Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication

Nils S. Borchers, Nils S. Borchers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000525342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book seeks to draw a comprehensive picture of influencer collaborations from a strategic communication perspective. The contributors tackle strategic influencer communication from multidisciplinary perspectives, from varying actor foci, and from different methodological frameworks and methods.

Influencers cross traditional boundaries in many ways and oscillate between intimacy and publicity, authenticity and commercialization, ingratiation and critical distance. From a strategic communication perspective, this variability makes influencers hard to capture: organizations can cooperate with influencers to achieve both marketing and PR objectives. Influencers can act as cooperation partners, integrating commercial content into organic narratives, or as independent critics. Influencers also combine different roles that have traditionally been occupied by separate actors such as intermediary, content distributor, creative content producer, community manager, testimonial, strategic counsellor, and event host. The combination of these roles in just one actor opens new opportunities for strategic communication and can produce appreciated synergy effects. It is therefore hardly surprising that influencer collaborations have become a firmly established instrument in the toolbox of strategic communicators.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Advertising and the International Journal of Strategic Communication.

Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication: A Conceptual Framework for Strategic Social Media Influencer Communication

Nadja Enke

and Nils S. Borchers

ABSTRACT

Strategic social media influencer communication has become a major topic in strategic communication. However, despite the growing relevance of this new strategic communication instrument, research has paid only limited attention to elaborating its basic concepts. In this article, we adopt a strategic communication perspective to develop a conceptual framework for strategic social media influencer communication. Particularly, we draw on research findings that identify the external resources social media influencers contribute to organization-influencer cooperation. We use these findings to systematically develop functional definitions of social media influencers and of strategic social media influencer communication. We define social media influencers as third-party actors who have established a significant number of relevant relationships with a specific quality to and influence on organizational stakeholders through content production, content distribution, interaction, and personal appearance on the social web. Subsequently, we define strategic social media communication as the purposeful use of communication by organizations or social media influencers in which social media influencers are addressed or perform activities with strategic significance to organizational goals. We then situate these definitions within the broader framework of strategic communication by discussing related concepts and by describing the strategic action field that has emerged around strategic social media influencer communication.

Introduction

Strategic influencer communication has become a major topic in strategic communication (Zerfass, Verhoeven, Moreno, Tench, & Verčič, 2016). Many organizations have identified social media influencers (SMIs) as relevant intermediaries, most notably because they provide access to and might even influence hard-to-reach stakeholders, e.g., teenage and young adult consumers or special interest groups. This way, SMIs have gained impact on organizations’ goal attainment. It is therefore a logical step that organizations have begun to develop and establish strategic SMI communication as a communication instrument, which extends their strategic communication toolbox.

Following hot on organizational practice’s heels, research in strategic communication and other fields has produced first valuable insights about, for instance, how organizations can engage with SMIs (Uzunoğlu & Misci Kip, 2014), how to adapt organizational activities to SMIs’ working routines (Pang, Tan, Lim, Kwan, & Lakhanpal, 2016), and the impact of SMI communication on stakeholders (Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017). Given the newness of the field, however, more conceptual approaches, which elaborate on the SMI communication concept and situate it within the field of strategic communication, are still rare.

We take this conceptual gap as a starting point for our undertaking. In this article, we aim to develop a conceptual framework for strategic SMI communication. To do so, we systematically develop definitions of (a) SMIs and (b) strategic SMI communication and (c) situate these concepts in the strategic action field of SMI communication. We argue that systematically developed and firmly situated definitions can benefit research on SMIs in strategic communication in various ways: They provide research with a solid conceptual foundation; they strengthen research’s analytical rigor; and they can inform and organize empirical research. All these benefits can help to obtain a more detailed understanding of SMI communication and its implications for strategic communication.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows: We begin with an account of the premises from which we start our definitional work. As a first major step, we then derive a definition of SMIs from the functions that SMIs can perform for organizations and distinguish this definition from related concepts. As a second step, we use the definition to develop a definition of strategic SMI communication. Finally, we outline the contexts in which organizations deploy strategic SMI communication.

Social media influencers as organizational stakeholders

Despite the growing body of studies on SMIs, research has not yet paid particular attention to definitions of the influencer concept. We could identify two distinct definitions and some further anecdotal comments on particular features and functions. According to an early, often referred definition by Freberg, Graham, McGaughey, and Freberg (2011, p. 90), SMIs “represent a new type of independent third party endorser who shape audience attitudes through blogs, tweets, and the use of other social media.” Abidin (2015) provides a definition that goes beyond Freberg et al.’s proposal by adding (a) the status group of SMIs, (b) the specific topics of their postings, (c) the necessity of a following, (d) their engagement with audiences, and (e) the willingness to monetize their activities as further criteria. Abidin (2015, para. 1) defines influencers as “everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in digital and physical spaces, and monetize their following by integrating ‘advertorials’ into their blog or social media posts.”

