Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

Chapter 19. Unveiling the New Influencers

WE ARE MEDIA

We, the people, demanded personalization in engagement, improved services that put the customer back into the spotlight, and acknowledgment that our feedback would incite a more value–added circle of overall communications and product adaptation. We have emerged influential and consequential to the bottom lines of businesses all over the world.

As consumers and publishers, we fervently 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, ambassadors, and critics. Those who master their domains are developing persuasive and important communities around their areas of expertise, interests, and passions and now possess the prowess and authority to direct, instruct, and steer decision makers and referrers.

Aside from the discipline and behavior our profession dictates, we are far more than communicators, marketers, publishers, or chroniclers of life events. We are also knowledgeable people with ideas, opinions, observations, and frustrations that cannot be discounted and we bring these experiences to each conversation as knowledgeable consumers. But when it's time to reach our peers and colleagues, we seem to regress to message broadcasters and purveyors of disjointed and off–target information. In short, we lose sight of how what ...