Hustle and Brand: The Sociotechnical Shaping of Influence

Abstract

While social media platforms are often assumed to be sites of speaking, they are also important sites of knowing, where businesses use content produced by individuals in order to understand markets and make predictions and where individuals understand their own position and importance. This article considers social knowledge production in the context of influencer marketing, a growing industry in which social media users are ranked according to measures of influence and compensated for promoting products online. Working from industry press, technical documentation and interviews with tool developers, marketing professionals, and social media users, it traces the sociotechnical shaping of influence, moving from computer scientists’ optimal solutions through technical constraints and business needs to the practices of marketing professionals and individual users. In doing so, it identifies two conceptions of influence. The first is connected to celebrities and practices of branding, while the second, more novel conception is associated with less prominent social media users who make themselves and their willingness to work visible to marketers through practices I describe as hustling. While social influence is conventionally conceptualized in relation to extensive, naturally occurring networks of individuals, in this context it is evaluated in relation to much simpler networks that bring together users who may never interact directly. In this context, users understand and manipulate their influence by positioning their followers (branding) and by explicitly affiliating themselves with non-human entities such as brands and topical hashtags (hustling).