Become an influencer

  Become an Influencer

  Elma Smit

  LAPA Publishers

  Pretoria

  www.lapa.co.za

  1

  WHAT IS AN INFLUENCER?

  Actual queens, beauty queens and other royalty

  Influencers invented social media. Not the other way around.

  Humans want to be accepted, to be part of a tribe, and to be a member of some community. We have always shared at least one thing, regardless of when or where we were born: the need to communicate, to engage.

  Whether you do this by drawing stick-figures on cave walls for other Neanderthals to find or by sharing photos of your face with people you will never meet is simply determined by when you were born.

  As any of the shareholders of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter or Facebook will tell you, all these social media platforms would certainly become worthless relics overnight if all of humanity suddenly decided to stop posting content.

  Being an influencer is nothing new. It is a skill, a hobby and sometimes an obsession. However, being good at one aspect does not mean that you automatically will be good at the others. Yes, it requires some talent and having this talent can be great for you, if you manage to turn it into a phenomenal career or a fulfilling pastime. But, as with any kind of (super)power, it can also be an all-consuming vice – one that can eat you up inside. It all depends on who you are, and why and how you are doing it.

  Before I joined Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, I was a student at the University of Stellenbosch. Back in 2005, although you’d see people around campus or have their contact details, the only way you would know who they were dating was through the grapevine. Crazy, I know!

  Sure, we took photos of ourselves at parties, on the beach and at graduation – even on digital cameras – but hardly anyone saw these unless we showed them the prints stuck on our bedroom walls or doors. And yet, freebies managed to find their way to me – or rather, I found my way to them.

  I was a DJ at the campus radio station and, at the end of my first year, one of the other DJs told me that he had nominated me for the campus beauty pageant, Ms Matieland. His agenda was that he served on the student council committee, which leveraged the (relative) appeal of a beauty pageant to raise money and awareness for the Maties Community Service programme. He was looking for candidates on campus who could bring some legitimacy to the whole thing. I had spent some time in high school volunteering at a safehouse for abandoned babies in my hometown and later taught holiday programmes to primary school kids as part of this community programme at Stellenbosch University. Plenty of naturally gorgeous and far more glamorous young women roamed the campus, but I would be able to speak about community service with integrity.

  However, let me be clear: I’m no Mother Teresa. I knew that I wanted to work in radio one day, even though I was determined to obtain a law degree first. I knew that competition for radio slots (both at our campus radio station and at radio stations where you were actually paid commercial rates) was fierce. This pageant would offer me the chance to gain a bit of influence on campus – not a lot, but perhaps enough to set me apart in the age before Instagram.

  The CANSA shavathon in aid of the Sunflower Fund was a live event hosted in the Neelsie Student Centre at lunchtime on a weekday. I was obviously not thinking clearly when I set the date – it was done in the heart of winter, which should be avoided at all costs!

  I decided that my pageant fundraising project would be a shavathon in aid of a leukaemia charity, the Sunflower Fund. With the help of another radio colleague, I convinced the branch manager of the bank in our student centre to pledge a cash amount for every head shaved or sprayed with colour. I then challenged the men’s hostels to join the action. My line was, “If I shave my hair off, will you?” And yes, I did shave my hair off. All of it! I think we collected between R10 000 and R20 000 this way.

  The prominence I was looking for came in the form of my photo on a billboard-sized banner in the student centre and front-page coverage of the shavathon in the town’s newspaper.

  As finalists, we were also given new jeans, a gym membership, a spa day and plenty of other smaller complimentary perks and freebies. Pageant sponsors could claim that they were supporting charity by getting involved and, at the same time, their clothes were worn and their businesses were frequented by the eight most-publicised faces on campus – for a month or two, anyway.

  Soon after, and due largely to my short-lived stint as an almost-beauty-queen (who also worked in campus radio), I started landing more interesting work. I hosted hostel events, fundraisers, music gigs and award shows. I even presented a few of those annoying shopping centre activations where they hand out branded pens, water bottles and lanyards, while an announcer (me) bellows promotional scripts over a loudspeaker. I said yes to anything that would bring me cash, some experience, exposure or a free pair of Sissy Boy jeans.

  This was the actual billboard banner image. As you might be able to tell from the varying sizes of our heads, some major Photoshop work was done on this composite image to make us all appear the same height. From left to right: Elma Smit, Naomi Erasmus, Taryn Campbell, Irma Hurter, Caryn van de Coolwijk, Lize Visagie, Caren Dorrington and Keneilwe Kgasi.

