Chapter 19
Unveiling the New Influencers
WE ARE MEDIA
Influence is not popularity and popularity is not influence. Influence is the ability to effect action. In social media, influence is our quest, as it can steer desirable outcomes.
We, the people, demanded recognition. We gained access to the tools and platforms that are putting the customer back into the spotlight. Our feedback now incites a more value-added circle of overall communications and product evolution. We have emerged influential and consequential to the bottom lines of businesses all over the world.
As consumers and publishers, we stormed these new platforms and staged a social revolution that forced the attention of those who so readily dismissed us—silence was no longer golden.
Social networks and platforms have expanded the roles of customers and peers from consumer to authorities, advocates, and critics. Those who master their domains are developing consequential communities around their areas of expertise, interests, and passions and now possess the authority to direct, instruct, and steer decision makers and actions.
We must now become much more than communicators, marketers, publishers, or service professionals. We too are consumers and this perspective must permeate our company culture. But when it's time to reach our peers and colleagues, we seem to regress. In short, we lose sight of how what we represent truly affects those whom we're trying to reach.
While we possess the ability to become the very people ...
