Behind the scenes of running influencers
Some stories from the past 10 years sharing content online and occasionally getting paid for it.
It was a cold March morning and I was inVictoria Park, East London running up and down, not too fast but not too slow, while three guys from a media agency filmed me. My son was just a few months old and I wasn’t expecting to be away from him for so long. I was breastfeeding and with each passing hour my boobs got more engorged and I got much colder. But I was being paid for the day more than I would get from two months of statutory maternity pay, so I kept running up and down and hoping that they would soon tell me they’d got all the shots they wanted.
The result was this video that was used as part of a social media campaign for a bottled water brand. This isn’t something I’ve done a lot of. In fact a very small amount of my time is spent doing what has now become known as ‘influencing’. I studied journalism and have made my living writing for various places from local newspapers to trade magazines and charities. And, as you probably know, I now have a column in Women’s Running magazine. But from time to time, over the past 10 years, I’ve been offered money to help promote brands. And sometimes, I say ‘yes’ if the product aligns with my ‘values’ and the money is too good to decline.
My Substack is an endorsement-free space and I’m committed to keeping it that way. I do, however, do occasional paid partnerships on Instagram and my website, so I thought I’d share with you here some of my experiences of being deemed a ‘micro influencer’ and some of my observations from the past 10+ years in the space.