Why I Feel Like A Misunderstood "Influencer"
Why I Feel Like A Misunderstood “Influencer”
Don’t worry, I also cringe and shudder immediately when I hear the term “influencer”.
Let’s be real for a moment, the term has an immediate negative connotation and I think pretty much everyone, whether you make money off of the internet or not, would agree with that. I think that this year especially has felt like a bit of a boiling pot for influencer culture, there has been more of a focus than ever before because we’ve all spent 60% of the year at home, likely on our phones scrolling through Instagram which we all know is the home planet of the “influencer”. I’m probably going to mention this word a lot throughout this post, so I’ll drop the speech marks now and cringe while I type out that word over and over again for the next 45 minutes.
I don’t know about you guys, but lately it has felt like we’ve ditched celeb gossip and replaced it with influencer cancel culture. It’s everywhere, influencer drama is in national newspapers across the globe, it’s shared, highlighted and spread via TikTok videos and YouTube drama channels, it’s in the comment sections of influencer posts who are experiencing call out culture for making a mistake or just due to being a bit of an ignorant dickhead. I get it. Trust me, I get it.. but wow, it’s intense.
Let’s go back to the start, and maybe this will really help you to understand why I feel so frustrated and misunderstood when I am labelled an influencer and put into that box with a whole heap of people who I simply cannot relate to or understand. I started this blog in 2015, I did a rebrand last year so a lot of old blog posts are now archived, but I started this blog as a hobby, purely for fun without any intention of this becoming a job. I’ve always been a creative, I’ve always taken photos and when I started my Instagram account back in 2011 it wasn’t just about having another social platform to share what I was upto in the weekend or on holiday, it was always a creative outlet for me from day one.
At high school, I studied and excelled in all of the creative subjects. Textiles, painting, design, photography and I absolutely adored it, I was one of those people who would ditch my friends at lunch time to go back to the art block, pop my headphones back in and get on with my design board to make sure I was always getting my excellence grades. Fast forward to university and I’m studying a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Event Management which was so academic based (I’m talking crazy amounts of essays and an accounting paper in my first year). Can you even imagine how much I missed my art subjects from school?
By this point I was reading blogs and watching YouTubers religiously. I loved how a simple blog post about skincare or a video showing what was in someone’s handbag made me feel like I was connecting with likeminded people beyond my group of friends (classic millennial). I’d watch and read every single day, and discuss all of the amazing people I felt like I had connected with to my mum and she was the one who actually suggested I start my own blog to share my life experience, skincare journey and photography that I was posting on Instagram.
It took a lot of convincing because I was embarrassed at the idea, but once I decided that this could be a fun little creative hobby, I was all in. I maintained my hobby, taking lots of photos in the weekends and writing about fashion, the ups and downs of my mental health during university, travel diaries from trips abroad, I fell in love with my little corner of the internet. By the end of my three year degree in 2017, I had been working on sponsored Instagram content with some big brands, won my first blogging award and signed on to my talent agency Johnson & Laird and the rest is history. I’ve now been working as a freelance blogger, content creator and “influencer” for nearly three years and I couldn’t be more fulfilled, happy and excited about my modern and often misunderstood career that came from 0 intention to make money.
As you can see, this didn’t happen overnight and my intentions were and still are, 100% pure. This is exactly why I feel so misunderstood when people judge me on first glance as your typical influencer, the type of influencer that people are sick of, can’t trust and roll their eyes at. I absolutely LOVE what I do, I adore connecting with you guys, discussing things like skincare and books and trust me when I say this, I worked way too hard over so many years to ever, EVER take this job for granted. When I say that I love a product, it’s because I’ve tested it out first. I’m a consumer too, so I wouldn’t dream to lead you guys and your bank accounts astray with my product recommendations.
I think the reason why the term “influencer” has such a bad reputation is because a lot of people have “blown up” overnight so they don’t have that same gratitude that years and years of hard work gives you, or they have managed to copy and paste someone else’s style onto their own Instagram page as an easy shortcut to make themselves look worthy of a free product send out. I know this sounds presumptuous and harsh, but I’ve seen so many people try to start a blog with an accompanied Instagram page and given up after 6 months because they started it for the wrong reasons.
We all need to remember that we decide who is and isn’t influential, not someone who see’s this as an opportunity to score free things in exchange for a mediocre positive product review. I think it’s really important to remember that Influencer marketing has definitely developed into a full blown industry because paying someone on Instagram with an engaged audience is a hell of a lot cheaper for advertisers than a billboard, a bus or a TV ad, that is why it’s so popular and why now 90% of brands are engaging in it. However, it is a business, it’s good business, so not every creator will be taking on every and any sponsored opportunity they are given. Without sounding like that guy, I happily decline any sponsored opportunities that I don’t align with, or that I don’t think you guys will be interested in. This is a good thing, because it means that if you enjoy following me and my content, you can feel rest assured that the sponsorships I do post about have been cherry picked, not taken out of desperation and therefore is always going to be authentic and genuine.
Yes I make money on social media, yes I post a lot of photos of myself, but do I do this because I’m passionate about creativity, sharing and connecting? 100% yes. And if you found yourself the perfect new moisturiser that has worked wonders on your skin because of me, that is just an added bonus for both of us.