#and how their respective world view has the potential to broaden their approaches to life

[iridescentmirrorsgenshin]

this is it!!! the post that moulded my brain!!! they were designed to complete each other it’s completely insane

I keep seeing people say that Kaveh and Alhaitham are incompatible and I'm just like... no u don't get it. They are so compatible that I'm convinced they're literally made for each other. They're both so incredibly stubborn but underneath all the bickering, they clearly have a ton of respect for each other and recognize each other's intelligence. It's because of both that mutual respect and their directly opposing worldviews and ideals that make them both pretty much the only people that are capable of influencing good and meaningful change in the other. Kaveh brings the empathy and artistry that Alhaitham needs while Alhaitham keeps Kaveh grounded. Alhaitham always seems so much more relaxed in every scene where he interacts with Kaveh. Alhaitham is pretty much the only person that Kaveh doesn't feel the need to go full people-pleaser with (excluding the occasional client that really manages to piss him off). They're actually perfect for each other.

[dimitrisnikolopoulos]

From Life Coaching to Web Development: The Journey of Dimitris Nikolopoulos

Dimitris Nikolopoulos, a prominent figure in Australia, has a journey that's as fascinating as it is inspiring. With a background in life coaching, he transitioned seamlessly into the world of web development, carving a unique path that reflects his diverse skill set and unwavering determination. In this blog, we delve into the transformative journey of Dimitris Nikolopoulos, exploring how his experiences as a life coach influenced his transition into web development, and the valuable lessons he learned along the way.

From Life Coaching to Web Development: A Seamless Transition

Dimitris Nikolopoulos's journey began in the realm of life coaching, where he developed a passion for helping individuals unlock their full potential. As a life coach, Dimitris empowered people to overcome obstacles, set goals, and lead fulfilling lives. His work in this field provided him with valuable insights into human behavior, motivation, and personal growth.

However, Dimitris's curiosity and drive for learning led him to explore new horizons. He recognized the increasing importance of technology and digital platforms in today's world and saw an opportunity to expand his skill set. With his innate problem-solving abilities and a thirst for knowledge, Dimitris embarked on a journey into the world of web development.

Embracing the Challenge

Transitioning from life coaching to web development was not without its challenges, but Dimitris approached it with his characteristic optimism and determination. He immersed himself in the world of coding, design principles, and digital marketing, eager to master new skills and broaden his professional horizons.

Dimitris Nikolopoulos's background in life coaching provided him with a unique perspective in web development. He understood the importance of user experience, clear communication, and creating meaningful connections – principles that are as relevant in building websites as they are in guiding individuals towards their goals.

Applying Life Coaching Principles to Web Development

One of the key insights Dimitris Nikolopoulos brought from his experience as a life coach was the importance of empathy and understanding the needs of others. In web development, this translated into creating user-centric designs that prioritize usability and accessibility. Dimitris's ability to empathize with users allowed him to create websites that not only looked great but also served their intended purpose effectively.

Moreover, Dimitris applied his coaching skills to client interactions in web development. He understood the importance of active listening, asking the right questions, and fostering open communication to ensure that he fully understood his clients' vision and requirements. This approach not only led to successful collaborations but also helped build long-lasting relationships based on trust and mutual respect.

The Intersection of Technology and Personal Growth

Dimitris Nikolopoulos's journey highlights the intersection of technology and personal growth. As he honed his skills in web development, he remained committed to his core values of empowerment, growth, and authenticity. He saw technology not just as a tool for creating websites but as a means of making a positive impact on people's lives.

In Dimitris's view, web development is not just about writing code; it's about solving problems, telling stories, and connecting with audiences in meaningful ways. His background in life coaching reinforced his belief that every interaction – whether online or offline – is an opportunity to inspire, educate, and empower others.

Lessons Learned and Future Endeavors

Through his journey from life coaching to web development, Dimitris Nikolopoulos learned valuable lessons that continue to shape his professional and personal life. He learned the importance of adaptability, resilience, and continuous learning in the face of challenges. He discovered that true success comes not from conforming to expectations but from staying true to oneself and embracing one's unique strengths and passions.

Looking to the future, Dimitris is excited about the possibilities that lie ahead. He plans to continue pushing the boundaries of web development, exploring new technologies, and finding innovative ways to create meaningful experiences for users. He also intends to share his knowledge and expertise with others, mentoring aspiring developers and empowering them to pursue their own paths in the digital world.

The journey of Dimitris Nikolopoulos from life coaching to web development is a testament to the power of curiosity, determination, and a willingness to embrace change. By blending his skills as a life coach with his passion for technology, Dimitris has created a unique career that reflects his values and aspirations.

His story serves as an inspiration to anyone looking to transition into a new field or pursue their passions. It reminds us that our experiences, no matter how diverse, can shape who we are and guide us towards fulfilling and meaningful paths. As Dimitris Nikolopoulos continues to make his mark in the world of web development, we can all learn from his journey and strive to create our own paths with purpose and passion.

