Is being an influencer something you aspire to? Or another weapon in your insult arsenal?
It’s a term that makes my skin crawl. And yet, I fall squarely into the definition of what an influencer is.
2021 marks my eleventh year making online content. I’ve spent nearly a third of my life yapping into a microphone about the games I love to play and the games that makes me want to throw a chair.
If you’re familiar with my podcasts then you know, in the before times, I’d fly out to Anaheim every November to attend BlizzCon. Covering all the new games and updates Blizzard Entertainment had planned for us.
I still remember getting my first media pass. It was 2012 and I got an email from a Blizzard PR rep saying, “Hi Garrett, As part of the Blizzard community of influencers we would like to provide you with a BlizzCon 2012 media pass”. My brain flashed: Joy. Hype! That word you can’t stand…
I had made it. I finally didn’t have to pay the constantly-rising prices just to walk through the convention center doors (and metal detectors). But why did I feel so skeezy about being called an influencer? Well, intending to influence someone has always felt gross to me. It felt like the arena of political pundits. Not the fun and hobby-focused land of video gaming. I truly believed I was not an influencer, or a thought leader, or whatever buzzword Hubspot is throwing around these days (it’s still “influencer” by the way).
But then I came across the two-step flow theory. That theory’s TLDR is that information gets filtered through opinion leaders (cough*influencers*cough) and then gets passed onto the audience. Information filtering sure sounds a lot like how I write my podcast show notes. Heck, I literally copy/pasted the “General Updates” bullet-points from Hearthstone’s most recent patch notes and hand deleted the ones I didn’t think were relevant for listeners of The Angry Chicken podcast.
Only passing on information that I find relevant is a key part of this theory. To my previous example: if you listen to the most recent episode of TAC you’ll notice we made no mention of the fact that the latest patch increased the length of player turns by 5 seconds (in the first few turns). I deleted this because I thought it was too number crunchy and would get in the way of the meat of the podcast where the plan was to give our thoughts on how this patch would upset the established metagame.
I try to mention when I’m leaving out certain points for the sake of a smoother podcast. But I also try not to get too lost in inside baseball. Maybe I need to reassess my negative association with the word. Or maybe I just need to feel more comfortable knowing that if you’ve been listening for a while, it might be because you like our brand of filtration.