Search Drink With James

There are exciting things going on at Fohr. We released last week testimonials 2.0. We talked about this a few months ago, the ability for you all to go out to your audience and get them to leave you testimonials. You can now view all those testimonials, you can feature testimonials that you want to be shown on your page, you can also download any testimonials as an Insta story and you can see this little section where your audience answered questions about where they find you influential, if they purchase products based on your posts, and if so, how often they do that.

Interesting evolution of the tool, if you haven't gotten testimonials yet, do it. It's super easy. You go to your page, you download the stories, grab the link, drive your followers to that link and they'll just start rolling in. If you haven't checked it out, you haven't been back to your Fohr account in a while, bounced over there and check it out.

I have talked quite a bit about influencer's behavior towards brands and making sure you don't burn bridges and making sure you're professional and prompt and kind. What happens if a brand is being abusive and they're asking for too much? The example here was somebody who accepted experience in exchange for some posts. They were excited about it. The day before the experience was set to happen, they got a full brief with what they wanted the captions to be, how many stories they wanted, how many in feeds they wanted.

She pushed back, and she said, "This is too much for gifting so I'm going to pull out." The brand then started really aggressively hounding the influencer. When you're working with a brand, it doesn't matter how big they are, it doesn't matter how long they have been around, you need to come to the table as equals. If you ever feel like a brand is treating you less than, I would walk away from that relationship even if it was one that was paying a lot of money.

That's a lesson I learned from a woman who runs all of the influencer work at Nike. She was talking about a certain celebrity who they felt like the celebrity wasn't respecting the Nike staff. So, they walked away from that relationship. For them, it's so important, no matter if it's an up-and-coming athlete or Michael Jordan that they respect the individual they're working with and the individual they're working with respects them and that they're on the same level. If a brand is treating you thus then if they're trying to get stuff out of you that you think is unfair, I would absolutely just politely exit and say, "Thanks so much for the opportunity, right now this isn't going to work out and I think it's best to just part ways."

A good life rule is just never to get angry over email. If a brand is pissing you off, always, if you're detaching yourself from that, and even if you are totally valid and being like, you are abusive, you're terrible, all of these things. It's best to just be polite in writing because you're just a screenshot away from somebody taking that story and turning it into you being completely unreasonable and totally out of control and now you're trying to explain this email without all this other context. It just gets you into a very bad situation.

So general James noted life rule, "Don't say anything shitty in an email ever." You want to say something shitty to someone? Pick up the phone. If you want to yell at someone or something, just do it over the phone, don't do it over text message, don't do it over email. That is one rule.

Two, in general, if a brand is gifting you something, an experience or a product, when we do it, we suggest the type of content we might like. We provide a mood board of what we hoped it would look like but we also understand that by not paying you, we cede control of that post. We cannot give you a full brief, we cannot tell you what your caption could sound like.

We make suggestions, we hope that you follow those suggestions but we are respectful of the fact that there is no contract and there's no payment and thus we cannot control the outcome of that. That is why we tell our clients to pay even if it's a small amount, we tell them to pay so we can control those things. If a brand is gifting you, and they're asking for too much and they're pushing you and trying to control what your post is going to look like or say, I think that is an abusive relationship, I doubt it's going to turn into a paid relationship. If it doesn't feel good, it probably isn't good and I would just again, respectfully walk away.

If they've already sent you the product, send it back. I do the right thing. Even if they pissing you off, and you're like, I'm not sending this back, screw them, send the product back. Never give somebody a reason to say that you screwed them over. Just, again, in general in business, where you can just do the right thing, do the right thing because again, if you don't send that product back, and then they screenshot your angry email and say you stole the product from them and freaked out you lose control of that narrative.

I just want to go through six quick factors that we look at when analyzing influencers.

