Blogging & Influencer Marketing - Is this only about the numbers & an echo-system around these numbers?

After reading the title, you must be wondering what’s wrong with that. In today’s world data is most important to say if a campaign is successful or not. But here I am going to discuss about a new trend to generating numbers to show the impact and there is a chain involved. Let’s see what I am trying to say here. 

Today I came across a very interesting email and then had a conversation with a company which helps influencers increase the reach. This is first time I entertained such emails and thought of talking to such people. I am going to disclose the name of the company because I might do some bashing here and I don’t want that to be pointed and take out the real essence of this post. Let’s go steps by step to understand what these companies do and what tempted me to talk to them. What I got to know through the conversation and what I feel about this whole scenario. 

And when it comes to my existing numbers - My blog viewership has always been great although I have seen huge ups & down over the time. My social media channels have reasonable engagement, but not great I would say. Probably I never paid much attention there, specifically Twitter. I never find myself doing good job on twitter and hardly seen time there. For last few months at least, there is some activity otherwise it was just a platform where auto-scheduler used to push my posts. Now the real question is - am I happy with current state. The answer is ’No’, but should I take the shortcuts to deal with it and change my fundamental rules of blogging or find some other way. Or probably don’ think too much? These are good questions for me to ask myself and move ahead. 

What’s the proposal of the ‘Influencer Manager’ (He was sounding like a consultant who would make influencers more powerful with numbers. So I am going to use this term in this blogpost.) - Here is the offer :

• 1. I can get as many genuine* followers as I want by paying some $$. (Any platform)
• 2. I can get as many likes on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram posts etc.
• 3. This doesn’t stop here : I can also get good engagement which means comments.
• 4. And they will build my Media Kit (probably they felt, I am presenting the info well or I am not able to sell my achievements properly)

When I challenged him a bit by saying how these followers would be genuine when they follow the page only through a paid activity and what’s the guarantee that they are truly interested would enjoy the kind of content I share? He was a good sales person so moved around the question and shared some gran, which was not sufficient. This was reasonably long call where he tried to explain me how a Brand choses an influencer and if you numbers are not good, someone else would win. And I am sure he tells the same story to every influencer, so it’s an artificially created competition where only these companies would win by making money for fake stuff. And that sounded like a business which can be done by anybody who spend money on social media, build follower-ship and start making money. Things are not that simple, my friend. 

How did I feel after a telephonic call with this ‘Influencer Manager’ : It felt like, I don;t need to do any blogging and not produce any content. Just pay some money to show that I have good social media follower-ship, there are plenty of likes on my posts and brands will keep coming to me for doing campaigns. Probably a good business model to have win-win situation for all the parties involved (at least from numbers perspective). I am wondering is this really a good way? Am I the only fool thinking too much about it and trying to call myself ethical blogger. Probably I am too busy in calling myself a proud blogger, who has never paid a rupee to promote my blog or social media channels. Even, I have rejected promoting brand’s content on my platforms even when they were willing to pay. Somehow I cold never digest this philosophy, but probably I need to give serious thought here and get advice from my well-wishers. So I would certainly share this specific post to folks from whom I can expect genuine input. 

On my blog I have seen post viewership less than 100 for some posts and at the same time, there are many posts with more than 10,000 views and max of 3lac+. But all these statistics tell me what kind of content is consumed more and how to spend my energies. Would these kind of promotions ever tell me the truth? I will start living in a different world which can never show me right picture and I am fine where I am today. 

And numbers are not that bad. Travellingcamera is about complete it's 10 Million views soon and more can be checked out here. 

I would love to hear your thoughts of this, so please share your inputs as comments below. And please correct me, if you think that these companies really add value and I should try them.