Become an Influencer
Elma Smit
LAPA Publishers
Pretoria
www.lapa.co.za
1
WHAT IS AN INFLUENCER?
Actual queens, beauty queens and other royalty
Influencers invented social media. Not the other way around.
Humans want to be accepted, to be part of a tribe, and to be a member of some community. We have always shared at least one thing, regardless of when or where we were born: the need to communicate, to engage.
Whether you do this by drawing stick-figures on cave walls for other Neanderthals to find or by sharing photos of your face with people you will never meet is simply determined by when you were born.
As any of the shareholders of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter or Facebook will tell you, all these social media platforms would certainly become worthless relics overnight if all of humanity suddenly decided to stop posting content.
Being an influencer is nothing new. It is a skill, a hobby and sometimes an obsession. However, being good at one aspect does not mean that you automatically will be good at the others. Yes, it requires some talent and having this talent can be great for you, if you manage to turn it into a phenomenal career or a fulfilling pastime. But, as with any kind of (super)power, it can also be an all-consuming vice – one that can eat you up inside. It all depends on who you are, and why and how you are doing it.
Before I joined Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, I was a student at the University of Stellenbosch. Back in 2005, although you’d see people around campus or have their contact details, the only way you would know who they were dating was through the grapevine. Crazy, I know!
Sure, we took photos of ourselves at parties, on the beach and at graduation – even on digital cameras – but hardly anyone saw these unless we showed them the prints stuck on our bedroom walls or doors. And yet, freebies managed to find their way to me – or rather, I found my way to them.
I was a DJ at the campus radio station and, at the end of my first year, one of the other DJs told me that he had nominated me for the campus beauty pageant, Ms Matieland. His agenda was that he served on the student council committee, which leveraged the (relative) appeal of a beauty pageant to raise money and awareness for the Maties Community Service programme. He was looking for candidates on campus who could bring some legitimacy to the whole thing. I had spent some time in high school volunteering at a safehouse for abandoned babies in my hometown and later taught holiday programmes to primary school kids as part of this community programme at Stellenbosch University. Plenty of naturally gorgeous and far more glamorous young women roamed the campus, but I would be able to speak about community service with integrity.
However, let me be clear: I’m no Mother Teresa. I knew that I wanted to work in radio one day, even though I was determined to obtain a law degree first. I knew that competition for radio slots (both at our campus radio station and at radio stations where you were actually paid commercial rates) was fierce. This pageant would offer me the chance to gain a bit of influence on campus – not a lot, but perhaps enough to set me apart in the age before Instagram.
The CANSA shavathon in aid of the Sunflower Fund was a live event hosted in the Neelsie Student Centre at lunchtime on a weekday. I was obviously not thinking clearly when I set the date – it was done in the heart of winter, which should be avoided at all costs!
I decided that my pageant fundraising project would be a shavathon in aid of a leukaemia charity, the Sunflower Fund. With the help of another radio colleague, I convinced the branch manager of the bank in our student centre to pledge a cash amount for every head shaved or sprayed with colour. I then challenged the men’s hostels to join the action. My line was, “If I shave my hair off, will you?” And yes, I did shave my hair off. All of it! I think we collected between R10 000 and R20 000 this way.
The prominence I was looking for came in the form of my photo on a billboard-sized banner in the student centre and front-page coverage of the shavathon in the town’s newspaper.
As finalists, we were also given new jeans, a gym membership, a spa day and plenty of other smaller complimentary perks and freebies. Pageant sponsors could claim that they were supporting charity by getting involved and, at the same time, their clothes were worn and their businesses were frequented by the eight most-publicised faces on campus – for a month or two, anyway.
Soon after, and due largely to my short-lived stint as an almost-beauty-queen (who also worked in campus radio), I started landing more interesting work. I hosted hostel events, fundraisers, music gigs and award shows. I even presented a few of those annoying shopping centre activations where they hand out branded pens, water bottles and lanyards, while an announcer (me) bellows promotional scripts over a loudspeaker. I said yes to anything that would bring me cash, some experience, exposure or a free pair of Sissy Boy jeans.
This was the actual billboard banner image. As you might be able to tell from the varying sizes of our heads, some major Photoshop work was done on this composite image to make us all appear the same height. From left to right: Elma Smit, Naomi Erasmus, Taryn Campbell, Irma Hurter, Caryn van de Coolwijk, Lize Visagie, Caren Dorrington and Keneilwe Kgasi.
Before beauty queens, actual queens performed much the same role. In the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I set beauty trends with her opulent dresses, fair skin, red lips, high hairline and strawberry-blonde hair. Many women at court plucked the hair from their foreheads in a bid to maintain a high