  Before beauty queens, actual queens performed much the same role. In the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I set beauty trends with her opulent dresses, fair skin, red lips, high hairline and strawberry-blonde hair. Many women at court plucked the hair from their foreheads in a bid to maintain a high hairline like the queen’s, according to a fascinating section on the Royal Museums Greenwich website dedicated to the Virgin Queen. Women at court wore her old dresses or had copies made of them; they even blackened their teeth when the queen’s rotted away and glazed their skins with raw egg white to achieve that marble-like look. You could say that she was the ultimate Renaissance beauty blogger. The website continues:

  An alabaster complexion symbolised wealth and nobility ... Concoctions used to bleach freckles and treat blemishes often included ingredients such as sulphur, turpentine and mercury ... As Elizabeth aged, her legendary sweet tooth caught up with her, causing her teeth to decay. Her influence by this time was so pervasive that some women went so far as to blacken their own teeth to mimic her appearance.

  People wanted to emulate her, to gain acceptance and be associated with her power. In spite of reigning over an oppressively patriarchal society, she exercised great influence.

  These days you don’t need to be born into royalty. You don’t need to tolerate marrying into a titled family. You don’t even need to enter a beauty pageant or shave off your hair. Why? Because you have social media.

  The chameleon effect

  Is there anybody in close proximity to you right now? You don’t even need to know them – just catch their eye. Now yawn. Yawn excessively. Don’t hide it or be polite about it. Lean into that yawn, as Sheryl Sandberg would say. Make sure they can see you yawning; do it twice if you need to. Are they seeing you? Good! I bet they are also yawning by now. In fact, even if you are reading this all alone and you didn’t just put on the most performative yawn on earth, are you feeling a great big yawn coming on? I’m yawning as I sit here writing this.

  This is called unintentional mirroring – basically, influence in action.

  Our brains do it all the time, in different and very interesting ways. Two scientists, Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh, ran experiments in the late 1990s and dubbed this the “chameleon effect”.

  They found that:

  •When you work with people on a task, even if you do not consider them to be your friends, you naturally tend to start behaving li
ke they do – often subconsciously. The more time you spend with them, the more you pick up their mannerisms, their postures and even their accents.

  •When you mirror the behaviour that you see and hear around you, chances are people will automatically find it easier to like you.

  •People who exhibit high levels of natural empathy are more likely to do this innately and they tend to be considered more likeable.

  You don’t need to read the whole study to know that this is true. Just think of your own school years or consider the social dynamics in any workplace. Whether you are trying to establish yourself in a new social environment or on a social platform, likeability is one of the key requirements for success.

  So, where do you need to start if you plan to achieve this? Not by putting on some great show of strength. Not by living up to lofty materialistic ideals. Not by focusing on overcoming the crushing self-doubt you feel every time you look in the mirror.

  You need to start by consciously studying your follower. The person you want to reach is not that different from the one who sits in the same office block or classroom as you do. Pay them attention – your most precious commodity.

  This was one of the most useful things I did when I first started making inroads into establishing myself as a sports broadcaster in a male-dominated world. Long story short: I was the first woman chosen to report on a Rugby World Cup for the South African broadcaster SuperSport back in 2011. This was an incredibly daunting and intimidating task – and I still believe that it was my relative youthfulness (I was 25 years old) that made me foolish enough to take on the job.

  One thing was even more crucial than keeping an eye on the actual ball during matches. More important, even, than getting to grips with the social shorthand of working with many very famous rugby pundits, some of whom were old enough to be my dad. I realised quickly that I needed to study the viewers, so I trawled the comments sections below rugby articles. I monitored Twitter, keeping tabs on popular hashtags and topics that dominated the conversations around water coolers and braais. This helped me gain a keen insight into the issues normal rugby fans were confused by and the broadly held opinions that could, perhaps, be unravelled, and even disproven, with the insight and analysis of my colleagues.

  Sure, I needed a few years to get to grips with the job and I didn’t enjoy uniform support – inside the company or on Twitter. But I found that when I started reading people’s opinions and questions and attributing these directly to them on air, viewers flooded me with the one thing every content creator needs: engagement. Soon, people were tagging me in tweets, sending me detailed analyses in messages, and even making topic suggestions. They seemed to feel a much closer connection with me than with many of my more famous and experienced colleagues, not because I had suddenly convinced anyone that I held some mysterious rugby oracle capabilities, or that I had access to the reins of the @SuperSportTV account, but because I simply reached out first. That is what skyrocketed my direct engagement – on TV, but also online.

  It was as simple and as uncomplicated as that. I went looking for what people were saying; I plucked them out of relative obscurity and attributed their ideas directly to them. That’s what triggered the domino effect of engagement.

  What is engagement anyway?

  Engagement in social media is generally considered to occur when followers like, comment on, share or reply to your content. Engagement is the measure of how often they do this – how frequently they keep coming back for more – and how consistently this keeps happening, with new followers joining the ranks.

  A rough sum looks like this:

  On my profile on a recent post this works out to:

  Ideally, one would need to work this out over a month, or even three months, to get a fair estimate of an account’s performance, but that is quite labour-intensive. Luckily, there are loads of engagement calculator websites, where you simply enter the account handle and they squeeze the metrics for you.