First, reach and more specifically Verified Reach. We make sure that a person's reach is above average for their tier. Meaning, when you hit publish on a post, you're reaching more people with that post than most of your colleagues at the same following level as you. That is a non-starter for us. If you don't have Verified Reach, it is very unlikely that we will work with you. If you are an influencer who hasn't worked with us and you're frustrated and you don't know why and you haven't applied for a Verified Reach, that is probably why.

Number two. Engagement. You might say, "You just told me not to care about engagement and engagement doesn't matter." When combined with reach stats, engagement is a telling indicator of how engaged someone's audience is. For us, engagement without reach is worthless because it's so easy to purchase but when we have the reach numbers and we can see engagement, it lets us know what to expect from this influencer and how they're going to perform within the confines of the algorithm as well.

Number three is audience demographics. You can have amazing reach, you can have a huge following, you can have crazy engagement, if your audience isn't the right people that we're trying to reach, we're not going to work with you. A lot of times I get people coming to me and saying like, "Hey, I worked with this influencer. They had half a million followers and it totally didn't work." I look at the influencer and it is clear that the demographics are just completely off. Their audience is too young, they're the wrong gender, they're in the wrong income brackets. Whatever it might be it is important that the demographics match our goals. We'll look at that every single time.

Number four. We want to work with influencers who are growing their following. There are a few greater indications of success with an influencer than a following that is growing.

Now, you might say, "Wait, what about people who are doing giveaways?" Do you think we're complete morons? Obviously, we can tell when people are growing their following using giveaways. If they are adding followers to their account but those people aren't actually engaged with their content, it means that the algorithm won't serve their content to those people it means that their reach will be below average. It means they won't have Verified Reach. It means that we won't work with them.

Number five. Percentage of sponsored content. If 50% of your content is sponsored, we're not going to work with you. If 40% of your content is sponsored, we will think twice about working with you. You can't have everything in your life be sponsored. There is no way a single person can like that much shit. I don't want to see a fucking commercial every single time I open Instagram. This is a whole existential threat for Instagram in general as it shifts from this entertainment and destruction tool-like engine into a shopping and advertising platform.

I think it loses some of its soul. You just can't have half of your posts be sponsored. We tell influencers, under 25% is a good number to aim for. Go through your feed, go through the last 30 days, see what percentage of your content is sponsored. Pay attention to that and try and keep it under 25%.
The next is we look at how much sponsored content you're doing inside of that product category v. If you have promoted four fragrances in the last month, we are not going to be the fifth. We're not idiots. Again, we absolutely look at how much sponsored content you have done inside a specific category vertical or a specific product. You can do a lot of beauty posts but if you've done three long-wear foundation sponsored posts in the last month, again, we're not going to be the fourth. Thank you very much.

Think about how much you're doing inside of specific verticals and understand that if you oversaturate that, you make it all less effective and brands should and will stop working with you inside of that vertical. I would say, for me, once a month in a specific vertical is the absolute max. I would prefer once a quarter. Again, I don't think you can fall in love with a new fragrance every month. I'm sorry, I just don't think you can. Again, as a beauty influencer, can you try a new mascara every month? Absolutely. Less expensive products that have less loyalty attached to them lend themselves to that.

But most products, I think once a quarter is probably a good baseline. That is the sixth things that we will always look at. There are obviously a lot of other factors. I want to say the last and maybe most important one that while we have powerful technology that helps us do this stuff really quickly, end of the day it always has a human eye on it. The last part of this process there's always a person looking at it, understanding your tone and the image quality and the way you talk about things, the length of your captions.

Instagram turned off likes in Australia on July 18th. We still get that data from our Australian influencers, so we are still seeing what is happening to engagement. We had our in-house data scientists take a look at some of that data and try and answer that question of what the hell is happening?

From July 18th to today, we've got 2,200 influencers in Australia that we have data for across obviously hundreds of thousands of posts. What we saw was a 20% decrease in engagement overall. It wasn't an immediate drop, but it is part of a larger trend that we saw. Now, my caveat to this, and what we're still looking into, is that that drop in engagement seems to be happening across the entire platform. Australia did fall more. It did look like it was falling faster than the rest of the platform in general, but the rest of the platform in general is also showing a general downward slope and engagement right now.

