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8/6/2019 Canadian Business

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THE SOCIAL



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wo days before the royal wedding,Erin Bury went to high tea at a

posh old Toronto hotel. In thelobby, her hostess—like Bury, a

local blogger—swept her towardthe hotel’s tea rooms, where a

dozen young women and a few

young men, dressed for an English

garden party, tried on fancy hats andposed for portraits. On a laptop computer, aman from Microsoft grafted the absent royal

couple into the photos, and then printed cop-ies for guests. As the partygoers sat down

to finger sandwiches and scones, a pair of Microsoft’s brand evangelists addressed the

room, demonstrating on a projection screena few handy features of the company’s Win-

dows 7 operating system.A community manager for Sprouter—a hot

online networking tool for entrepreneurs—Bury was among a group of online “influ-

encers” hand-picked to attend the Micro-

soft event. Twenty-five years old, with long

blond hair, pixieish blue eyes and a broadsmile, she sat among a group of other com-

munity managers and social media consul-tants. While the evangelists preached, their

audience half-paid attention, keeping oneeye on their phones. They showed off pic-

tures of each other on Twitter, tweeted at

each other across the room, and commentedon the software Microsoft was showing off .Each tweet was marked with the hashtag

“#W7RoyalTea.” And as they tweeted, dozens

of their followers tweeted back, expressing a mixture of interest, delight and envy.

You probably wouldn’t recognize ErinBury if you saw her on the street, unless

you were part of the startup community in which she works. But in some rooms, Erin

Bury is minor royalty. At a charity fundraiser

organized by Toronto’s social-media com-

munity last Christmas, young PR students

from the city’s Humber College eagerly net- worked their way to an introduction, then

scurried off to tweet at her to solidify the

connection: “Great to finally meet @erin-

bury at #HoHoTO!” Erin Bury gets free stuff that you don’t, gets invited to parties for

which you aren’t on the list, and has huge

brands waving cash at her—all this because,in a way, she’s rich: she has social capital,

or put more simply, influence.More and more, companies are turning

to “influencers” like Bury to help them gettheir messages out to interested audiences.

The more influence you have, the more valu-able you potentially are to a social-media-

minded company, whether they sell soft-

ware or tequila. Some see influencers like

Bury almost completely taking over thetaste-making roles traditionally performed

by celebrities and journalists. But whenyour reputation becomes a commodity, it

can lead to some tough decisions. It’s onething for Bury to have social capital; now

she has to decide how to use it.

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, Bury’s Twitter fol-

lowing may have eclipsed the 10,000 mark.She’s been retweeted by Oprah and has a

blog with a small-but-desirable readership.

Her growing reputation for knowing the

ins and outs of the tech startup scene has

earned her writing gigs with The Globe and

Mail, Business Insider and Mashable. But if along the way she’s accrued the kind of social

capital that gets her on the other side of thered velvet rope, it was almost accidental. A

product of small-town Ontario, Bury studied journalism at Carleton University, interested

more in learning communication skills than

becoming a working reporter. After graduat-ing, she spent a year in the Toronto office of the research group Environics. One night over

dinner, she met Sarah Prevette, a talented

young entrepreneur still in her 20s who was

about to launch what would become Sprouter,and needed a community manager for the

venture. Bury didn’t know what a community

manager was, knew little about social media, but was intrigued by the opportunity. “My

barometer for things is always, ‘What’s the

worst that could happen?’” Bury says.Bury signed up for a Twitter account the

day before she started at Sprouter in Decem-

ber 2009, and began networking on thecompany’s behalf. As its profile rose, so didhers, as one of its two public faces alongside

Prevette. She was getting ample experienceto help her one day strike out on her own;

but as Sprouter held events in Ottawa andMontreal, and as far away as Los Angeles,

Bury realized that to a certain audience,her name had started to mean something,

beyond the company she worked for.Then last fall, a friend in the PR industry

convinced Bury’s boyfriend, Kevin Oulds (atradesman who works far from the social

media) to enter a contest staged by SauzaTequila. He made a funny video promoting

the brand, rounded up votes from friendsand family, and made it to the final pairing.

Bury had been on the sidelines for most of the contest, but with a cash prize of $10,000

on the line, she decided to get involved.While she’d previously helped Oulds with

strategy, for the final month she eff ectively became his campaign manager, helping him with promotions—including giving away a

smartphone she’d been given as an incentivefor voters—and at times using her own Twit-

ter account to encourage people to supporthim. Oulds won the contest handily.

