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Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

theatlantic.com

61–70 of 278 posts

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't promote any food or drinks that I don't love myself. Even when working with restaurants, I make this clear. You can give me all the food you want, but if I don't think it's awesome, I'm not going to talk about it. So that removes any negative criticism, and it makes it greatly in their interest to serve good food. It's ONLY about the product. I'm completely anonymous, very few outside of the industry even kno…

"You can give me all the food you want, but if I don't think it's awesome, I'm not going to talk about it." That's cool but the old world where if the food isn't awesome the writer will say "THIS FOOD WAS BAD" was probably better.

Nope, provides no value except for spreading negativity. I don't have time for talking about everything I put in my mouth. I'm not a critic.

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#62
post #34

I've seen something which I think is even more interesting. Second tier influencers (100k followers) paying expensive hotels and private plane trips of first tier influences (1 mil followers), so that they can appear on their feeds, and gain new followers.

I'm sorry, completely off topic. I can't believe your username was available up until 2016, kinda jealous.

When I picked this one there were quite a few more 2 digit usernames available. I didn't even write a script, looked for them manually. Go grab em everyone :)

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#63
post #17

I just want to know who the heck takes recommendations of 'influencers' seriously? Gullible teens with no money?

I think the majority of people that get large disposable income are heavily influenced by lifestyle marketing. The tech crowd tends to be the exception with our frugal, down to earth ways despite earning lots of money.

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#64
post #17

I just want to know who the heck takes recommendations of 'influencers' seriously? Gullible teens with no money?

Lots of people went to Fyre Festival on @emrata’s say-so

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/arts/music/fyre-festiv...

But it doesn’t seem to have impacted her career any

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#65

Sounds to me like this is a big opportunity for an intermediary to connect useful social media influencers with various brands.

funny thing is, there are also tons of influencer marketplaces and agencies, it's a space with incredibly low barrier to entry. Thing about the marketplace is, there is little incentive on either side for the influencers or clients not to skip over the marketplace altogether after using it for window shopping

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#66

Wow, 10% of unsolicited requests are worth looking at? That seems remarkably high.

I'm guessing most people realize it's ridiculous to even send such requests when they have 2k followers.

That would not have been my first guess.

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#67
Every reputable travel publication/blog I know of have strict editorial policies against accepting freebies/discounts/gifts in exchange for reviews/coverage.

Those so-called "influencers" aren't really about serving their audience -- they strike me as just a scammy way to travel "for free".

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#68
post #42

"Influencer". From browsing the influencers in the article, the formula appears to be a) expensive clothes b) expensive hotels c) trailing photographer, d) regurgitation of corny "I am so cool" lines like "It takes cool people to do epic shit", "No one here gives a fuck". Do you think we could design an AI, maybe GANs and caption generation, to generate influencers like these? The hotels could pay the AI makers to us…

Believe it or not, really realistic looking computer generated Instagram influencers already exist. Example: https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/ - 1.2m followers

That’s not AI though, it’s digital art of a computer generated character in the form of an Instagram account.

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#69
post #52

In "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" there is a story about a society that shipped out all its useless members (hairdressers and telephone sanitizers) off planet. If Douglas Adams was writing the book now he may have replaced sanitizers with influencers.

Except the lack of telephone sanitizers led to the downfall of the Golgafrinchans, whereas the loss of blogger wannabes from a society would not have provided such a plot point.

Re: Luxury hotels are being inundated with requests from self-described influencers

#70

Every reputable travel publication/blog I know of have strict editorial policies against accepting freebies/discounts/gifts in exchange for reviews/coverage. Those so-called "influencers" aren't really about serving their audience -- they strike me as just a scammy way to travel "for free".

From another angle, I wonder why their readers trust the influencers when they are well-known to be bought and paid for.
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