We're looking into that, but I feel fairly confident saying that engagement has fallen in Australia since they turned off likes, that is in no way a surprise. You're going to be less likely to probably like something if you don't see that number out there, but I will say the Fall was so far, does not seem as steep as people might have guessed. Look, we've always been saying that this is not going to affect influencers at all, this is going to be great for influencers in general, and we tell our brands, every chance we get, that engagement is just not the right metric to be looking at when you are analyzing the success or the efficacy of an influencer.

Another thing I saw last night at Facebook was that-- Something we've been telling brands is that engagement is the wrong metric to be looking at to try and understand if something works. Last night, Facebook said the same thing. They had graphs showing that engagement has no correlation with a post being remembered and being effective, so engagement has absolutely no correlation with a post's efficacy. The only thing it affects is the algorithm and that post's ability to be seen by more people.

In that way, engagement is important but it is not important. Whether a single person likes a photo or doesn't like a photo but sees it has no bearing on how effective that post is in injecting that brand's story into that consumer's brain tissue. And even if tomorrow they turn off likes and engagement falls 30% across the board, it's not going to matter because it will fall 30% for everyone and so the algorithm will shift with it. It's not like if your engagement falls 30% everyone else's does. You're still at the same place relative to everybody else. I don't think it's going to really change much and I definitely think it's going to happen so we might as well get used to it.

It's a two-part question. One, should I buy followers if I'm close to 10K's to get the Swipe Up? Two, is the Swipe Up really that effective? Is it going to really be a game-changer? Let me answer part two first. On average we see about 5% of a person's following watching their story, and when they post the story of the Swipe Up we see about 1% of that.

For example, if you've got 100,000 followers, you might have 5,000 people that see your story and 50 might Swipe Up. Swipe up is not driving a massive amount of traffic in general. There is certainly a convenience factor to it but it's not like we're seeing Swipe Ups driving tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of visits and huge percentages of who is viewing it.

In general, they're not massively effective. Now again, there is a convenience part to it. Part two is should I buy followers to get the Swipe Up? No, you shouldn't. You shouldn't ever buy followers. Obviously you guys know that I'm not pro buying followers. We were the first company to come out with a tool to help detect people that were buying followers. It's been a big part of our business. It continues to be a huge part of our business.

We are incredibly focused on making sure we reward influencers who have built an organic following. Now, I do know people who have bought followers to get the Swipe Up. They weren't actually influencers and so they're just like, "Screw it. I want the Swipe Up. I'm going to buy these followers." It feels like in the short term it would be worth it, but let's say I think the person who asked the question is at about 5,000 followers.

What she was saying was like, "I don't have a huge amount of followers, but my account is growing. People are really engaged. My audience is asking for Swipe Ups. I'm getting reposted by brands." All in all things are going well for this influencer. It's like, "I just want the Swipe Up show, I just buy it." If you did that, now half your following is not real. I don't think that does good things for the algorithm now because your percentage rate looks so much smaller.

Your engagement percentage again doesn't look as good for brands who are evaluating you, and even with hiding likes, brands are going to be able to find out how many likes someone is getting so don't think that just hiding likes means brands are never going to see how many likes you get. They will, we will still see it. Our clients will still see what engagement you're getting.
More than that, it creates a debt in your account. It's just this dead weight that you're going to carry around with you. While buying 5,000 followers doesn't really matter if you get to 300K. When you're below 20 or 25 or even 50K, it will still be a large percentage of your following that is fake and you would be tempted to maybe charge brands based on your following account. Now you're defrauding brands.

