User:Camilladluca/sandbox

= Virtual Influencers =

Virtual influencers are virtual CGI avatars created by agencies specialised in AI applications. Their appearance and digital lives are designed to mimic those of human social media influencers, in order for them to be used as social media marketing tools.

Overview
Virtual influencers are computer generated avatars that are created based on the features and characteristics of human social media influencers. The creation of a virtual influencer involves people across a range of sectors from marketing specialists, to animation professionals, AI experts, actors for voice-overs. Companies like The Virtual Influencer Agency conduct market researches to find out what their target audience looks for in an influencer considering every aspect from demographics, to physical appearance, personality traits, interests and aesthetics. Some avatars are fully computer generated, while others use a real model as a base on which to build the digital model. The cost for the creation of a virtual influencer ranges between $5,000 and $100,000 depending on the level of sophistication required.

Just like human influencers, virtual influencers specialise into a niche market - the most famous examples operate within the beauty, fashion, lifestyle and travel industry - and market themselves through practices of self-branding.

The first Virtual Influencer
Miquela Sousa (Lil Miquela) is a 19-year-old musician of American-Brazilian origin. Lil Miquela's Instagram account was first activated in 2016. After quickly acquiring stardom, on 19th April 2018 she used an Instagram post to reveal she was indeed the CGI creation of a Los Angeles based startup called Brud.

In 2019 the engagement rate on her Instagram profile was of about 2.7% with more than 40k likes per post.

Her creators have given her character a storyline that includes personal relationships, feuds, and opportunities for her to share her liberal views on current events.

In February 2018 she collaborated with Prada and Giphy. She also starred in campaigns for Calvin Klein alongside Bella Hadid and Samsung with Millie Bobby Brown and Steve Aoki.

The Virtual Influencer trend
Several virtual influencers have been created since Lil Miquela gained media attention with an increasing interest from brands to use them in marketing campaigns. According to Drum, the potential of virtual influencers against their human counterparts is due to the fact that they can be constructed to suit the audience taste and that they will do exactly what the companies expect them to. They are also not restricted by time and spacial limits. Hirokuni Genie Miyaji is the CEO of 1sec, the company responsible for the creation of virtual star Liam Nikuro. He told The Japan Times that many companies have approached 1sec to request their own virtual characters to employ as digital marketing tools as they appear to be more reliable and long-lasting than human influencers.

Other examples count Shudu, the first virtual supermodel that after the initial Instagram success that had her featured on Rihanna's Fenty Beauty account, was chosen to star in the new Balmain campaign alonside two other digital supermodels - Margot and Zhi.

In Japan the virtual Instagram celebrity Imma was part of an IKEA installation that gave the CG model a real looking home displayed into one of the shops for customers to follow her homelife in person or via a live stream.

= Reputation Economy = The reputation economy is a phenomenon that sees companies and professional individuals as products whose value is determined by how relevant their online presence is. An online presence is built on social media platforms and websites, environments that act as records of the person or company's skills, work, achievements, and professional networks. In traditional marketing, reputation was considered to be an intangible asset - an asset that is not measurable. Nowadays reputation is measured via algorithmic systems that transform feedback and rankings into numerical values. Examples of this can be seen on e-commerce websites where peer-to-peer exchanges happen like on Amazon and EBay, where these parameters allow customers to define the level of trustworthiness of a seller and/or product.

The value of a person and/or brand also becomes dependent from their digital footprint, the information about an individual/brand that can be found online based on their digital activity. In 2010 a Microsoft survey conducted in the US showed that 79% of HR office workers base hiring choices on information they retrieve about the candidates online. Social media screening is often part of the recruitment process of companies, with LinkedIn being the most relevant social media platform in the realm of professional activity. Another example is the online platform Stack Overflow that was created in 2008 by Atwood and Spolsky as a place for programmers to ask and answer technical questions. The platform is built on a reputation point system where users can rate answered questions and the higher the rating the higher the overall point count for the user that submitted the answer. In the early days of the site, users started including Stack Overflow scores in their CVs to prove their programming skills and in 2011 the platform implemented a 'Careers 2.0' feature where companies could recruit expert programmers.

Self-Branding in the Reputation Economy
The online reputation of an individual can also be built through self-branding, an ensemble of practices that "involves individuals developing a distinctive public image for commercial gain and/or social capital". Social capital is a concept developed by Pierre Bordieu to indicate the value and resources one gains via a network of social connections. In the reputation economy social capital is visible and can be measured on social media accounts by counting the numbers of followers and interactions such as comments, likes and shares, website visits and so on. The topic of self-branding is often related to self-employed freelance work, in which the lack of an organisational institution that backs the worker, pushes the freelancer to rely on networking connections to create work opportunities.

Some scholars have argued that this constant work on the self and on professional connections is a form of immaterial labour because it involves workers at a much deeper level than by just considering their skills. The worker is demanded to marketize their entire self and include emotional and affective labor in their everyday practice. Gandini also advanced the idea that this immaterial labour is free as it requires an investment in social relationships and time that does not correspond directly to profit.

Trust in the Reputation Economy
The conception of trust is built on the basis of other’s opinions. This practice, although unusual, indicates to be the most effective amongst the newest economy and work models on mediation platforms. As an example, e-commerce platforms like eBay or Amazon are perceived as a socio-economic context that uses a feedback-based, third-party body to regulate the interaction between clients-buyers and contractors-sellers participating in an economic transaction where the item being bought and sold is labour. As a result, the reputation proxy becomes a source of users' indirect trust, having a greater impact on their sales more than other possible proxies that the platform provides. Sellers with better eBay reputations have higher profits and charge higher prices, as demonstrated by Bolton, Katok & Ockenfels (2004) and Bolton, Loebbecke & Ockenfels (2007), as well as Diekmann, Jann, Przepiorka & Wehrli (2014). This happens because the feedback system puts a stop to cheating by providing reputational stimulators that lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, as a result of recurrent ‘reputable action’ in a separation between reputation, trust and risk (Diekmann, Jann, Przepiorka & Wehrli, 2014; Scott & Walsham, 2005). To put it in other words, in circumstances where trust must be built between strangers, such as e-commerce websites or digital marketplaces, actors are forced to rely on an externally constructed measure of legitimacy that serves as the source of the trust needed for their engagement in economic arrangements with strangers. From a sociological point of view, it could even be argued that the definition of trust at stake here deviates from the sociological literature that views social capital as an element that facilitates access to networked resources in comparison to other types of capital to accept Niklas Luhmann's (2000) conception of trust as a way of reducing the possibility of any interaction with non-intimate social actors. Martajjo (talk) 13:28, 25 April 2021 (UTC)Martajjo