We Limit Ourselves When We Limit Our Words
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UPDATE:
What is an influencer? Traditionally it has meant someone or something with psychological and social power to motivate change …
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These days the word, influencer, has become almost a proper noun. Use it in the social media world and we assume that it tags a person who has a close relationship to folks we want to reach and the word, influence, has become an active verb, something we do …
When we talk about influencers in the social media space what we’re really talking about is influencer marketing … looking for people who have an advantage, authority, the agency to cause others to act.
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. —Wikipedia
If we check with folks and references who live off the Internet, influence has a much larger definition than that. Think about “driving under the influence of alcohol” and you’ll get grounded again. People who get folks to buy are not the only influencers at work in our world. And for every influencer / person we would like to move, someone or something is influencing us to choose them too. Here are a few influencers we don’t talk about enough.
- Overheard conversations and subliminal aggregations of things we hear
- Conditions in our environment, such as energy, time, resources
- Assumptions in our thinking, including bias, curiosity, and ignorance
- Emotional attachments we don’t suspect or those we have strong commitments to
- Genetic disposition, such as fear or self-preservation
- Our unique experiences, memories, and skills which shape our entire world view
- The individual wiring of our brains and our cognitive processing
- Books, movies, ideas, music, art, conferences, seminars, educational events
- Compelling stories, even advertisements
Influence is what we allow to move our actions and thoughts. It’s all around us and available to explore in ways that provoke new thoughts and experiences. We limit ourselves and our thinking when we limit our words.
We limit our marketing by limiting how we define influencer too. Great strategy looks farther and deeper than that.
What influences you?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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