You're charging them for followers that you don't really have. The way your contemporaries and other influencers look at you is going to change because your following is going to jump by 5,000 in a month and your engagement is not going to follow. People are going to start saying you bought followers, brands are going to know you bought followers. That will spread around the industry.
There is just so much bad that will happen that it could never counterbalance the good in allowing a tiny, tiny percentage of your audience to be able to Swipe Up on something in Insta stories. There are other ways to get links to people. Obviously you can use one of those things in bio that has the articles and is pointing people to what you were talking about. You can also have people DM you.

If you're under 10K just say, "Hey DM me, if you want a link to this I'll DM it to you." Or run a poll and say, "Do you want a link to this?" Go through everyone who said yes and DM them the link. There are other ways to get that information to people than buying followers for Swipe Up. There's another point of just like cheating begets cheating. If you look at most criminals, the way it probably started is like something small that they got away with, and then kept getting away with, and then a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit more. Once you buy the followers to get the Swipe Up and then you say, "Shit, I hate I'm not growing anymore. I feel like I just need to get to 20K and I'm at 18," and you say, "I'm going to buy 2K more."

It just like, it becomes a thing that you do and it pollutes you and you can never look people in the eye and say, "I haven't bought followers."

Integrity is so important in your life. It's incredibly important for me and for our employees and if you lose your integrity, you can't really get that back. You can try and tell yourself all the excuses that you want, but you have just cheated and that is now going to be a part of your story that you can never erase. Whether it's to get a Swipe Up or whether it's because you feel frustrated because you're not growing. If you're at a point where you're willing to cheat to try and get ahead, I think that like the space's turned toxic for you. It's time to step away because if you're at 5,000 followers and you're thinking about buying followers to get ahead and to change your prospects, it's not worth it. I would argue that your relationship with the space has [unintelligible 00:20:35] and it's time to step back or step away, because if you start having that unhealthy relationship with it, it gets bad really quickly. I don't know who saw Christina Cardona, who's been a friend of the companies for a long time and she's moving to Paris and she did an IGTV. If you haven't seen it, you should. It was short and very simple.

She was talking about how she's lost her passion for the space and how she would try and reinvigorate herself and focus on it. That would happen for a couple months and then she would lose interest again. I think that if this is going to be your job and if your relationship with it turns toxic like Quigley said in the last episode as well. If you start having a bad relationship with your art, it can ruin you and that's what happened to her while singing. It's okay to step away and be like, "This isn't for me anymore. It is turning me into a person that I don't recognize, a person that cheats to get more followers, to be seen in a different way. It's not worth it."

I'm not going to give the name but an influencer who we all know and love got a cease and desist from a manufacturer who created the garment that was knocked off and the influencer was promoting the knockoff and the manufacturer told her to remove all of the content that she had ever posted about that knockoff. Something she kind of consistently talked about to remove all of that content from blog, Instagram stories, everything and then demanded the affiliate revenue that she made off selling the fake garment. The question is what is an influencer's responsibility to research whether something is a knockoff and should influencers be promoting knock-offs.

Now in this specific story that we're talking about, I have never heard of a brand suing an influencer to try and get the affiliate revenue back from them. I am not a legal scholar but I don't think that they are going to win that case. I'm not even sure that they can force you to take down a post about a product that is a knockoff. The beef is with the company that knocked it off, not necessarily with the person that promoted it, but I think it does bring up two interesting questions for influencers. One is, is a brand safety question of just like do you know the partners that you are working for? You are in the same way that brands are doing a lot of research now on influencers to make sure that they are brand safe because that brand is giving the influencer their brand to talk about.
It's kind of saying, "Okay, I'm handing this over to you, you kind of tell our story." That's a scary thing for a brand.

As an influencer, you're doing the same thing, especially if you're an influencer who is established, you have a bit of a following and it's a smaller emerging brand, in a lot of ways you have more brand equity than that startup does. It's a big thing that you're doing to promote that brand and I think as an influencer you have to do a little bit of research and understand if that brand aligns with your values if it's a company that you want to work with because, in the same way that this can blow up in the face of a brand when an influencer does something unethical, same thing can happen for an influencer.