Both definitions provide valuable insights into the SMI concept. Freberg et al.’s definition draws attention to the institutional separation of SMIs from their clients by conceptualizing SMIs as independent entities. Abidin’s definition introduces the notion of commercial cooperation between SMIs and clients and details SMIs’ ways of relating to audiences beyond technical channel aspects.

Both definitions, however, are offered en passant, i.e., the authors (a) posit rather than systematically deduce their definitions and (b) do not account for their specific perspectives. This way, their legitimation draws primarily on their undisputed face validity. Nevertheless, we claim that research on strategic SMI communication could benefit from a more systematically developed and more firmly situated definition of SMIs. Since definitions are key instruments for making sense of the social world, they are crucial for what researchers can observe and how they interpret specific observations (Caws, 1959). Thus, a systematically developed and firmly situated definition of SMIs could constitute a central building block of a strategic SMI communication framework and help to gain a more comprehensive understanding of strategic SMI communication.

We suggest that a definition should treat SMIs as formal rather than material objects (Keller, 2006) because strategic communication research is not interested in SMIs per se, but rather in their specific role in strategic communication. For instance, issues of displaying masculinity on YouTube (Morris & Anderson, 2015) are of minor relevance from the perspective of strategic communication.

The decision to understand SMIs as formal object carries two implications (Borchers, 2014): First, the definition has to focus on the functions of SMIs from the perspective of strategic communication rather than on ontological features. Such a focus is purposeful because it reflects the relevance of SMIs for strategic communication. In fact, the term influencer itself already reflects this relevance. It is a functional attribution that organizations apply to social media users such as bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, etc., that are ascribed the ability to influence the organization’s stakeholders and thus become relevant to the organization. Second, the definition cannot claim universal validity but is valid only from the perspective of strategic communication. This perspective implies that SMIs are defined in their relation to organizations because strategic communication “takes the perspective of the focal organization/entity and its calculus to achieve specific goals by means of communication under conditions of limited resources and uncertainty” (Zerfass, Verčič, Nothhaft, & Werder, 2018, p. 487). The focus on organizations again implies that our definition also adopts a meso-level perspective. Consequently, the definition we are going to develop can only inform research that in some way or the other considers SMIs in relation to organizations and their objectives.

Functions and definition of SMIs from a strategic communication perspective

We argue that SMIs are organizational stakeholders that can fulfill specific functions for organizations and their strategic communication. According to Freeman (2010, p. 49) stakeholders are groups or individuals “who can affect or are affected by organizational purposes.” SMIs fulfill the functions of “secondary stakeholders” (Freeman, Harrison, Wicks, Parmar, & de Colle, 2010, p. 24) that have the ability to influence “primary stakeholders” (Freeman et al., 2010, p. 24) of organizations such as consumers or citizens. In addition, they can serve as primary stakeholders by providing organizations with social media content. To describe SMI functions in more detail, we mainly draw on the findings of an empirical study on the management of strategic SMI communication by organizations and their agencies, which we have presented elsewhere (Enke & Borchers, 2018).

We suggest organizing the functions SMIs fulfill for organizations according to their position in the communication and organizational value creation process. Communication and measurement models allow for systematically deriving a definition that considers (a) SMIs’ functions in relation to organizational objectives and (b) the different hierarchical levels in the communication process upon which these functions touch. For the sake of this article, we adopt Macnamara’s (2018a) integrated evaluation model for strategic communication as a framework. It classifies communication processes into inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Table 1 gives an overview on how SMIs relate to these levels.

Table 1. SMIs Functions for Strategic Communication.

Input	Activities/Roles	Output	Outcome	Impact
content production competences	content creator	content	combination of input factors, actual activities, outputs and outtakes leads to higher effectiveness and efficiency on the outcome and impact level
content distribution competences	multiplicator	reach
interaction competences	moderator	interaction
public persona	protagonist	personalization
relevant number of relationships		relevant contacts
relationship quality		peer effects (authenticity, credibility)
ability to influence		influence

Inputs

The input level involves specific resources, which SMIs might contribute to strategic SMI communication. Resources can be (a) allocative (material, e.g., money, technical equipment, and manufacturing resources) or authoritative (non-material, e.g., competences and relationships) and (b) organizational internal or external (Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, 2018). The SMIs provide external resources, which can be deploy...