I gave myself an assignment for this year’s Monterey Car Week. While I am familiar with the term “influencer,” I have never actually followed any. So while I monitored the goings-on in Monterey on social media, I clicked “follow” whenever a post by an influencer popped up. (I defined an influencer as someone who had thousands of followers, and whose posts had thousands of views.) I kept it up for the whole week, and it was quite a lesson.
First, I learned about a new sub-level of followers. These are “spotters,” generally kids in their early teens. These groups of people alert influencers to the presence of a car they might want to shoot, often a modern hypercar. The spotters surround the car taking pictures and wait for the influencer to arrive. I was reminded of Yul Brynner as the King of Siam making his entrance in “The King and I.”
Having done my share of interviews in my day, at numerous concours and shows, I feel qualified to make some observations.
Rule number one in an interview is that the conversation should be about the subject, not the interviewer. Except on social media, time after time, these influencers spent more time talking about themselves than they did listening to the owners of the cars they were shooting. In fact, I don’t recall a single interview where I came away knowing more about the subject, their car or their thoughts about being at Monterey Car Week than I did before the interview started.
This is not to say it’s not worth monitoring social media feeds for a sense of what is happening on the peninsula, but if you are hoping for a thoughtful overview on any aspect of Monterey Car Week, I think you will be sorely disappointed.
I don’t claim to be fluent in the relevance of social media today, at least in terms of its end purpose, but the extent of the creativity I found seemed to be limited to posting selfies with hypercars and 10-second videos.
Perhaps the best analogy I can make is that social media is like the checkout counter magazine racks of the past, where you would find People, the National Enquirer and TV Guide. If you wanted any more serious reading, you had to look in a different part of the store.
Unsurprising then, that at the end of the week, I had not found a single “influencer” that I wanted to follow any further.
What about you? Who are your favorite influencers and why do you follow them? What do you hope to learn?
I look forward to your answers below.
Read my previous blog posts here.
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