The top models embarked on a trip to an island in the Bahamas to create a promotional video for a music festival. They arrived to share the excitement of their exotic and luxurious vacation, complete with parties and exclusive facilities such as yachts, jet skis, and even private jets. Immediately, their content went viral on social media and became public attention. Expanding beyond models’ posts, the festival organizers enlisted hundreds of influencers to amplify the festival. Resembling the expression, “social media, do your magic,” these posts successfully provoke hundreds of people eager to attend the festival, book tickets, and make deposits as a guarantee for a comfy experience during the festival. In reality, the festival known as Fyre Festival was nothing but a scam orchestrated by entrepreneur Billy McFarlan. There was no island, exclusive concert, or promised luxury facilities. The public bombarded the influencers for being seen as conveying lies. Some influencers apologized and stated that they were unaware of the malicious intent behind it. 

The documentary film Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, produced by Netflix, proves the power of influencers. The label given to these models, influencers, refers to individuals who can influence the public through their content. However, in this digital era of transparency, the public can openly question the responsibility of influencers. 

This film reminds me of influencer engagement as one of the favored strategies by some clients at IDCOMM. Influencer engagement was quite popular among brand clients when I entered the public relations industry in 2017. The clients understand that influencer reviews or testimonials could increase brand awareness and sales. Unfortunately, in several cases, many clients hope that utilizing influencers can increase sales instantly. The brand places brand awareness as a second priority or even not become the objective anymore. The key message is conveyed monotonously with minimum public relations tactics, such as continuous storytelling and innovative message delivery. 

Attempting to align with the progress of the times, several clients focusing on implementing C4D (communications for development) have also begun to consider influencer engagement strategies to convey development messages. The undeniable success of President Jokowi in the 2014 Indonesian Presidential election and Ahok’s defeat in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial election is evidence of the tremendous influence of influencers on social media. Although there is a growing momentum to maximize this strategy, 2021 will be a challenging year where influencer engagement is applied to drive behavior change. Clients involved in development campaigns often expect collaboration with influencers to be non-transactional. At the same time, it’s widely known that working with influencers is frequently transactional. The clients also expect a behavioral change in a short period and the number of influencers to be as efficient as possible. 

What role do public relations practitioners play in preparing influencers as message conveyors? Their role is not only surfing the internet and preparing a list of influencers but also responsibly selecting the right influencers and equipping them with a comprehensive understanding of the communication campaign. How can we ensure the recommended influencers are 100% eligible for the campaign? It requires precise steps when conducting influencer engagement, such as understanding the client’s expectations, seeking insights and screening, building relationships, ensuring that key messages are delivered correctly, and analyzing influencer performance. These steps must be continuously communicated to clients and influencers, emphasizing that this collaboration is not just a transactional relationship but a shared responsibility to ensure that the communicated message is delivered effectively and accurately. 

Client Expectations  

The expectations or objectives of a communication campaign are the most crucial aspect of the communication strategy. A public relations practitioner should become a listener and provide the best solutions. A digital communication campaign has several objectives: awareness, consideration, and conversion. The awareness stage is created to expand information dissemination and provide knowledge to the public. Meanwhile, the consideration stage aims to make the public believe and internalize something. The conversion seeks to direct the public to take action, whether it be a purchase, behavior change, or other tangible actions. 

Involving influencers in the campaign can build awareness because they have many loyal followers. The influencer can also create interesting messages and trigger interactions. Consistent and massive influencer involvement can have a significant impact on this objective. When expectations advance for consideration and conversion, it is necessary to involve influencers who can convince the public with a credible track record. For example, when the campaign’s objective is to encourage people to buy a product, it is necessary to involve influencers who can sell it. We can give the influencer a unique code on their post and count the click numbers as a success indicator. The influencer engagement strategy can be more comprehensive when we have a complex objective. For example, it can involve various levels of influencers, provide special training and treatment for influencers, conduct research, maximize content variations, and much more, including a substantial investment.  

 Exploring insights and screening  

After establishing the campaign objectives, the public relations practitioner should create a list of suitable influencers with strong insight. Some definitive indicators used in determining influencers are the number of followers, engagement rate, and the suitability of their feed or posts with the campaign. A more comprehensive insight would strengthen the reason for choosing the influencer by seeking their interests, visions, and target audience. A lesson learned from the gender norm campaigns handled by IDCOMM was that screening and digging for insight about influencers was very complex and time-consuming. The process involves mapping influencers deemed to have aligned visions and interests, followed by baseline research to observe follower characteristics, pre-campaign interviews with influencers, and professional influencer engagement. Another step, background checking, becomes a critical mandatory requirement to ensure that the influencers have no legal violations, are not affiliated with political parties or figures, or do not endorse tobacco products. Another consideration is that the influencer is compatible with the campaign. 

Constructing relationships and ensuring the alignment of key messages

A public relations practitioner should have strong communication and relationship skills to gain the trust of an influencer. They should convey key messages and ensure the influencers are delivered appropriately. Public relations practitioners are responsible for creating communication guidelines, briefings, approval processes, and obtaining content achievements from influencers. A flexible, persuasive attitude and a willingness to enrich knowledge are the main assets when working with influencers. It has become a common understanding that arranging influencer schedules becomes challenging.   

What should public relations practitioners do if the influencers miscommunicate the message? Strong relationships become the key. If a public relations practitioner has strong relationships, they can use a persuasive approach to requesting influencers to make revisions. Practitioners can implement this approach when there are many revisions while influencers have strict rules. That’s why negotiation skills become essential in asking for flexibility from influencers and educating clients. 

Analyzing Influencer Performance 

 On one occasion, when ID COMM had just completed a digital communication campaign on climate change, a client asked me about the details of the social media reports. He asked me, “What do these numbers mean? Is it true that all activities reached millions of people?” This question shows that the social media result should be comprehensive by combining the quantitative result and qualitative explanation using three measurement indicators: engagement, reach, and impressions. Engagement refers to interactions generated by content, such as likes, comments, shares, and bookmarks. Reach estimates the number of audiences reached by content, and impressions are estimates of how often the public views content. Engagement becomes the primary measurement because high engagement numbers indicate the influencer’s skill in inspiring the public. Besides quantitative measurement, public relations practitioners can enrich social media reports through comment analysis and research to the followers. Through these two methods, we can find public responses and discover insights that can be used as recommendations in the future. 

Influencer engagement is a communication strategy that has proven effective and appropriate for the current conditions. However, public relations practitioners must follow specific steps before recommending this strategy to clients. As a result, a communication campaign will flow genuine and not transactional. 

Author: Dewi Bastina