Becoming an influencer in the Events Industry

A little post popped up on social media again this week from Pheedloop, naming Diary of an #Eventprof as one of 10 ‘amazing’ blogs that #eventprofs should follow.

Not just great blogs… amazing blogs!

It makes me incredibly proud to be recognised, especially alongside the likes of BizBash, Event Industry News, Event Manager Blog (which I’ve guest blogged for), Event Marketer and TechsyTalk.

I like to think that my little blog is a bit different from many of the others you’ll find out there, and the ones above.

No-one pays me for the posts I write, it’s not sponsored in any way, and I am not coerced in terms of what and how I write. I don’t blog for any other financial reason but to simply build awareness, share a bit of knowledge, and raise my profile a little.

Like Pheedloop say in their post I write from my personal experience and day to day life working in events. I’m not trying to prove anything, and my pure motivation is loving what I do and wanting to share with others who may find my thoughts and musings useful, and maybe even a little bit inspiring.

Which made me think about event industry influencers, particularly as the subject came up during last week’s EWL Club January Exchange during our 2018 industry trends debate, and will be the topic for our February Exchange in Birmingham.

I was also kindly invited to sit on a panel on the very subject at EventLab in November last year, which resulted in a very interesting and thought provoking debate.

I was asked for my opinion of how you can become an influencer in the event industry, and worryingly others seemed to think it centres solely around social media activity.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan of social media, it has been a good friend of mine over the past few years and helped me build a strong profile in the industry so can’t be faulted, too much.

However, the worrying thing that came from that panel and the advice being given was that in order to become influential you would need to be spending the majority of your time posting on every channel available to you, stressing yourself to max about the right hashtags to be using, or curating the perfect filtered images and leaving yourself no time to actually do any event planning, eat or sleep, or maintain any normal level of existence as a human being.

(As a wellbeing ambassador I certainly don’t endorse this. Particularly as high levels of social media activity have been linked to the release of dangerous levels of dopamine in the brain, the feel good hormone linked to addiction).

My point is how can you become an influencer in the events industry if you’ve no time to build on your experience as an event professional?

Here’s how you can. Be good at what you do in events, and put your time and energy into getting better at what you do, it’s as simple as that.

Do things in our amazing industry that will make a difference and inspire others, there are plenty of opportunities to do this, such as volunteering or mentoring.

Think quality not quantity, stay real to your role and ensure you provide content that resonates with others, and make it personal so people will connect emotionally and be inspired and motivated, make it real not manufactured.

If you’ve no time to tweet or post every day because you’re doing the important stuff, don’t worry about it because if you do all of the above other people in the industry will be tweeting about you and for you.

There are no written rules when it comes to how often you should be posting on social, despite what some so called ‘experts’ might say.

What works for one may not work for another and it really depends on your network and followers, so you have to find what works for you, nobody else can give you the answer.

Remember we’re not robots and have our own patterns of behaviour and personal reasons for following people too.

What may be ok for one person I’m following on social media to post may actually stop me following another, so the best advice I can give is try out different things to find out what works best with your followers and network and do more of the same. And don’t forget; quality not quantity.

Which brings me on nicely to MICE Influencers, which we discussed last week, not at great length but enough to gauge that there’s mixed feelings out there in terms of the benefit of MICE or Micro Influencers in the industry as a new marketing tool and professional service.

The biggest question seemed to be sustainability, and whether this trend could ever be long term because how long until that influencer loses their authenticity as the industry starts to question and ponder; are they recommending a venue or destination from pure experience or because they are being paid to do so? Remember none of us are Kim Kardashian or Heather Armstrong (if you don’t know who she is google Dooce).

It’ll be interesting to see what comes from the debate in a few weeks time so I’m not going to try and answer that right now, and it’ll certainly be interesting to see where we are 6, maybe 12 months from now.

Watch this space!

Until next time #eventprofs…

You can read this post on the Diary of an #Eventprof blog by clicking here