Bite Size Comms

Let’s define influence simply: persuading people to do something. That’s different from thought leadership, which gets people to think about something, and different from raising awareness, which merely informs them. Influence is big business precisely because marketers see it as more effective at driving conversions, and therefore at delivering organisational outcomes.

We may scoff at some stories, but they reveal how far this has spread. This month, hundreds of tourists have been trekking to the Friedrich August refuge, 2,300 metres up in the Dolomites, some camping overnight, just to buy a €4 doughnut called a krapfen, after food bloggers hyped it on social media. The refuge and local authorities are unhappy about the resulting chaos, and there’s no brand behind it — no “paid for content” label is required because none was paid for. It echoes January 2025, when Neapolitan TikToker Rita De Crescenzo’s videos sent over 10,000 day-trippers on 260 buses to the small ski resort of Roccaraso in Abruzzo, overwhelming a town of 1,500 residents and forcing the mayor to cap bus numbers.

Creators, as they prefer to be known, are often called micro-influencers, typically defined as accounts with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, a tier distinct from celebrities and macro-influencers with far larger reach. Even at that scale, a single sponsored post can earn a few thousand pounds, but only once a creator has built a sizeable following. Some don’t weigh the consequences of chasing clicks. In Ireland this month, a spate of teenagers filming themselves driving the wrong way down motorways, reportedly “for social media likes”, has led to multiple crashes and fatalities, prompting the Garda Commissioner and the Justice Minister to call directly on platforms to remove the content and to introduce new pursuit training and legislative responses. The pull of peer status, notoriety and platform rewards is proving stronger than the risk of a horrific crash.

The rules for brands using influencers in the UK are clear, even if compliance often isn’t. Where payment, a gift or a product-in-kind has been given or agreed, the resulting post must carry an upfront, prominent label such as “Ad” or “advert”, not buried hashtags like “#sp” or vague terms like “collab” or “gifted”. The same obligation applies when, say, a brand pays a professional body or third party to promote its products. The Advertising Standards Authority oversees this under the CAP Code, but enforcement still relies heavily on public reports of suspected breaches.

Micro-influencing has also become far more niche. Creators now specialise in narrow subsets of a category, for example, menswear for men over 50, which can help brands reach genuinely new audiences rather than simply re-serving existing customers who already follow the brand’s own channels.

Influence matters just as much in public affairs, though it’s measured differently and often poorly. This week, Helen Dunne’s Corporate Affairs Unpacked newsletter recounts her asking Claude to summarise and make sense of last year’s CorpComms Award entries. Claude’s findings were enlightening. Public affairs firms frequently report on outputs: articles placed, petition signatures gathered, survey responses collected, meetings held with parliamentarians or officials. What gets measured less often is outcome: money released for a sector, a law changed, or unwanted legislation quietly dropped.

That distinction is the crux of it. Influence, whether it’s selling a doughnut or shifting policy, is ultimately about persuading people (in public affairs, those with power) to actually do something. Outputs are activity. Influence is the change that activity produces.

[Image of a bottle of red wine and two glasses from Unsplash+]