When I was first appointed chief marketing officer of a hotel com- pany, I was presented with an interesting situation, one I’m quite sure many marketing professionals have experienced in some form over the last five to ten years.

It was Fashion Week in New York City, and we’d allotted a small budget to offer complimentary rooms to some social influencers. It was 2014, and this type of marketing wasn’t as common as it is today, so we didn’t pay any fees, and the lost potential revenue for the hotel was minimal—maybe ten thousand dollars max. The influencers were engaged through the relationships of our head of social media. We invited fifteen, ten accepted, and they stayed for two or three days each in exchange for multiple daily posts show- casing the property.

During the same week, another one of our hotels was featured on the Condé Nast Traveler Gold List as one of the best hotels in the world. For years, this list was paramount when it came to attracting high-end guests willing to pay a premium for your property.

The entire executive team of the company was ecstatic at the hotel’s inclusion on the Condé Nast list. High fives! Congratu- lations all around! Meanwhile, no one made a single positive com- ment about the ten influencers we were able to get, at a minimal expense, to stay at our hotel. We’d spent more than one hundred thousand dollars on public relations agencies to be included on that Condé Nast list and less than 10 percent of that cost to acquire those influencers. Now, at the time, Condé Nast Traveler had no more than 300,000 followers on their Instagram feed and a rapidly diminishing print circulation, while the ten influencers had well over 10-million-and-growing engaged followers on their social media platforms. One of them was Aimee Song (@songofstyle), who boasts 4.9 million followers on just her Instagram platform alone. And these influencers didn’t just post once, they posted multiple times daily on their channels. Though we didn’t at the time have the digital analytics to measure the full effect—traffic and bookings—of both channels, I believe the return on investment from the influ- encer posts was significantly higher, considering the cost, number of followers, engagement levels, clickthroughs, and reposts.

This experience is a prime example of how marketing has changed in the Age of Ideas.

Influence isn’t a new concept born from influencers; all adver- tising and marketing has always been based on influence—it’s why we used to buy full-page magazine ads, TV commercials, and vie for the attention of magazine editors. But with the democratization of communication and technology, there has been a shift in who has the influence, a fragmenting of influence, and without a doubt this will continue to evolve. While some influencers are highly valuable, some are not. While some magazines and newspapers are highly influential, some are not. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we need to move away from relying on any one outlet or person who at the moment may have the power and instead build our own influence, like Supreme does. You can do that by establishing a strong direct relationship with your audience.

Influence, Collaboration, & Storytelling with Conde Nast, Louis Vuitton and Steve Jobs

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