What is wrong with young people just wanting to be influencers?

There is this trend for media people and adults in general to describe young people’s digital landscape in dystopian terms. They talk about how dumb young people just want to be influencers now. They talk about the detriment to their mental health, of growing up in a social media landscape that forces them to be constantly exposed to the public, which forces them to prevent a front, and to create content to broadcast and that’s ignoring the more scandalous content that is often broadcast privately.

I could make a pretty solid argument that the choices teenagers make now with social media will stand them in good stead for the future. As I myself try and struggle to build and maintain a social media profile, I realise, as I should have known, that it is very difficult. The “youths’ are able to do this because they were born in it, or to paraphrase Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, people of my generation merely adopted social media, young people were born in it, moulded by it. So I struggle, but better late than never, I have begun what is an arduous journey to develop a personal brand, because if there is a truism that I have learnt, it’s this - if you don’t exist online, you don’t exist.

The other thing that I had to learn the hard way is the importance of personal branding, and building that brand, whatever it may be. In life, you want to be someone that people have heard of, someone people seek out, and much like earned media for companies, you want inbound traffic to your profile, your services. In short, you need people to approach you because the converse is so, so expensive. At a certain point, it becomes very expensive for all of us to spend our increasingly valuable time to seek people out, to find clients, to reach potential customers for our message and our services.

We all need to build a personal brand because you want people to seek you out, not the other way round, and this is the argument I am making for today’s youths. What is wrong with young people just wanting to be influencers? Influence is just another for of personal brand and gaining followers is just another form of brand building. In brand building, it is really important to have a head start in this, and the “youths’ of today have the benefit of that head start.

A generation before, millennials and people broadly of my generation dreamed of being professional footballers or professional sports people in general, and what’s wrong with that? Professional footballers continue to be paid more and more so financially, at least giving yourself a change to reach their level is worth a shot, and there is nothing wrong with becoming fit and healthy in pursuit of that dream. Being an influencer is, if anything, easier than being a professional footballer, there are more opportunities available, and the personal brand that is built in pursuit of being an influencer is invaluable.

There are many, many careers where the added exposure and a large following would be incredibly useful and I, for one, would not rule out hiring someone just because of the large following. There is a timelessness to personal brand building - it has always been useful, and it probably won’t be any less useful in the future. I only wish that I knew this earlier. So to those who say that the “youths” of today are growing up in a technological dystopia where they just want to be influencers I present my argument that influence is just another form of personal branding, and that will never not be useful.