We can be so much more, and better, than “social influencers who define brands.”
That phrase, and the whole “influencer marketing” movement, reduces customers to loudspeakers and mannequins us inside the echo chambers and halls of mirrors that marketing has become. Worse, what influence we enjoy is almost entirely isolated inside giant private platforms where we are spied upon constantly, our very lives fracked for the oil of personal data, so our trapped attention can be sold to advertisers whose hired robots can spear our eyeballs with “relevant” and “interest based” ads we would never ask for if we had genuine control over our “experience” of them online.
What we customers need to have, far more than influence on behalf of brands, is control over our lives online—and how we interact at scale with all the brands and media of the world.
That’s what we’ve been working toward with ProjectVRM and Customer Commons.
Get involved. You might even enjoy a far better form of influence than you’ll ever get shilling for brands. Namely, being useful—for the world, and not just for your own ass.
And think about this, World Economic Forum: what better way for customers to stop being “meek consumers” than to become fully enhanced with powers of their own, rather than just tools for brands?
