What's an Influencer Worth?

As traditional advertising methods fade, a new generation of young social media mavens—“influencers”— are offering businesses their endorsements in exchange for money or free stuff. How does it work? More important: Is it a scam? We went undercover to find out.

- Jacqueline Detwiler

I think we can all agree that it is ethically suspect to lie about the size, location, or even existence of your house. Or steal other people’s photos. Or solicit freebies without offering anything in return. And yet, I have to admit that I’ve done all these things. I have done things that would make even the most social-media-addicted teenager blush. I have bought followers and requested likes. I have hashtagged communities to which I do not belong. (What’s up, #cleaneating!?) I have copied snapshots from other people’s Instagram accounts and then painstakingly cropped out the attribution tag before posting them to my own feed. I have shared pictures from my vacation to Italy. 

If your company sells anything at all to the public, you’ve heard about Instagram influencers—the hottest topic in advertising since, well, advertisements. As social media has begun supplanting TV, newspapers, and magazines as a primary entertainment source, companies have been forced to seek new ways of getting their products in front of the eyeballs of the coveted youth demographic. Businesses can, of course, just buy ads that Instagram slips into the streams of its users’ photo feeds. But younger consumers are alarmingly adept at ignoring those.

The ideal solution would be to infiltrate those streams not with ads but with the familiar, trusted voices of friends—who are also, as it happens, pushing the exact message you, the entrepreneur, want pushed.