It's Offical: I am Not a Schmuck

The ever-vigilant voice inside my head has been silenced.

Ta-dah!

It turns out, I'm not a schmuck.

I'm a micro-influencer.

And I'm hot.

CMOs want me.

A "micro-influencer," according to word-of-mouth marketing agency Mavrck, is an everyday Joe who engages 500 to 5,000 followers around a topic.

CMOs want to curry favor with me, so I'll "co-develop" social media posts that steer conversations toward their products.

And in terms of ROI, micro-influencers like me are mightier than he-man size influencers. 

"Micro-influencers generally have the smallest reach, but also have the highest engaged reach," according to Mavrck. "More importantly, they’re generating authentic conversions among like-minded consumers, individuals with shared connections to the micro-influencer that are far more powerful than the superficial engagements and conversions you may get from a paid advertisement, blog or impersonal public endorsement."

Take that, Kanye West!

A CMO can incent me to co-develop posts by giving me the VIP treatment, showering me with gifts, discount coupons, or exclusive offers.

Every time I'm incented to act, on average, three of my followers become the CMO's customers, the company says.

"Micro-influencers are your best brand asset you didn’t even know about," Mavrck advises.

How about you?

Are you a micro-influencer?

Fragmented

Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so they will not understand each other.

— Genesis

Division is nothing new in our nation, but media was always a glue that bound us.

Its fragmentation comes like Yaweh's wrath:

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so they will not understand each other.

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Hard and Sticky

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?

― Anne Lamott

How often have you been told to make your content easy?

Easy to skim, scan, and swallow.

Easy's best.

Not always, say two Princeton neuroscientists.

They've shown disfluency―the processing by the brain of hard-to-read content―increases the content's impact.

Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer asked 3,400 subjects to take problem-solving tests and found the subjects repeatedly scored higher when the tests were disfluent (i.e., printed in hard-to-read typefaces).

"Disfluency led participants to adopt a more systematic processing strategy," the researchers concluded.

Additional neuroscientific evidence indicates hard-to-read content triggers an alarm in the brain that activates the prefrontal cortex responsible for careful thought.

The harder we have to work to understand a piece of content, the stickier it becomes.

Echo of the Future

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

— George Orwell, 1984

Amazon this week announced Echo Look, an intelligent camera that uses machine learning to act as a personal style assistant.

Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.

Powered by Amazon's voice control system Alexa, the Echo Look acts as a "smart mirror," taking full-length photos and videos that let you check your outfit.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. 

The device also connects to an app with a “style check” feature that lets you compare and rate different outfits.

It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.

Fashion-forward users will love Echo Look. And because cloud-based Alexa is always getting smarter, so will the Echo Look.

You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Content Marketers, You are Not a Committee

Why are most corporate blogs mind numbing?

They're the products of committees.

Every post is the same. Safe. Sanctioned. Sanitized.

No one owns the content, so it's uninspired and impassionate.

If you want to improve your corporate blog, find employees who love their work and ask them to contribute (if you can't, you have a bigger problem than a boring blog).

Give them one, simple instruction: You are not a committee.

Then get out of their way and watch what they do. You'll soon have a much better blog.

As Mark Hamill recently told the audience of Content Marketing World, "Follow your own inspiration. If you find something engaging, find a way to repurpose it through your own prism. Believe in yourself and trust your instincts."

 You are not a committee.