  Below 1% is considered low, while 1% to 3% is considered a fairly good engagement rate. Between 3% and 6% is very high and over 6% is huge. Over the last 30 days, mine has been sitting at 3.99%, which is fairly healthy considering that I’ve had a book to write.

  Comedians who really flex their comedic talent on social media tend to boast great engagement rates because comedians spend most of their time on stage telling us things we know about ourselves and each other. Yes, comedians often boast exceptional comedic timing, great charisma and some measure of stage presence. But what really sets great comedians apart is their ability to study people and distil our varied and unique experiences down to a few entertaining, universal notions.

  Sharing in laughter makes us feel heard and recognised as we hear and recognise others. This is also why some sitcoms use what is called “canned applause” or “canned laughter”. The script and performances are timed around a few seconds of applause after key punchlines. I’m sure you’ve wondered why you are able to hear the audience laughing, yet this mysterious audience is never shown? Yes, some sitcoms do actually record their shows in front of a live audience, which means that you are hearing the real reactions of that audience, but even then producers sometimes edit the laughter to make it continue for longer or start sooner – whatever is required to ensure maximum comedic effect.

  This is a simple technique, but it works. Even when you know that the track is simply a recording of people laughing, you still laugh. Your brain is tricked into it. Producers rely on the chameleon effect to make sure you find their show funny enough to watch the next episode – and the following season as well.

  Similarly, social media platforms make comment sections public. Haven’t you wondered why these platforms don’t just send the comments that people leave below your posts to you directly? After all, you are the person who created the post. Why show other consumers the comments made by your friends, the in-joke left by your colleague or if anyone liked your post at all? Even if you take the total number of likes away (as Instagram is doing), the mere suggestion that other people enjoy something or find it valuable enough to engage with it is often exactly why we take a second look. If you walk past a group of people crowded around something on a pavement (especially if you don’t know what it is), chances are that you’ll crane your neck to get a glimpse or ask a bystander about what is going on. This is no different to how social media works, and how hashtags and trending topics work.

  But this is only half of the equation: it is a transactional relationship that needs to start with you. When you study and then cover the topics, ideas, concepts and trends your ideal followers care about, they will find your content easier to like (both virtual and actual likes).

  What is it that they like? Pay attention: they’ll tell you, one way or another.

  People follow people

  Influencer marketing exists because we have more faith in each other than we do in brands. This didn’t happen overnight, though.

  The earliest advertising can be traced back to Ancient Greece, Rome, Arabia and China. Of course, industrialisation really ramped up production and distribution, then television and radio changed the game during the twentieth century and, finally, the Internet came about.

  What remained consistent throughout this time, however, was that brands traditionally created advertising featuring relatable-looking placeholder people. These placeholder people were using or consuming the products and services promoted. They all looked or sounded like you, your friends or your family. The scenarios were familiar and real; the products offered real solutions. But the people involved were clearly paid to do this.

  Even when film stars, athletes and models first endorsed products under their own names, consumers accepted that this was an acting or a modelling job, much like their last movie, stadium billboard or advertising campaign; in other words, a commercial transaction.

  Then, when social media kicked off, an except
ionally effective but rather limited kind of marketing exploded, almost overnight. The reach of our experiences with products and services became instantly shareable and searchable. We no longer had to take a company or advertising agency’s word for anything. We didn’t need to rely on celebrities in foreign countries or hand-picked, polished testimonials from one or two Satisfied Sallys to tell us that “this washing powder/moisturiser/car polish really works”.

  “Social proof” was easy to find and, before we knew it, it was all around us. Dr Robert Cialdini coined the nifty term “social proof” in his book Influence, where he went a step further than the “chameleon effect”.

  He found that we do not merely copy each other without realising it. He said that we copy each other particularly when:

  •We are unsure of ourselves

  and

  •The people we observe seem similar to us.

  He wrote this in 1984, so the basic concept that underpins influencer marketing dates back to long before social media.

  When I am not sure about what to do, I am probably going to default back to people who seem sure. Of all the people who seem sure, I’ll probably copy the one who seems the most like me.

  So, let’s say that I am in the market for a new brand of mascara. I am unsure of which one to choose and I’m faced with four options:

  •Product A is featured in a new TV advert.

  •Product B is on a beautiful billboard I pass on my way to work.

  •Product C was featured in a post by Kim Kardashian. She is gorgeous, but my lashes are naturally fair and quite sparse – not a problem I associate with her.

  •Product D is used by a blogger who also does Pilates at my gym – a blogger with hair and lashes very similar to mine.

  I am going to pick product D.

  Brands soon realised that expensive television adverts create talkability; billboards give your brand clout; big celebrity endorsements deliver broad appeal; and a super testimonial from a gorgeous film star is certainly useful. However, sending lots of little advertising foot soldiers directly to a consumer’s phone screen has become the ultimate shortcut to activate the ultimate marketing superpower: word of mouth.