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The headline of last week’s press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York issued another setback in the mainstream understanding and acceptance of social media influencers as legitimate publishers and information sources. It read, “Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign.” The mainstream media […]

Is a celebrity an influencer? By that, I mean someone that falls into the category of influencer marketing? Or is celebrity endorsement a category in and of itself? I tend to classify celebrities as different because they’ve earned their influencer for something other than being an influencer. Even if a content creator illustrates expertise or […]

There are dozens of ways for influencers and content creators to monetize their content. Sure, the easy money seems to be partnering with brands to share them with your audience in relevant ways in exchange for a fee or some measure of value. But that shouldn’t be the only way influencers make their money. Merchandising […]

Is Facebook set to kill the influencer economy? That question arose during my recent conversation with Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere and the Everything Everywhere podcast, and it’s a question we seriously have to consider and contend with in the coming year or years. He explained every time a brand or an agency, or one […]

You don’t need $5.6 million to get attention for your brand during the Super Bowl. Well, you do if you insist that attention come in the form of an official Super Bowl commercial. But there are lots of brands who have successfully hijacked the online conversation and buzz around Super Bowl commercials in recent years […]

One of the first jobs I tackled when I began focusing on social media marketing in the mid-2000s was to arm wrestle with a room full of corporate lawyers about what a client could and couldn’t do on social media. Fortunately, I was working with attorneys who had an attitude of possibility, not risk-aversion. They […]

One look at my articles and social posts and you can probably tell I’m a bit of a podcast nut these days. I wasn’t for a long time. In fact, up until the last 2-3 years, I thought the vast majority of podcasts were terrible. (Well, I still think that, but there are more good […]

Dr. Karen Freberg is heading into her 11th year of teaching public relations at the University of Louisville. She also teaches a master’s level course for one of my alma maters … West Virginia University. Dr. Freberg started teaching a new version of public relations as the 2000s were winding down and social media had started […]

Influencer marketing is growing up. If you don’t believe me, look at the latest numbers in AspireIQ’s The State of Influencer Marketing 2021 report. 96 percent of creators want to work with brands beyond social media posts 87 percent are willing to work with favorite brands in exchange for product, as long as the perceived […]

If I were to describe a person to you who had built a large following for themselves online, parlayed that into a job at one of the biggest companies in the world in a given industry, fell ill with cancer, beat that cancer, then started his own agency which is winning national and international awards […]

If you’re going to be a guest on a podcast, you need to know how to be a guest on a podcast. It’s easy to think, “Oh, we’re just chatting like on the phone,” and nonchalant your opportunity to be interviewed. When you take that approach, you wind up sounding bad, dumb or both. I […]

There’s a reason Winfluence often features people representing the influence marketing software solutions and it isn’t sponsorship dollars. These are the people working in and thinking about influence marketing every day, so they have great insights and perspective to share. I thought I knew most of the players in the software space until I recently […]