Influencers, Managers and AI Princesses
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #134 ❤️
This week we’re looking at how influencer marketing can survive the cost of living crisis, is LinkedIn the new twitter (don’t think so) and how Elon Musk’s my way or the highway style of management definitely does not translate to the service industry in today’s economy.
Also, we’re begging you once again not to give your data to fun apps.
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - What Will Happen To Influencers With Nobody To Influence?
In a cost-of-living crisis, will flaunting luxury as a career continue to work?
Influencers bread and butter is being aspirational – showing off their lifestyle, inspiring purchases by inspiring jealousy at a certain level. Subscribers can’t afford everything they see, but with a 10% off code here and a free delivery there they can afford taste a little bit of what the influencer is living, so they continue to follow and continue to be influenced.
Until they can’t afford it anymore.
With many people in the UK wondering whether they will be able to afford heating this winter, seeing influencers flaunting a less and less attainable lifestyle is getting old, fast.
We saw this in action last week, when a luxury influencer posted complaining about her heating being broken, so to console herself she was going to check into the savoy in London and have a bath. The best response so far being - “The room (a very cold one) has not been read”. Quite.
With some influencers recognising the issue and stating that their usual posts now just feel like bragging and/or not a great time to be recommending frivolous spending, the question of luxury influencers is a bit more complicated.
Talking about Ms. Savoy’s post, Kenneth Lord, dean of East Michigan University’s College of Business and an expert in celebrity endorsements, says that prestige brands care more about “upholding their luxury image” than any perceived insensitivity to “people who aren’t within their market anyway.” Translation – if it bothers you, you’re too poor for them to care about anyway – tough luck to you.
Basically, luxury influencers will stay, the ones who were making their money off teeth-whitening and 10% off boohoo codes might need to re-think things, as will the brands who hire them. It’s always the little people…
#2 - Is LinkedIn The Replacement For Twitter…
Wired author Morgan Meaker is touting LinkedIn as the replacement for Twitter.
Noting that they usually get backlash for this opinion linked to the “humble brag hard working I helped a homeless man on the street then that homeless man turned out to be a Google interviewer and now I’m a millionaire and also I get up at 5am to read a book a day” posts that characterise a certain terrible corner of LinkedIn, they go on to describe how LinkedIn is changing.
Their newsfeed is starting to include genuinely interesting comments, links to good articles, life updates from friends, even selfies and wedding pictures.
With many people having deleted social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram due to too many ads, too many sponsored posts, too many boomers or too many teens, millennials especially may now be looking to LinkedIn to fill that gap.
But our question is, should it?
Finding interesting content on LinkedIn that doesn’t involve the active search for a new job, and enjoying the platform in that way, certainly, but personal content such as selfies and wedding photos? We’re going to say no, please take that elsewhere. Where? Well, we’re not quite sure yet, but when we find it we’ll let you know.
#3 - How Can Gen Z Speak Up In The Workplace?
With more Gen Z and Millennials in the workplace, the difference between how these generations want to advocate for themselves and their peers is creating a clash between them and managers from older generations.
With the new workers wanting to be heard, and feeling that they deserve to be heard, their more old school bosses can find this slightly disconcerting, certainly when they themselves had to “pay their dues” to be able to be where they are today.
However, just because it was hard for them starting out and they didn’t feel that they could advocate for themselves, doesn’t mean newcomers to the workplace, Gen Z especially, agree.
A recent television show underlined this issue, as a new start to a marketing office refused, when the next person up in the power chain explained to her that she would be expected to get coffee, saying she didn’t think it set a good precedent for the treatment of women in the workplace. And you know what, she’s right.
Younger generations express that they feel a moral obligation to stand up for themselves in order to stand up for others, a far cry from the idea of putting in the work as an individual to get further up the ladder and then be able to dump it on someone else.
However, this confidence in their convictions can certainly make older generations bristle, and as they’re the ones holding a lot of the cards, there’s a fine line to tread between generations in the workplace in order for them to understand each other and work together.
But surely they should be working together to make things better for everybody, not to inflict the same difficulties on newcomers that they had to deal with themselves.
#4 - Mean Managers Shown The Door
A manager at an Olive Garden in Kansas, kind of like a US Frankie and Benny’s but with a slightly classier Italian theme, tried to go Elon Musk on their employees and had it backfire on them.
As living proof of a new working class who aren’t taking any nonsense, Olive Garden’s top management decided to make an example of this middle management nightmare, by getting rid of them.
The manager in question went on a power trip via text message to all shift employees, noting that if they were taking time off because they were sick they had to come in to work and prove they were sick, if they had to take time off for personal reasons they didn’t want to discuss then too bad, and if they were taking time off because their dog had died well then they better bring in that dead dog and show it to the manager.
The text thread made its way onto a Twitter thread called “F**k You I Quit”, and Olive Garden top management clearly wanted damage control to be done ASAP as possible because they announced to a local news outlet that they had fired the manager in question.
For a chain whose motto is “when you’re here, you’re family” it would make sense that this isn’t the kind of image they want to give off, but their response is very evocative of a power shift between employers and employees in an economy where up to 40% of workers in the US are ready to leave their positions over bad treatment or working conditions.
#5 - What On Earth is Lensa AI
You may have seen some slightly odd cartoon-ish images of your friends and others (we don’t know who you follow online and that’s your business) on Instagram with various captions about AI art.
It’s the new craze sweeping the internet, you feed some photos of yourself to an AI app called Lensa AI, for a small price of less than a tenner usually, and they spew out some stylised images of you looking like a model, a fantasy video game character, a viking warrior, whatever takes their fancy really.
Now, we’re going to give you a little test. Does this sound like a good idea to you?
Spoiler alert – it’s not.
It turns out, shockingly, that although the small print says they can’t use your images for whatever they want, it also says they can – you’ve really got to read that stuff closely. So you’re giving them your images, and paying them for the privelage. They’ve managed to get around that phrase to remember – “if it’s free, that means that you’re the product” – by getting you to pay. That’s sneaky, truly diabolical really, but hiding in plain sight is often the best way.
Not to mention the accusations of stealing from actual flesh and blood artists, and the issues with racial bias and hyper-sexualisation.
Look, if you did pay for it, we’re not going to judge you. But come on, really?
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Do Nice Guys Finish Last?
According to this Ted talk, not at all.
The benefits of civility vs. the dangers of incivility in the workplace are outlined here, and the main thing to take away from it is nice people, or “civil” people, are actually considered better leaders.
You don’t need to play the Devil Wears Prada to be taken seriously as a boss.
To find out more on how you can retain talent without asking them to bring their dead dog into work, or how we can help you with digital solutions to your business challenges, check out our case studies.