“If you want people to listen, you have to have a platform to speak from, and that is excellence in what you do.” – William Pollard, Born Jun. 10, 1828.
This is going to be a good one for the would-be mass influencers among you.
You know what an endorsement is, right? It's when you get a well-known, meaningful celebrity or industry figure to vouch for you or your company or your product.
You see it all the time. Probably the most profitable example of it would be Michael Jordan's relationship with Nike.
Now, the REASON endorsements work – the reason marketers want to get them and use them – is because PEOPLE LISTEN when someone EXCELLENT is speaking.
They just do. We give our attention to people we see as extraordinary.
What's funny is that you don't have to be excellent within the arena of whatever is being endorsed. If you can throw a football really well, your opinion on cars will matter to your fans.
Endorsement works, which is endorsers can make a lot of money for the attention they can generate.
Now in times past, you had to find extraordinary people who had achieved extraordinary things if you wanted a killer endorsement. Because that's what it took for someone to get really famous, and therefore worth getting endorsement from.
To get a saturation of media sufficient to make you recognizable, you had to be something truly special…
But it's different now.
In the case of our media saturated culture we are conditioned to give attention to certain people, because they are put before us as performers – the whole point is to watch them doing whatever. Playing sports. Acting. Politicizing. Etc.
Simply being seen often enough to be recognized can be MISTAKEN for a kind of excellence these days. You are perceived as being excellent at being famous.
Which is how we have reality show “stars” who are famous for being famous and nothing else. The more cameras are pointed at them, the more they become worth pointing cameras at.
But to kick that kind of thing off, someone used to have to bet big money on you to start off. You had to be given a small shot and you had to parlay that into more attention. Usually by behaving scandalously.
Here is where the Internet comes in.
It's the great equalizer. Anyone at all can get a smart phone for a small amount of money and IMMEDIATELY start churning out their own little reality show featuring their own self.
Generate your own celebrity out of thin air. Publish. Seek an audience. Engage with your earliest fans. Fan their flames and empower them to evangelize you.
And as you grow in skill and experience at running this one-person show, you begin to get better at it. Maybe even excellent.
And as you know from today's quote, when you're excellent in SOMETHING, people will pay attention. They will LISTEN. And most importantly, they will COMPLY.
So if you have some way for his audience of yours to pay you, or else have businesses pay you for throwing your audience's attention their way (become an endorser of value)… Then you pretty much get paid to be yourself.
Paid a lot.
And you can't fuck it up. It's easy. It's fun.
Do it. Start now.