Soon after, Microsoft came knocking. Buryhad blogged about her love of the company’sHotmail e-mail platform, but she’d grown

frustrated with it and switched to a competi-

tor. Microsoft off ered to pay her to write a

series of blog posts on her personal site aboutswitching back. She and Microsoft agreed

that she would be transparent, announcing

in her posts that the company was paying

Erin Bury turned her online influence into a commodity. But what’s areputation worth? BY JORDAN TIMM,

PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKKI OMEROD

NETWORK

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her to blog on the subject.And then Dentyne chewing

gum got in touch. They wantedto hire a real-life social-media

power couple to be the face of a

Valentine’s Day–themed promotional cam-paign. Oulds and Bury were chosen. They

were paid for a series of media appearances—

including national television—and when the brand flew them to Vancouver for a roundof press, they took advantage of the com-

plimentary airfare and extended their stayinto a vacation.

If the first two opportunities were rela-

tive no-brainers, the Dentyne off er caused

a little more reflection. “We had just donethe Sauza thing, which I was very associ-

ated with,” Bury says. “If I’m all of a suddena Dentyne spokesperson, is it going to be,

‘Oh my god, she’s partnering up with every brand that approaches her?’”

Bury found herself approaching a dilemma.How much free stuff , how many endorse-

ments could she accept before the credibil-ity that earned her that influence in the first

place started to be compromised?

A DILEMMA LIKE BURY’S only exists becausethe kind of social-media influence she’s

accrued now has actual value in the real

world. Rather than broadcasting a messageto a wide audience and hoping to hit a few

interested parties, brands are increasingly

seeing the value in targeting a few inter-ested and influential people and letting themessage spread to those people’s networks,

which will presumably also be interested. Atan event like the royal tea, says Microsoft

Canada’s Consumer and Entertainment PRlead, Paolo Pasquini, “I can feel the engage-

ment. You have between 10 and 30 peo-ple in an event, they’re tweeting, they’re

engaging, they’re dynamic. They’re hav-ing conversations with Microsoft, they’re

having conversations with the host, they

leave, you end up seeing a trickle of tweets,

a trickle of blogs—potentially sometimes youfind yourself in traditional media as well.”

Plus, compared to the cost and return-on-investment you get through conventional

advertising channels, springing for tea andsandwiches is a bargain.

“I think of it like shooting gold out of a shot- gun,” Joe Fernandez says of the big media

buys that have for decades been the back-

bone of brand strategies. Fernandez is the

CEO and co-founder of Klout, a San Fran-

cisco company that tries to measure indi-

viduals’ influence across social media and

translate that into a single metric, a Kloutscore. The company’s algorithms analyze

your behaviour on social platforms like Twit-ter and Facebook, and people’s response to

—how often you’re tweeted at or retweeted,

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Bury’s dilemmaexists only because the online influence

she’s acquired nowhas real-world value

and by whom, and how influential those

people are. The higher your Klout score,

the more influential you are.Bury’s Klout score is 68 out of 100. That’s

modest compared to a real celebrity likeConan O’Brien (with more than three millionfollowers and a score of 88), but comparesfavourably to the Canadian social-media

maven Amber MacArthur, who notches a

64. Though MacArthur reaches more people,Klout ranks Bury higher in part because hernetwork features more influential people,

and because her tweets are more likely toprovoke reaction from her followers.

This concept of the influencer—someone

who aff ects the behaviour of others and, inthe marketing world, their buying behaviour

in particular—isn’t new. Journalists and celeb-rities have fulfilled that role for years. But

as the new twist on the old saw goes, on the web, everybody can be famous to 15 people.

But anybody who becomes Internet famous will have to decide how far to go with this

kind of brand engagement.

“FIVE YEARS AGO, I was on this show called

Maxed Out on the W Network,” says blog-

ger and bundle of energy Casie Stewart overcoff ee at a downtown Toronto café, “and

the [host] asked me what I wanted to do.

And I was, like, ‘I want to be a world brand,’

kind of like Paris Hilton. She told me, ‘Well,that’s really hard, Casie, because you didn’t

come from money like her.’ And I was like,‘Oh yeah, bitch? You watch.’”

Stewart started her This Is My Life blog

five years ago, as a hobby while working

in the fashion industry. In the fall of 2008,

she decided to take it more seriously. “Isaid to my friends, ‘I’m going to hibernateall winter, and people are going to know

me from my blog in the summer,’” Stew-

art says. “And I did. I just started blogging all the time. I’d go to events and I’d write

about them, and any product I use, I started writing about it.”

