look and read things. The traditional celebrity in my case TV show ones tend to post more photo-based things with a caption as they are not on YouTube generally and if this is being controlled by their managers like stated by KC Morgan, we can think that people will begin to disconnect themselves from associating with that person as it becomes robotic in a sense instead of welcoming and inviting. Although people don’t always unfollow celebrities because of a disconnect, this shows people still like and follow these celebrities to keep up to date with what they are doing and be an engaged fan of the person.
Why do people tend to unfollow others? People who are active on social media tend to unfollow other people because of a variety of reasons. Hayley Johnson said in a YouTube video that people who don’t have a clear niche as an influencer don’t normally gain followers or a consistent amount of likes on a video or post. By saying this it made me think to look back on social media and I realized celebrities I follow do normally have a consistent thing they are focused on, if it’s a music artist they post music videos if it’s an actor they post show they are coming out with or skits or even events that they were invited to join. Hayley also notes that people who are social media influencers and start their pages up with the unclear niche and focus they tend to also not start getting paid because they don’t have the consistency needed on the platform to get paid and so once they fix that it normally takes them about 2 years from the time, they started their page to get paid. If these influencers aren’t always getting paid and when they do it may be an inconsistent amount of money it can attract people to believe they are being genuine and not just saying something because they’re popular or in a certain type of business related to fame. People will also unfollow celebrities because of wrongful accusations or things they find were offensively said. Now even though celebrities may have social media managers they still sometimes go onto their media and can post insulting things that cause reactions out of people.
Who is more successful at influencing society positively; social media influencers are. This is because not only are social media influencers trendsetters creating things like dances, and fashion, but they also inform people of different things they’re capable of doing like DIYs (do it yourself) videos and how to videos. Their influence is positive because they are able to gain this following and views through their genuine and dedicative approach. TV celebrities aren’t as informed about the things they are posting sometimes and tend to go based on their knowledge or experience sometimes but there have been times where people have caught them in the act of saying things that may result in them neglecting what is truthful or not saying a full story because they are saying things out of instinct instead of knowledge. For example, a first draft news article states how Kanye West had stated a post saying coronavirus vaccination ‘put chips in us’ and so this not only spread concern to followers when he said that but made people question the government. When people were able to do more research to conclude this as false information, we can only think of the anger that must have been given to the celebrity as he had given people false information. The same first draft news article states that “The role of emotion is often overlooked in media literacy campaigns even though it is a strong driver of shares on social media, and therefore a powerful force in disinformation campaigns.” This shows that when on TV or in advertising this false information there becomes this idea of someone lying and, in that people, build strong opinions and so as an influence on the public the person spreading false information is seen as bad and people begin to not believe what they are saying anymore because they are now a discredited source. On time.com Laura Stampler makes an article on how celebrities posted inconsiderate things and got large amounts of backlash for it causing some to lose their media platform and others to make public apologies for their actions. When influencers do this, they are not always held at the same level of accountability because they aren’t as well known or publicized but they tend to try and stay away from this or even pay attention enough to note that what they are saying is opinion and people may disagree rather than just stating the opinion itself. I experienced this even in my research as they YouTube influencers whose videos, I watched to learn about influencing they all said that hat they were saying was based off their knowledge and experience or stated how something worked for them and may help others. This helps influencers seem credited and a valuable source as they know what they are saying can’t be used against them because it’s not on a suit all basis where everyone should feel and think the same but on a more open to your own thought, but this is how I feel to look at life. The idea of not having to agree with someone sits better in people’s minds as in America they are able to have their first amendment right.