In August, Elon Musk stated that Artificial Intelligence poses a “fundamental existential risk for human civilization”, which as you might imagine, has generated a ton of press.
Artificial Intelligence and Influencer Marketing
My personal Artificial Intelligence experience is limited to Siri (I rarely use her), Alexa (I use her sparingly) and a spectacularly failed attempt to outsource my calendaring to “Amy” at x.ai.
Can AI Run Your Next Influencer Marketing Campaign?
Can this actually work well, and generate high quality content that moves the needle?
My guess is no. Though Forbes claims that “being able to find the right influencer… is a game changer and something that could be truly impossible for humans to do on our own,” I would beg to differ. This is what the humans on our team do every day and last I checked, we have nary a computer on staff. We do have a Dashboard that helps us narrow down our choices when it comes to recruiting for a campaign, but there are a lot of human factors that go into making our final decisions.
Where To Draw The Data Driven Line
Recruitment isn’t the only piece of an influencer campaign that benefits from a human touch. I reached out to our team and asked for examples of actual situations we encountered that could only have been tackled by a living, breathing human being:
- An influencer was distraught over not being selected for a campaign. She decided to get out her frustrations by tweeting them! And topped it all off by tagging the high profile brand. Our client was not impressed (understatement of the century). Following a number of conversations, we were able to convince the influencer to take down her post and the crisis was averted.
- At one of our live events, one of our team members got into a great conversation with the hostess who revealed that, separate from her personal profiles, she happened to be an admin on a Facebook page with 2M+ fans. By the end of the conversation, the hostess had volunteered to share out content from the event through that channel, generating a slew of extra engagement on the campaign.
- An influencer decided to post a Facebook video to her work on a campaign as a value-add (video was not part of our original ask). The video was absolutely amazing but because it wasn’t part of the campaign (and didn’t have accompanying post instructions), the well-meaning influencer forgot to add disclosure. We were able to call her up, ask her to add in disclosure, and share the video as part of the stellar content created on this program. And after all that? The video went viral!
More Living, Breathing Humans For the Win
- A client cancelled a six-figure program the night before it was set to launch. Our team sprang into action, reaching out to every participating influencer through all means possible (email, phone call and text) to insure no influencer content was published on the aborted campaign.
- We had an overeager client who got a little too excited when coming up with calls to action. Our team had the tribal knowledge to understand what would and wouldn’t work strategically. We were able to redirect the client strategically so that the end results not only blew her expectations out of the water, but also capitalized on seasonal trends and conversation on social.
Data-Driven, Not Data Dependent
We definitely love our technology here at Sway Group. It’s our bread and butter. That said, there is only so much that a computer can do. That’s why we tell clients that we are data-driven, but not data-dependent.
We use data and software to inform what we do, but we don’t rely on it for everything. While things might change down the road, we feel quite strongly that the jobs of the humans at our Influencer Marketing agency are quite safe and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Do you think artificial intelligence has a future in the influencer marketing world?
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