If you are working with a company and you've been promoting them and you're one of their long-term ambassadors and then you find out that they make all the uniforms for ICE officers, like your audience may struggle with that, and you may and probably will be held responsible for supporting an organization that doesn't coincide with your beliefs. This is happening a lot more with influencers that care about the environment and being eco-friendly, companies are the biggest abusers of the environment and it is hard for some influencers to align their kind of eco-activism with shopping at Zara, because how much of Zara ends up in a landfill eventually? Probably 98% of it. It's kind of disposable clothing by nature. Nobody's passing down their Zara shirt to their daughter and being like, "I wore this." Whatever.

As an influencer, it is worth you looking into your brand partners to understand do my values align? That is something worth doing. The other thing is just like should you be promoting knock-offs. If you have ever had something stolen from you, an idea or a design or someone's plagiarized you, it is a really gross feeling, it sucks especially when it's a massive organization that you can't fight. Especially if you haven't done the things you should have done like trademark something or whatever it might be, patent your idea. One of the side effects of living in a country that is pro-business is that it is really hard for an individual to protect themselves against the business. If somebody steals your idea and they are Zara or some massive organizations, there's really not much you can do to get back at them. As an influencer, if you are someone that supports fast fashion, those brands are destroying small designers.

They're destroying artists lives, they're literally are stealing money from those places and it may not feel like that. It may not feel like you're complicit in that but I think you absolutely are and if you look at a Venn diagram and you say like, "This is a Celine customer and this is a Zara customer, is there any overlap?" Probably not a lot. I think the people that can afford to shop at Celine on the regular, I'm talking old Celine not new Celine which is obviously total trash.
The people that could afford that aren't probably rolling into Zara to buy the knockoffs but if you're a fashion style blogger and all this creativity is coming from a small group of people and then that is being ripped off, it will eventually probably get more and more difficult for those companies to be viable and to have businesses, and so creativity will just continue to get stifled. Clothes will go the same way as music and everything else and it'll be controlled by algorithms.

It will just start to get really boring because there won't be much business and creativity because that creativity will just get stolen. You have to think as an influencer, "What is my stand on supporting companies that are stealing from artists?" Even if Zara and Celine customers don't overlap, Zara is stealing from these companies and they're stealing from what artists, what fashion designers are at their best, which is artists.

They're stealing from them, and they're taking their art which may be the culmination of decades of craft and inspiration and all of that, and they're just fucking stealing it and slapping a 2,999 tag on it and everyone is just gobbling it up. It's not as pervasive in the net men's space because that just men's wear is just so different. I can't buy Tom Brown knockoffs. It just doesn't exist because there's not a business in that.

It's easier for me to sit here and be like, "I don't shop at Zara. I don't shop at any fast fashion," because fast fashion for men I think is very different and I obviously wear a suit every day, so it makes it exceedingly difficult. I do think you have to think about where you stand on these things and try and stick to that. Stick to some philosophy and whatever that might be. We were going to watch what happens with the influencer in her cease and desist.

If this becomes a more common thing it's going to shake the industry up quite a bit, if designers start coming after the influencers who are posting the knockoffs.

For those of you who haven't seen this, weird, but Kacey Musgraves went to this one-hour photoshop, got some amazing, cheesy photos made and printed and post them to her Instagram. Basically said, hey, talk to the owner of this business. They have struggled when the world moved to digital. I went in, had a really good time shooting with them. I loved the photos. If you guys are in the area, it would be amazing if you could go support them.

In general, I think she was like, there's so many of these businesses. If you can going in and spending five dollars with them rather than Amazon priming it, or working with somebody. He meant it's a small thing you can do to support your community. I think the response has been overwhelming. People are lining up to get their photos taken. It's totally revitalized their business. It's a big guy feel-good story I think for Kacey and for everyone involved. I think is an influencer. Obviously, she is sitting at hundreds of thousands of likes on these photos. She has, I don't know how many followers, but more than you probably do if you're watching this show, but I do think it speaks too.

