Where are the real people on the Internet?
When I started working as a Social Listening Analyst in 2017, my first job was monitoring the launch of a new mascara online: on Instagram posts, tweets, YouTube videos, reviews, and so on. One review particularly struck me. A woman said she 100% recommended the waterproof version of the mascara because her boyfriend had just broken up with her, and even though she’d spent the whole day crying, the mascara hadn’t smudged one bit.
This is what I loved about social listening — not witnessing a broken heart, of course, but the opportunity to find little anecdotes on different platforms. At that time, everyone was ranting about filter bubbles. Still, I had the chance to explore the experiences of online communities that I would never have lived through myself because people felt free to talk about the absurd elements of their lives.
Unfortunately for me, documenting the weird parts of one’s life online is on the decline, as it turns out. The Economist, in its February 3rd-9th edition aptly titled “The End of the Social Network,” says:
The striking feature of the new social media is that they are no longer very social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a user’s viewing behaviour, not their social connections. Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020.
It’s not that people are more sheepish online than they used to be. Rather, posting online has become a more professional act, with beautifully crafted vlogs and TikToks, discouraging regular people from posting blurry pictures with heavy filters. Fewer and fewer people are talking about their lives for everyone to see. Instead, they are reverting to WhatsApp groups for a more private experience, and this poses a real problem for my stalking tendencies and for social listening in general. In recent years, social listening has become content listening.
This can be seen in the definition change of the acronym UGC: user-generated content. When I started my career, user-generated content emphasized the “user”: people bought products themselves and made photos or videos reviewing them. On the dashboards and the PowerPoint slides I produced, I was told to differentiate between“owned” (the brand’s Instagram account, for example), “earned” (posts made by buyers), and “partnered” — posts made by a few big influencers the brand contacted in advance. The UGC was the sum of all earned posts.
But then everything changed with the rise of the “micro-influencers”: influencers with relatively few followers. My clients used agencies that dispatched new free products to people who, at times, had less than a thousand followers on Instagram. We couldn’t flag these posters as “influencers” because there were so many of them, and this was a time before regulations such as mandatory caveats on posts. And they were not, strictly speaking, “paid” by the brand. So, how they talked about the products drastically changed during that time: the crying dumpee slowly disappeared, as everyone hoped for an extra freebie. Regular consumers mimicked the tone of the influencers they followed, hoping the micro-influence agencies would like their posts and send more. I also witnessed a trend of consumers pretending to be sponsored in hopes of getting actual offers.
Brands and marketing experts at that time pretended that because micro-influencers had less of a following, they would sound more authentic and have greater influencing power on their followers. The reality I watched was that more prominent influencers had more bargaining power: they could trash a product or a brand because they knew they could find a good deal with a competitor. They were also a bit blasé, revealing their drawers overflowing with beauty products to the world.
Micro-influencers felt so grateful to be sent one product and hoped for more; their reviews were always positive. In his work The Gift, French ethnologist Marcel Mauss discusses the concept of obligation. A gift, even if it is just a gift, calls for another gift and a form of reciprocity. This can be seen in Polynesian tribes and online makeup tribes as well. Micro-influencers felt obligated to produce a good review because they got sent a new product. Also, it has to be said, even if it’s obvious, that you will have a different opinion about something you paid for than if you received it as a gift. You won’t get as annoyed or be as disappointed with something you didn’t spend your own money on.
“Micro-influence” fell out of fashion in marketing jargon, and was replaced very ironically by the term “user-generated content,” with an emphasis on content, and “paid” being implied. In 2016, brands hoped for UGC; now, they pay for it. And with the rise of large language models AI like ChatGPT, the future is bleak for earnest reviews made by regular humans… I’ve become nostalgic for an internet where we had an ocean of anonymous regular people and a few big influencers who managed to monetize their content, compared to the teleshopping-looking UGCs created by hundreds of small creators. But this nostalgic judgment stems from my marketing elitism: in a world where most of the content I consume is free, why wouldn’t the average Joe and Jane make a couple of bucks for themselves?
So, as marketing analysts and as regular consumers, where do we go for earnest and genuine reviews? One small trick I found helpful when doing market research for startups and entrepreneurs was the “website:reddit.com” query on Google. I look for the subject I am researching, but only on Reddit, a forum where people tend to be anonymous, earnest, and not paid for reviews. And I’m not the only one. On a TikTok lamenting on the state of the “branded internet,” I found this comment:
Why Reddit? It still works as a social network more than social media, organizing conversations in a subreddit of like-minded individuals, and it doesn’t give users the opportunity to monetize their Reddit posts by brands (yet). The culture of Reddit is also very anti-marketing, and social media managers tend to dismiss the platform for that reason. Of course, it is not perfect: this method works best with specific markets, like software development.
One could also argue that each new social media platform is first meant as a reaction to older social media, which has been plagued with paid content. Do you remember TikTok in 2020?
As a reaction to the overflow of paid reviews, you also have influencers who specialize in giving honest reviews, like Swell Entertainment on YouTube or Keith Lee on TikTok. Now for the shameful plug: in June of 2023, I launched a literary critique podcast in French, Torchon, where, with the help of some friends, I “read books so you don’t have to.” I recently received my first reviews on Apple podcast, and one of them said the following:
I found it refreshing to listen to strong opinions that go against what we’re used to hearing in book reviews: usually too enthusiastic and kind. I don’t share the opinions of critics on certain books (Mona Chollet for example) but how good does it feel to hear a point of view that goes the opposite of ours. :)
Why are we able to make earnest criticisms of books? First, we would need to be bigger to get brand sponsors or even free books from publishers. And let me tell you, wasting time AND money on a bad book can be incredibly infuriating. Second, I don’t think we’ll ever get free books, as the whole point of our podcast is to read them so our listeners don’t have to: where’s the business opportunity in that? And finally, I’m personally fed up with this branded, smooth, and stale state of the Internet nowadays. But you never know: everything has a price…
👋 Hello! I am Léa, a French podcaster, blogger, and freelance marketing consultant. I help startups and entrepreneurs with their marketing and social media strategy.
