Thanks to Twitter and Chris Brogan’s tweet, I came across the video below, which showcases a completely contrived guerrilla marketing tactic to influence an influencer. Basically, a woman is seduced by a man, hired by a studio, simply because her movie choices influence the movie choices of her social network.

As the PR Squared post details, what’s really scary about this video is that this tactic could be viable in the very near future. We’ve all seen the contrived viral campaign for Gatorade with the superhuman catch by the “Ball Girl” (see below), so is it really a stretch to think that studios or big brands desperate for attention and buzz would concoct a scheme like the one portrayed in the SlateV video?

The Age of the Influencer

We’re living in the age of the influecer, where someone with reach to a large network of people, whose behaviors are emulated by others, has a power that is now measurable, tangible, and a desirable commodity to companies trying to create buzz or sell a product.

Many a company already turns to Market Research firms to find and define their influencers. These companies spend thousands of dollars to understand the network effect, and the research industry as a whole is busy developing products aimed to make targeting influencers one that is scientific. In my MR days, I’ve sat in conference rooms and product development meetings working to help define and position a research product that would help clients find the indicators they needed to be able to predict the purchase behaviors of consumers by identifying the key influencers (people and/or occurrences) that contributed to prior purchases. It’s smart, savvy, and what companies want.

In the web world of early adopters, super users, and the online network effect, it’s not uncommon for startups to reach out and target community evangelists to evangelize an application, product, or service to their social network. Yelp even pays these people (one per city) and calls them Community Managers. I can even point to more than a few emails from people who are familiar with my online presence, requesting me to be an evangelist for their product or service.

As the strategies for reaching influencers evolve, we’ll all see more and more unique (and likely shady) attempts to contrive viralness, making the scenario in the video above a possible reality for someone similar to myself. I can already point to a handful of occurrences where men have either dangled the fruit of potential work or even a date, only to find out later that their interest was never what it originally appeared to be, but merely to get free exposure for their new idea.

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