How to be an Influencer....

This seems to be one of The BIG questions in today's business environment. Influencers are everywhere - they all seem to be young and beautiful and full of fetching pouts and winning smiles, long blond hair or designer stubble. Oh, and wealthy.

I've only ever seen one under the age of about 30 (although decent make-up can hide a multitude of imperfections and knock years off your apparent age) and he was an old Polish geezer on breakfast tv over the weekend: white hair, neatly trimmed white goatee, blathering on about something or other. My Beloved turned to me and said witheringly, "He's over 70 like you, and an influencer, making lots of money. Why can't you do that?"

I couldn't answer. Because I have absolutely no idea how to become an Influencer. Or even what they are supposed to do,

Apart from looking presentable, what exactly are the qualifications? How do you get them? How do you decide what you want to influence people in? And how do you actually DO that? And monetize it?

It seems to me there are no qualifications, and anyone can talk an absolute pile of nonsense on almost any subject under the sun, on Twitter (or whatever it's called this week), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or any other social media platform, and provided the individual has the word "Influencer" somewhere in his/her description and a nice photo for his/her thumbnail, then people, especially the young (who, let's be clear, invented the entire concept), will accept the nonsense as nothing less than the gospel truth. And somehow, magically, all the Likes and Shares translate themselves into hard cash, and lo and behold your old Toyota Avensis becomes a shiny new Audi Q7.... Like magic.

OK, perhaps I sound like (or even am, to an extent) a Bitter Old Man, but I'm not, really and truly. I just find it incomprehensible that these activities can be so influential (sorry...) with so little substance - and not all of that good. It's a case of the Blind leading the blind......and blind are lapping it up.

A teenage girl of my acquaintance, like most teenage girls it seems, spends hours every day on social, and follows a number of Influencers. One of them recommended some make-up product or other (I have no idea which one, but it seems it was expensive) to make any teenage girl look a million dollars. The acquaintance duly invested a month's pocket money in a jar of this stuff, plus the face powder that was the recommended accompaniment, and slathered it all over her face every day for a week before leaving for school. Sure, she looked pretty as a picture when she left home every day, but by the end of the week, despite properly cleansing and washing her face every night before bed, she was covered in acne - both cheeks, forehead, even her nose.

That was a couple of years ago. Although it has improved a lot (possibly because she no longer uses the products), her parents have had to shell out a significant amount of dosh on dermatologist appointments and her recommended products to try and help. The hope is that, in time, she will simply grow out of it...... It may of course have had nothing to do with the Influencer, not her fault at all: she was after all not much more than a kid herself, so probably still naive about the Ways of the World (except for the new Ways of making money with little effort or ability in anything else) but I do ask the question whether or not she had sufficient knowledge of the damage any cosmetic can do to sensitive young skin before she started peddling the stuff on social (and no doubt being lucratively rewarded for doing so).

In my day, the kid would have been labelled a con-artist or worse, and not at all looked up to. But then times have changed, and across the entire internet there is a lack of strong governance and sense of responsibility by the platforms themselves, never mind the majority of people and companies who use it for their business growth. How else to explain the rise of, say, Truth Social (its name alone should raise red flags!), or the Chinese outfit that peppers my LinkedIn feed every day with new space-age smoking technology adverts that the system will not allow me to either block, delete or report....

In the old days - so the 20th century and before - influencers were not called Influencers. They were called mum and dad, or grannie and grandad. They were your teachers at school, from the age of 5 and upwards and through college or university, giving you the core knowledge you needed to survive and flourish in life. By definition, they were older than you, with much more experience in living (including, those in my youth, active service in World War Two).

They all guided you in the right way to behave; in respect for other people (particularly those older than you and in positions of responsbility); and in good habits like being on time for school, for trains and buses and planes, and later on for work. Then your seniors at work, your supervisors and managers and peers who happened to have been employed at your factory or office for a longer period, all gave you help and guidance and influenced your own performance and, ultimately, career path. And in so doing they gave you the tools to pass on as guidance to your own kids and grandkids. As an "influence" system I would argue it was far more effective and valuable than any amount of hours trawling through any number of social media platforms or search engines. The advice was always - at least in my experience - grounded in real life, based on real world experience, and rarely if ever unsubstantiated claptrap narrated solely for financial gain. And it worked - there are still habits and behaviours, particularly relating to the workplace, that I find myself following even now in my retirement, and desperately trying (without too much success) to encourage my kids to emulate. But it seems good time-keeping for a start is no longer important.

It seems to me that influencers should carry a Government Health Warning, in the same way that smoking products and alcohol do. They should be compelled to show a high degree of knowledge in their chosen subject of infuence, probably earn a professional qualification of some kind from a respected educational establishment rather than some fly-by-night mail order scam. But I recognise this is highly unlikely to happen - if Big Tech like Microsoft and Apple, Google and Facebook are incapable of governing themselves then what hope is there for a quasi-business sector like "Influencing" to do so? Somewhere between "Zero and You Gotta Be Kidding?" I would suggest.

So I am highly unlikely to ever attain My Beloved's tongue-in-cheek suggestion of "Travellin' Bob: Influencer" and all the Wealth of Croessus that apparantly goes with it. But I will continue to rail against things that annoy me - like the unstoppable rise of AI (that in my view is a clear and present danger to us all); the continued importance of Big Tech and the way it dominates us all whether we like it or not; the evil of Messrs Putin, Trump, the British Conservative Party and the IDF (amongst others); and a host of other niggles. And I will continue to praise and support the good I see in the people of this planet as and when I see fit - climate change activist retirees facing jailtime for calling it out when governments everywhere renege on promises and further endanger us all; health professionals fighting incompetence and shortages every day; volunteers providing food, shelter and help to refugees wherever they may be....; and a host of other praiseworthy activities.

It's what this Blog is all about, after all!