When we were talking about, a few weeks ago, using your feed for good and the charity trip I did in Bangladesh. That's a hard thing to do. Just getting the visas was incredibly difficult. It's something that no individual could just do. If you were like, I'm going to Bangladesh, I don't even know that that would be possible. There are smaller things that you can do. You can highlight a local business in your neighborhood. Again, Kacey Musgraves took her platform and did something really fun with it. Is it going to change this guy's life forever? No. It'll be a spike for a week, a month, a few months. If that business is going to close, that business is going close. One Instagram post is not going to change that.

But in the short term, it certainly is helping, and it's giving them a chance. I think that as the space is growing, and as we focus more and more on money, you lose that thing that is so fun about having a platform. Which is being able to use it to highlight people that you think are doing awesome things and bring them some attention. It's so hard to run a business. You guys know, you've heard me talk about that. It's so hard. When somebody goes out on a limb and does something to support you and try and bring awareness to the thing that you're doing, you don't forget it.

I told said Tim's putting a movie out. I think when we were talking about it in the run-up to him launching this film, I was like, "You're definitely going to notice the friends that show up with their credit card, verse the ones that don't." It means a lot when somebody supports the thing you're doing with money or time or throw some attention at it because, for you, it's everything. You're looking at it as a business owner being like, this is a small thing somebody could do. Why are they not doing it? That is if it's your friends, but I think as an influencer, thinking about that power and thinking about your ability to not make national news like Kacey Musgraves did. If you get 10 more customers to go to a local business in the next month, that's 10 customers. That's real money. That actually can make a difference.

I think it's really fun. I think it's a fun story about the power of Instagram and social, and what a following can do for someone. I encourage all of you to go find weird, small, cool businesses in your neighborhood, talk about them, drive people to them, get them to shop there, find new brands and talk about those. You can make your money in other ways. That's probably the reason you got into this in the first place, anyway, it was to help and talk about cool brands and businesses that are doing interesting things. Get back to that and listen to Kacey Musgraves' last album, because it was an absolute banger end to end. That is all.

I hear this once a week from people who say, "Oh, I was just with my friend and I was talking about blank brand. Then I opened my Instagram and boom, there was an ad for that. They have to be listening to me." It's like smart adults with functioning brains believe this to be true. They believe that Instagram is listening to your conversations and serving ads. There's a lot of reasons that that's insane. I'm generally not a believer in conspiracy theories because especially today, it would be so difficult to cover that up.

There's just no way that Instagram could be spying on 3.4 billion people. Then using that data and going to brands and telling them, "Hey, we have advertising and we can target people based on their conversations." That thousands and thousands of brands and thousands of Facebook employees who know this secret, nobody has leaked any information about it. That is obviously not possible. The other thing is that Facebook has a $55 billion a year advertising business. If this were true, I assume the FTC would just not allow them to advertise anymore. It would ruin their business. How could it be worth $55 billion to listen to your fucking main conversations and serve you ads?

The greater truth is a few things. One, you're super predictable. It's not that hard for a brand to look at the data that they do get, to look at the things that you like, and the things you look at and the websites you go to and build a profile, and guess what you're going to like. The more interesting thing is how recognition works in advertising. I think what is happening when you have that phenomenon when you feel like I was just talking about this and I saw an ad, was just that. That you were just talking about it. Then you saw an ad that you've probably seen 20 times, but because you just talked about the brand, that triggers something in your brain to say, oh my gosh, I was just talking about this. You recognize the ad.

Then a day later, you see an influencer post about it and you recognize that. Then your friend is at drinks and they're talking about this thing they bought from this brand and you recognize that. Then you're like, oh my God, I'm hearing this everywhere, but you're really not hearing it more than you used to. It's just that you are conditioned to recognize it more. I know when I got a Leica camera, I now see Leicas everywhere because I'm looking for them because I'm like, I know what they look like, and I'm passionate about the brand now. I'm just so much more likely to notice a Leica than I used to be, so I see them every day.

