Is a Singaporean blogger endorsing your brand more important than a celebrity?

Brands in Singapore now have choices when it comes to who endorses them. Your brand can now choose between a well-known Singaporean or international celebrity or key Singaporean or global blogging influencers to be brand advocates. Or both.

What are the pros and cons of each option?

The pros of having a celebrity endorse your brand is that the celebrity themselves have a ready-made brand which presumably you have researched as being an ideal fit for your brand. They also have a ready-made social media following either globally or regionally depending upon whether they are a global or regional or country-specific superstar.

Top influencers include US President Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, and Lady Gaga. But are any of them right for your brand and could you afford them?

You can also have a middle way. A local celebrity influencer who is used to influence micro influencers. SingTel used local well-known comedian Hossan Leong to roll out a real-time one-day Twitter campaign #Need4GSpeed to promote their 4G service.

Hossan also created personalised video responses for popular bloggers in Singapore to share with their followers.

As the campaign kicked off, the popularity grew and 2 hours into the campaign, organic interaction replaced interaction driven by bloggers @SingTel followers and Hossan’s fans reached out to him with their feedback and word began to spread on Twitter and Facebook.

In the 8 hours of the campaign, @SingTel got a total of 1400+ submissions to #Need4GSpeed, 450+ @SingTel mentions, and over 500,000 tweet impressions.

The campaign generated over 32,000 engagements and 1.54 million impressions on the Promoted Trend day. Daily brand mentions increased 17x over the daily average and traffic to SingTel’s 4G website increased by 39%.

The cons of having a celebrity endorsement is that they all have baggage. There’s always the classic case of the celebrity being a brand advocate of Nike or Coca Cola and being seen wearing adidas or drinking a Pepsi. They are a law unto themselves.

They also cost a fortune and endorse many brands. Who can remember all of David Beckham’s brand endorsements, for example?

The pros of employing micro influencers is that you can employ many of them in various markets and they are connected and have real influence on their followers. These people really know what’s going on and have their ear to the ground.

The endorsement of a micro influencer also comes across as more genuine as the market is less mature. Everyone knows celebrities just endorse for the money with the odd exception of those that are sincere brand advocates for a cause or a brand they are linked to in other ways like ownership.

A recent Singaporean Samsung TV event, for example, used micro influencers over macro influencers to come along to the launch event and blog about the event to their followers. How were they chosen? They were measured on their social media influence and ultimately the user was rated on a scale from 1 to 100.

The cons of micro influencers are that their reach is never as great as a celebrity but it can be more genuine. Followers may have actually met the influencer or have interacted with them as opposed to them being a major celebrity and being untouchable.

Depending upon how you use micro influencers means that you clearly couldn’t put them in a visual advert and expect people to know who they are as you could with a celebrity endorser.

There is also the risk that micro influencers think that their power is greater than it actually is. There is even an Influencers TV Channel on line, for example, which I think is the ultimate in vanity.

There is another way of doing this. You could use both. You could have a high level celebrity endorsement and then activate that endorsement using on the ground influencers to fan the flames. The best of both worlds?