“Alternatively Influential”: You Are One Without Knowing It

You are “Alternatively Influential” without even knowing it. Or even knowing what it means.

The phrase comes from a Wall Street Journal article, and it describes a category of people that marketing has never known how to name: those who genuinely influence the purchasing decisions of those around them, with no audience, no media kit, and without thinking of themselves as influencers for a single second.

That means, pretty much, everyone.

Fifteen years of rapid change

I started in the creator economy in 2011. Suffice it to say the industry has evolved, to the point of changing its very nature.

When I started out, brands only cared about mega-creators. A single goal: volume, maximum followers. And we have to remember a detail that has since been completely forgotten: back then, very few of them had crossed the one-million follower mark.

Then campaigns began to be measured seriously. Reach, engagement, affinity. And this analysis produced a counterintuitive result: the biggest audiences were not the highest performing.

Hence the diversification. Macro, micro, all the way to nano-influencers, and even so-called “UGC” creators: those whose content you buy without even buying their audience.

Today, every brand uses influencer marketing. It has become essential to marketing strategies.

The shift: from reach to credibility

Here is the key lesson fifteen years of professionalization have produced:

Reach no longer makes the difference, credibility does.

More relatable, authentic profiles whose word truly matters. This is the logic that drove the entire move down to nano-influencers: at every step, audience is traded for trust.

And this logic works. It has only one flaw: no one took it all the way.

The real shift lies elsewhere

Because the reasoning always stops in the same place: looking for smaller creators. We never ask whether influence still belongs to creators.

Yet it does not belong to them. It never belonged to them exclusively.

Influence is everywhere. We all influence, every day.

When you tell a colleague which software to use. When you share a product link in a family WhatsApp chat. When a friend asks what moisturizer you use and you answer honestly. When you advise against a restaurant.

None of these interactions appear in reporting. None are paid. And yet, they trigger the most purchases, because they carry the one thing advertising can never buy: trust.

Data confirms this: 88 % of consumers trust personal recommendations [1]. Personal. Not professional.

Recognizing influence where it lives

The shift is not about creator size. It is a change of focus.

We are moving from a model centered on content creation to one centered on recommendations.

The nuance is fundamental. In the first, you buy an asset: a video, a post, a story, and the reach that comes with it. In the second, you activate a behavior: someone mentions you to someone else, and that person buys.

	Content model	Recommendation model
What the brand gets	An asset and reach	An attributed sale
Who participates	Those who know how to produce	Everyone
What creates value	Content quality	The relationship of trust
Measurement	Impressions, engagement	CAC, sales
Ceiling	Number of creators	Number of satisfied customers

The two are not mutually exclusive. A creator can easily do both. But only the second is open to the “Alternatively Influential”: virtually all of your customers.

Why brands are missing out

For a simple, somewhat ironic reason: these people do not consider themselves influential.

They have no media kit. They pitch no one. They do not know affiliate links exist, and would never think to ask for one. They recommend because they want to recommend.

The result: they are neither identified, activated, nor rewarded. All the value they create is absorbed without being recognized or measured, never showing up in an acquisition plan.

The problem was never the lack of recommendations. It is the lack of infrastructure to see them.

The question that follows

If someone with no audience generates a sale through their recommendation, that sale has the exact same value as a sale generated by a creator with 500 000 followers.

So why should compensation be reserved for the latter?

That is the entire logic of the Recommendation Economy: recognizing that influence does not stop at creators, and giving everyone the tools to be rewarded for the value they truly create.

You are “Alternatively Influential.” It is time it counted.

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I am Virginie Maire, co-founder of Frak Labs, which turns your customers into a scalable, profitable, and authentic acquisition channel. A committed entrepreneur and mother of two, I have navigated media, social networks, influencer marketing, and e-commerce for 20 years… and I still enjoy it just as much!