Social Media Influencers (SMIs): Essays on Instacapital, Its Forms and Its Relationships with Market Actors

Abstract

The online social media influencer (SMI) phenomenon has become recognisable as not only offering legitimate career pathways, but also as a space and field that has created profitable personal brands. The rise of SMIs has been enabled particularly by the growth of the social networking platform Instagram, allowing individuals to share their lifestyles with their followers through images, text and video. Instagram has helped SMIs access the means through which they can monetise their social life and to co-create branded and sponsored content. The result is marketing budgets being increasingly assigned to SMI promotions and collaborations. The need, therefore, for more theoretical and practical understanding of SMIs and their interaction with market actors including brands and the newly emergent SMI agencies (a professionalising industry) is apparent. Hence, in-depth interviews with a range of Australian SMIs and SMI agencies were conducted, followed by a visual narrative analysis of the images and texts in the SMIs’ Instagram posts. This methodology was used as a basis for three essays, each exploring a distinct aspect of how SMIs generate, maintain and transform “Instacapital” in the online field. The first essay maps the SMI landscape using the Bourdieusian idea of “cultural intermediaries” (Bourdieu, 1984). It examines key actors within this field, the co-creation between different types of lifestyle (micro, macro and power) SMIs, and emergent mediating agencies and brands, highlighting what the industry recognises as legitimate SMI success (online social capital). The essay highlights the emergent and key role of the SMI agency/agent as a significant cultural intermediary in this process. The second essay employs Bourdieu’s (1993) examination of the “circle of belief” idea to examine how the practices employed by SMIs facilitate the generation of online social, cultural and economic capital and the processes by which legitimacy is constructed within the online social sphere of influence. The essay further explicates the role of the agency as a cultural intermediary in “producing” and legitimating the “person brand” of the “power” SMI. The final essay focuses on the transitional pathway of the SMI from being a micro SMI to power SMI or person brand. It introduces the notion of “affective capital” (Arvidsson, 2013) into the online social influence field, which is traced from the data as being derived from four types of distinct “sub-capital”. Namely, attention capital (van Krieken 2012), authenticity capital (Gnegy, 2017), aesthetic capital (Colliander & Marder, 2018) and feminine capital (Huppatz, 2009) to collectively create a distinct form of “meta-capital” (Couldry, 2003), which helps create a person brand. This study shows how the person brand serves a key part in linking (Gnegy, 2017) consumers affectively by using their affective capital (Arvidsson, 2013) to the object brands for whom they serve as “ambassadors” in a symbiotic relationship. The three essays help to explain the way by which affective capital works to help bind the object brand with the person brand. They bring together an understanding of how social media influencers (in the Instagram world) are mediated and produced by the agencies, while serving as cultural intermediaries themselves by leveraging their affective capital online to bind consumers ever closer to object brands. The data reveals the significance of SMI (person brand) interchanges with (object) brands for the value co-creation of profitable collaborations, creating and building strong affective capital into rich brand-to-brand relationships. Hence, these three essays collectively build a theoretical understanding of the SMI industry, as well as provide a practical understanding on how to identify, match and leverage SMIs’ affective capital from their online follower base to build strong consumer-to-object brand relationships. As a result, these SMI person brands are discussed as being a kind of cultural intermediary themselves, by serving this affective linking function for object brands. These essays form the basis for a stronger theoretical understanding of how online social capital can be understood as working to build affective links between object brands and their consumers and their (SMIs’) own publics (Arvidsson, 2013). The affective intensity or the social imaginary (Arvidsson, 2013) created by the SMI around themselves as a person brand and the object brand are key to harnessing these consumer publics. Hence, it is the affective labour value add that object brands seek when collaborating with the social media influencer sphere.