Whereas if you asked me a year ago how often do you see a Leica, I'd say, I don't actually see Leicas every day. I probably see one a week. If you had asked me a year ago, I probably would have said, I see a Leica once every couple of months, maybe. Maybe I see five people a year with them, but I was seeing just as many. Probably 50, 60 people a year. It's just that I wasn't conditioned to recognize it. I wrote an email to brands today about this and said that one thing that is so powerful about influencer marketing is that because you guys already have the trust with your audience, because they listen to what you say, you are able to get that brand to stick in their brain, so the next time an ad comes up, they actually recognize it. That ad is so much more effective. There's really no actionable point here for you guys, but I do think that understanding psychology, understanding the way our brains work is really important especially if your job is changing people's minds and influencing them. In your own behavior, think about that. When you feel yourself noticing a brand or whatever it might be more often than you did before, try and step back and deconstruct what brought you there and what is making you recognize that because that is such a powerful thing that we can do as an industry to drive the efficacy of advertising.

I'm going to caveat that by saying nobody asked that question, but I did mention in last week's episode that we were going to do a study on engagement during Fashion Week, and that my theory just shot in the dark was that engagement would fall. We did find that to be the case. If you haven't seen On Fours Instagram, we're going to publish these results for our little study that we did right today. It'll be a couple of days back. If you haven't seen it, you can dive more into it there. I'm sure they'll explain it more thoroughly.

What was interesting is, so we took anyone that mentioned #New York fashion Week, or mentioned New York Fashion Week. We've had 1,400 influencers. We looked at their engagement in the month leading up to Fashion Week, during Fashion Week, month after Fashion Week. What was really interesting is that, if you look at their engagement in the weeks leading up to Fashion Week to during Fashion Week, engagement fell over 25%, and it really doesn't rebound in the month after. Now, it could be that people are going and doing all the different cities, but I feel pretty confident saying that engagement falls on a whole for those influencers who are talking about Fashion Week.

Now, there's more to his story than just, oh, you shouldn't talk about Fashion Week. Another interesting thing was, of those 1,400 influencers, they were publishing on average about, what was it? It was 7,000 posts a week, and during Fashion Week, they were publishing 10,000 posts. I think the fall in engagement has as much to do with posting quite a bit more, as it does with people not connecting with it. If you're worried about your engagement during Fashion Week and you're looking at these numbers and trying to find a takeaway, my takeaway would be that you should be posting less, or just don't ramp up the frequency of your posting as much as you might do.

Now, you might not care, which is also totally fine. We've had a few conversations recently about with influencers who say they just no longer really care about engagement, and maybe you want to post what you want to post, go crazy, but the data is saying pretty strongly that for those influencers who go to Fashion Week and cover it, your engagement is going to fall by at least 25%. You know how the algorithm works. It can be hard to get that back. I think that's maybe what we're seeing in the fact that the engagement doesn't rebound, is that once your engagement slips, it can be hard to turn that around consistently. You could put yourself in a hole for months to come if you bomb your audience too much and bore them with your Fashion Week content. Pay attention to that or don't.

Another thing, next year, we would like to do a study on Insta Stories and see how much drop-off there is, because I find the Insta Stories to be quite a bit more boring and mind-numbing and repetitive than the Instagram posts, but the constant stories of finales and the shows is fairly, I think, boring to most people. Really exciting if you're there, but for most people, pretty fucking boring, so consider that.

Lastly, we have a question about Fashion Week. Specifically, what can I do as an influencer if I am not in New York to cover Fashion Week or stay up-to-date with it? First, I think Fashion Week now more than ever before, is very skippable. We are doing some research right now. Next week, we're going to talk about this and talk about the macro trends a little bit more. My assumption is that audiences also were just not really interested in Fashion Week content.