A local PR company reached out to Stewart



and started sending product samples, she

started blogging about them, and when her growing profile led to a paid role as a spokes-

person for a charity, she decided, “I’m going to professionally be Casie Stewart.”

Stewart won a role as a Virgin Atlantic

Airlines spokesperson, became a face of

Puma Canada, and went full-throttle after

other opportunities. While she shares Bury’sconcerns about credibility, Stewart repre-

sents a diff erent approach. She and a fewlike her are testing whether “influencer”

can be a job. She arrives for an interview

wearing an outfit that a Queen Street bou-tique loaned her after she tweeted she’d be

appearing on a panel and needed some-

thing to wear. She has a talent agent to get

her gigs in commercials, especially with

brands she’s worked with in the social-mediarealm. She hasn’t paid her phone billsince 2009; Telus covers it for her,

and equips her with the latestAndroid phones. She makesat least as much per week as

she did in her last formal job,

which paid $45,000 a year.But influence can be a quick-

silver thing, and there’s no guar-antee that today’s It Girl won’t

be tomorrow’s Was Girl. Stew-

art says the thought doesn’toverly bother her. Five years

ago, there was no Twitter. In fiveyears, maybe she’ll live on her family’s sheep

farm in New Zealand. “I’m always going to be Casie Stewart,” she says. “The brand that

is me isn’t going to go away.”

ONE OF THE KEYS TO being influential, every-one seems to agree, is being authentic. “Any

company that tries to sell to us too much onsocial media, we turn away,” says Andrea

Tavchar, a professor of social media and pub-lic relations at Toronto’s Humber College.

She teaches her Humber PR students—someof whom will become the people hiring the

likes of Stewart, and some of whom may

instead decide they want to be Stewart—how

to build their social capital online, and howimportant authenticity is to that currency.

“The more authentic you sound online, themore people are going to believe you.”

But can spending your social capital on

accepting opportunities to front brandscompromise the authenticity that earned

you that currency in the first place?

Tara Hunt calls that currency “whuffie,”

a term borrowed from the social-capital- based currency in a sci-fi novel by Cory Doc-torow. Her 2009 book The Whu ffie Factor

(retitled The Power of Social Networking for

the paperback edition) is part of Tavchar’ssyllabus, and has helped shape the way peo-

ple think about social capital and especially

social-media capital. A high-profile blogger,author and serial entrepreneur, the Mon-

treal-based Hunt is a regular on lists of themost influential women in tech. She recalls

that five or six years ago, when brands first

started sending gadgets and other productsto bloggers perceived to have large followings,

people were suspicious at first but soon got

use to the free stuff . Hunt is certainly opento working with brands. She loves her newtablet computer, provided by Samsung in

exchange for appearing in a short video totalk about the future of mobile. But what

about trading services not for free stuff , or

experiences, but for cash? “You can’t dothat,” Hunt says flatly. “When you’re givenfree stuff , you don’t feel directly obligated.

But when you’re on a payroll, you do.”Hunt’s been off ered as much as $20,000

for an endorsement. She’s a single mom with a teenage son, and she’s in

startup mode with her new proj-ect, Buyosphere. She admits thatshe sticks so close to her princi-ples that she hurts herself. “We

all have to make money at the

end of the day.”

But what if the wrong opportunitytempts her, and she loses her whuffie?

“That’s the most valuable thing I have,” Huntsays. “If I lose that capital, I have nothing.”

SIX MONTHS AGO, Erin Bury used to get moreinvitations. Lifestyle brands, spirits-makers,

and film festivals wanted her at their events.For the most part, Bury politely declined,recognizing the audience she’d acquired

was more interested in the stuff that built

her influence in the first place—tweets andposts about entrepreneurship and tech. Pre-

sumably the brands, too, recognized that

Bury wasn’t always the best fit for them,

because the invitations have dwindled. If

an influencer becomes just a shill, it reflects

just as poorly on the brands with which

they’re associated. “It’s got to be very cred-

ible to get any kind of distance out of it,”

says Pasquini of the art of engaging influ-

encers. “You’ve got to be relevant, you’ve got to be transparent—because that keeps

Erin’s credibility, right? And that’s hugelyimportant, because her audience follows

her based on trust. We don’t want to ever jeopardize that, [because] this isn’t some-

thing we’re doing as a one-off . We’d love todo more in collaboration with her.”

As the royal tea wound to a close, Bury

wandered to a corner table, away from theaction, where she saw a cluster of unfamiliar

faces. They were mostly Microsoft employ-ees, but could prove valuable members of

her networks, whether as an influencer oran entrepreneur. She sat down and intro-

duced herself.

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