Stop whining: You’re losing influence

Gary Vaynerchuk, the famous host of Wine Library TV, a daily internet webcast on the subject of wine, mentioned in his SXSW 2010 keynote that inevitably we’re all going to be in one industry i.e. customer service. I have to agree, over the last five years, the internet has become more a platform for people to express their opinions and less about porn and music.

Even more so, by empowering the average consumer, the internet has become a reverse mass medium. How so? Well, in the glory days when television was the mass medium, brands used to talk to millions of [potential] customers at once. Now the internet has turned it around, and become a mass medium where millions of customers are talking to thousands of brands at once.

But it doesn’t end there. The internet has done something else: brands are no longer seen as massive corporations, instead it’s the individual brands that are becoming increasingly powerful – think Gary Vaynerchuk or Mike Stopforth.

With this shift in paradigm, comes a new set of issues to deal with.

People follow people because of what they say and believe. We follow celebrities, marketers and CEO’s because of what they stand for and because for once, we are just a click and 140 characters away from a celebrity we would previously never have had the opportunity to talk to.

So what is this pressure? You, as a brand, need to understand that people follow you and what you say because they share your beliefs or they value what you have to say. That’s powerful stuff if you think about it. This means you have an obligation to not waste their time with meaningless updates or empty tweets.

As I’m updating this article I see a tweet by one of South Africa’s Digital Specialists, Andy Hadfield: (This is an example brother, no knives being thrown): “I’m going to say it. Everyone thinks it anyway. Lindt balls are better than sex. There.” As funny as that tweet is, it really serves no greater purpose from someone who is an “influencer” on Twitter.

These people/followers, who are actual people and not a number in your follow base or friends list, felt that you and your ideas were worth following, so you should try not to disappoint them. No harm in complaining if you have had a bad experience with a company’s bad service, but constantly complaining and dishing out #brandminus hashtags for everything you personally don’t like will only help you lose followers.

Your cup of Vida this morning wasn’t the best? How is tweeting that going to help make your followers lives any better because remember: you’re part of an evolution, what you do, affects how people think and feel.

While the Julius Malemas of the world are complaining about the small things, it’s the Nelson Mandela’s that are changing the country. Who would you rather be?