We are doing a little study right now that we'll be able to talk about more next week and see if that is true or not, but I think one of the reasons, if I think about myself, if we're going to talk about the macro stuff next week, I'm going to just talk about the way I feel about it. When I first saw Fashion Week, I was living in New York and I would hear that Fashion Week was happening. I didn't really know what it was. Certainly, I had no ability to find that out. I wasn't reading fashion magazines or anything, but I would notice that as I was working in Soho at the time, that there was a lot of really tall women walking around Soho. It must mean it's Fashion Week.

As social became more of a thing and Tumblr started sending Tumblr influencers- I don't know what they're called, Tumblr Bloggers, to Fashion Week, I saw Fashion Week through the people I followed for the first time, and it was super exciting because it was this world that was really mysterious and it was really difficult to get access to. It used to just be for editors and buyers. It felt so chic and unobtainable. So to see the innerworkings of that, the parties and the shows and all the beautiful clothes and the beautiful people and the backstage and how hectic that was. It was really exciting the first time, the second time, the fifth time.

I'm now on my hundredth fashion week that I've been forced to watch on social media. For me, each season is increasingly boring. It seems that we're talking about economics this week on the show. Let's use another economics term which is just diminishing returns. The way my economics teacher first told me about diminishing returns, is that if you open up a bag of cookies and you eat that first cookie, each subsequent is going to be less appealing or something. It will give you less joy each time. So there are diminishing returns each time you engage with something.

For me, I'm so bored with fashion week content. I've seen it all before that I just don't give a shit. I think that most audiences are the same way. I think most audiences don't really care and it's become so unrelatable and uninteresting. It takes over Instagram for a month and you just have to see a month of people going to shows and pretending to be fashion critics. Which is totally fine, if that's your passion and you're super into it. I just don't think for most people, their audience really cares about it, and certainly doesn't care about it for a month. So I think as an influencer, again, we've been talking about this idea of educating, inspiring or entertaining.

One of the things that's great about social is being able to see things that you haven't seen before. Again, fashion week, you've just seen it so many times. This is the reason--Remember when I was on a tear last year about Positano and how bored I was with seeing photos from the Amalfi Coast? It's because I've seen it so many fucking times, that it's like, "How many more photos from the same restaurant? From the same boat with someone sitting up there with the fucking peace sign up in front of the Amalfi Coast? How many times do I have to see that photo before the good lord will finally let it stop and spare me?"

I think there's a huge amount of power in not doing it and not going and not covering fashion week and juxtaposing your feed to what everybody else is talking about. If you haven't seen the episode with Julia and Thomas from Gal meets Glam, we talk about this. She talks about how she felt a lot of pressure earlier in her career to go to fashion week and cover it, but never really enjoyed it. Now she skips it because she feels like for her audience, they don't care. Fashion week just isn't interesting to them, they're not wearing those clothes. Why would she spend a month covering high fashion couture just because she's invited?

Just because you're invited does not mean you have to go. If you really enjoy it, and that's the content you want to make, go fucking crazy and do it. If you're feeling pressure, if you're feeling like, "I don't feel like a legitimate influencer because I am not at fashion week." I think that is now more than ever, just not the way to look at things and just totally not true. I would encourage all of you who are interested in skipping fashion week to do so. Take a trip, go somewhere else, show your followers something else.

If you have the ability to do that, if you have a big following and you can travel and do whatever the hell you want, I would maybe use that to my advantage and specifically go on a trip during fashion week and talk about the fact that you're skipping it and you're not gong to be showing people a bunch of terrible Insta story videos of another finale walking down the runway because it is boring. To my friends out there who are going to go to fashion week, who are passionate about covering that. I encourage you to step back before it starts and actually think about, "How am I going to cover this in a way that is interesting?"

Maybe reach out to your audience, ask them what they want to see because I think that you're asking a lot of your audience if you're going to do New York, London, Milan and Paris, and you're going to do three to five shows a day. You're asking a lot of your audience to go on that ride with you. I think it's worth checking in and thinking about how you want to cover that in a way that inspires, educates or entertains.