An alabaster complexion symbolised wealth and nobility ... Concoctions used to bleach freckles and treat blemishes often included ingredients such as sulphur, turpentine and mercury ... As Elizabeth aged, her legendary sweet tooth caught up with her, causing her teeth to decay. Her influence by this time was so pervasive that some women went so far as to blacken their own teeth to mimic her appearance.
People wanted to emulate her, to gain acceptance and be associated with her power. In spite of reigning over an oppressively patriarchal society, she exercised great influence.
These days you don’t need to be born into royalty. You don’t need to tolerate marrying into a titled family. You don’t even need to enter a beauty pageant or shave off your hair. Why? Because you have social media.
The chameleon effect
Is there anybody in close proximity to you right now? You don’t even need to know them – just catch their eye. Now yawn. Yawn excessively. Don’t hide it or be polite about it. Lean into that yawn, as Sheryl Sandberg would say. Make sure they can see you yawning; do it twice if you need to. Are they seeing you? Good! I bet they are also yawning by now. In fact, even if you are reading this all alone and you didn’t just put on the most performative yawn on earth, are you feeling a great big yawn coming on? I’m yawning as I sit here writing this.
This is called unintentional mirroring – basically, influence in action.
Our brains do it all the time, in different and very interesting ways. Two scientists, Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh, ran experiments in the late 1990s and dubbed this the “chameleon effect”.
They found that:
• When you work with people on a task, even if you do not consider them to be your friends, you naturally tend to start behaving like they do – often subconsciously. The more time you spend with them, the more you pick up their mannerisms, their postures and even their accents.
• When you mirror the behaviour that you see and hear around you, chances are people will automatically find it easier to like you.
• People who exhibit high levels of natural empathy are more likely to do this innately and they tend to be considered more likeable.
You don’t need to read the whole study to know that this is true. Just think of your own school years or consider the social dynamics in any workplace. Whether you are trying to establish yourself in a new social environment or on a social platform, likeability is one of the key requirements for success.
So, where do you need to start if you plan to achieve this? Not by putting on some great show of strength. Not by living up to lofty materialistic ideals. Not by focusing on overcoming the crushing self-doubt you feel every time you look in the mirror.
You need to start by consciously studying your follower. The person you want to reach is not that different from the one who sits in the same office block or classroom as you do. Pay them attention – your most precious commodity.
This was one of the most useful things I did when I first started making inroads into establishing myself as a sports broadcaster in a male-dominated world. Long story short: I was the first woman chosen to report on a Rugby World Cup for the South African broadcaster SuperSport back in 2011. This was an incredibly daunting and intimidating task – and I still believe that it was my relative youthfulness (I was 25 years old) that made me foolish enough to take on the job.
One thing was even more crucial than keeping an eye on the actual ball during matches. More important, even, than getting to grips with the social shorthand of working with many very famous rugby pundits, some of whom were old enough to be my dad. I realised quickly that I needed to study the viewers, so I trawled the comments sections below rugby articles. I monitored Twitter, keeping tabs on popular hashtags and topics that dominated the conversations around water coolers and braais. This helped me gain a keen insight into the issues normal rugby fans were confused by and the broadly held opinions that could, perhaps, be unravelled, and even disproven, with the insight and analysis of my colleagues.
Sure, I needed a few years to get to grips with the job and I didn’t enjoy uniform support – inside the company or on Twitter. But I found that when I started reading people’s opinions and questions and attributing these directly to them on air, viewers flooded me with the one thing every content creator needs: engagement. Soon, people were tagging me in tweets, sending me detailed analyses in messages, and even making topic suggestions. They seemed to feel a much closer connection with me than with many of my more famous and experienced colleagues, not because I had suddenly convinced anyone that I held some mysterious rugby oracle capabilities, or that I had access to the reins of the @SuperSportTV account, but because I simply reached out first. That is what skyrocketed my direct engagement – on TV, but also online.
It was as simple and as uncomplicated as that. I went looking for what people were saying; I plucked them out of relative obscurity and attributed their ideas directly to them. That’s what triggered the domino effect of engagement.
What is engagement anyway?
Engagement in social media is generally considered to occur when followers like, comment on, share or reply to your content. Engagement is the measure of how often they do this –
