Social media can make or break any company. After watching both Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, social media was a true catalyst for Fyre Festival’s almost success and inevitable failure.
Let’s start with the definition of an influencer. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, an influencer is “an individual who has the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of his/her authority, knowledge, position or relationship with his/her audience.”
Fyre Festival literally optimized social media by creating a visual disruption. They hired 400 influencers, atheletes, and models to post an orange square on Instagram at the SAME exact time. They hit their targeted consumers instantly. These consumers immediately wanted to know what was going on, and this orange square post literally forced the Fyre Festival promo video to instantly go viral.
One of the influencers hired was Kendall Jenner. To put it into perspective, she can get paid on average $250,000 per post. That is CRAZY! Influencer marketing is taking over the way we use social media, and Fyre Festival is just another example.
This tweet pictured is infamously known for being one of the first to reveal what a disaster this festival ended up being. This example illustrated that the power of one tweet is larger than a PR and marketing team. After paying all of those influencers, it is the consumers who have the power in their hands to destroy a company. Ironic, huh? Social media is a powerful tool, and I believe it can hold companies like Fyre accountable for shady buisness practices. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to interact with brands in the future.