[sillykoalalight]

Exploration of secular spirituality according to expert Denny Ja

Secular spirituality, has become an interesting topic that is increasingly being discussed in recent years. This concept refers to a form of spirituality that is not related to traditional religion or belief. In the exploration of secular spirituality, expert Denny JA became one of the very influential figures. In this article, we will review Denny JA's view regarding secular spirituality exploration. Introduction The exploration of secular spirituality has become increasingly relevant in the midst of modern society which is increasingly critical of traditional religion and beliefs. Many people look for the meaning and purpose of life outside the limits of institutional religious. In this case, secular spirituality offers an interesting alternative. Denny JA, a prominent intellectual in Indonesia, has expressed his views related to secular spirituality exploration. He argues that secular spirituality can provide freedom and independence in seeking the meaning of life without having to be bound by religious dogma. Denny Ja's view of secular spirituality Denny Ja believes that secular spirituality is a more universal and inclusive form of spirituality. He argues that every individual has the capacity to experience the miracle and beauty of this world without having to depend on certain religions. In his view, secular spirituality opens the door for everyone to explore their own life goals. According to Denny Ja, the exploration of secular spirituality involves the search for the meaning of life through self -reflection, personal experience, and discovery of knowledge. He believes that through this approach, one can find true inner peace and happiness. In the view of Denny Ja, the exploration of secular spirituality also involves self -development and improving the quality of life holistically. He invites individuals to live life with full awareness, respect diversity, and create meaningful relationships with others. The application of secular spirituality in everyday life How can someone apply secular spirituality in everyday life? Denny Ja provides some guidelines that can be followed: 1. Self-reflection: Take time to reflect on your values, goals, and desires. Question what is really important in your life and how you can achieve it. 2. Personal Development: Focus on personal growth and improving the quality of your life. Perform activities that provide inner satisfaction and develop your potential. 3. Appreciate diversity: Respect and appreciate the differences in others. Learn about culture, religion, and different beliefs to broaden your horizons. 4. Creating meaningful relationships: Build a relationship that is mutually supportive and meaningful with the people around you. Sharing experiences and knowledge to enrich life together. Conclusion Exploration of secular spirituality is an interesting phenomenon that is increasingly popular in the midst of modern society. Denny Ja's view related to secular spirituality provides an interesting and inspiring perspective. He invites individuals to find the meaning of their own lives through self -reflection, self -development, and personal experience. In exploration of secular spirituality, individuals are expected to develop self -awareness, respect diversity, and create meaningful relationships with others. Through this approach, one can find true happiness and live life with meaning. In closing this article, we can conclude that the exploration of secular spirituality according to expert Denny Ja is an interesting alternative for those who are looking for the meaning of living outside the limits of traditional religious. In living everyday life, it is important for every individual to reflect on values, develop themselves, respect diversity, and create meaningful relationships. That way, one can experience true inner peace and happiness.

Check more: Exploration of secular spirituality according to expert Denny JA

[bestworstcase]

i’ve been thinking about this post from a couple days ago and how i shared my four questions of character development but didn’t actually give an example of what my answers look like and it’s bugging me a bit because it occurs to me that it’s kinda just. lobbing a tool out there without documentation on how to use it properly rip

so uh. further details with examples ft. the bitter snow cast.

#1: what are they looking for?

all characters have an UNFULFILLED DESIRE that motivates them to action. the more central to the story the character is, the harder this must be to attain, as a general rule. this is, ideally, NOT an exterior goal. instead, it is the intrinsic wellspring from which the character’s goals and aspirations emerge.

EXAMPLES:

cassandra: it’s complicated. she is a character defined more by what she lacks than what she wants, per se; she does not feel secure of her place in the world, she craves trust because she feels she is distrusted, she craves respect because she feels she is overlooked, she craves love because she feels unloved. she doesn’t want to be a servant. she is terrified of insignificance, of being forgotten. she does not fit, and this hurts her. she is riddled with self-loathing and self-doubt because of the discrimination she has endured due to her saporian heritage. but if pressed to explain what she wants… she can’t summon a true answer. she doesn’t know what she wants, so what she is looking for fundamentally is to figure that out.

rapunzel: complicated again. she is a character defined in large part by what other people want from her. a people-pleaser who becomes anxious, persistent—even forceful—in her efforts to make everyone happy. she isn’t accustomed to paying attention to her own desires, and tends to neglect them unless she is acutely unhappy. i think she is looking for herself, more than anything.

varian: he is searching for answers. he wants to understand how the world works, to discover what it has to teach him. simple.

caine: she is looking for freedom. her life has been a long succession of horrific losses: her father was brutally taken from her, her mother became horribly ill, poverty and familial obligation robbed her of what remained of her childhood, she became disillusioned with the faith her aunt tried to share with her, her best friend died in her arms. she wants vengeance, and she also wants to stop carrying these ghosts with her, and she also wants to stop looking over her shoulder all the time and waiting for the next loss to catch up with her.

zhan tiri: she is looking for peace. she is the oldest living being in existence, and she came from nothing, and every single significant moment in her unfathomably long life has been soaked in blood and pain and death. her intrinsic nature is to hunger—always needing, always restless, always empty—and more than anything, she longs to break this endless circle of want.

#2: what’s stopping them?

every character must have an OBSTACLE which DISRUPTS their pursuit of what they’re looking for. it is the thing standing in their way. this is NOT the antagonist—it is the reason the character cannot easily overcome the antagonist. ideally it is something intrinsic.

EXAMPLES:

cassandra: she has, again, a complicated answer—because the very thing she is looking for is the same thing that stands in her way. how can she discover her basic, most primal want if she can’t even articulate her goals? she wants, at the beginning of the story, to join the watch—but not because she wants to join the watch, so much as joining the watch is a proxy for cassandra assimilating fully, for being coronan through and through, for scrubbing herself clean of the stain of her parents’ legacy—and that proxy is itself merely a proxy for her desire to belong—and her desire to belong is, in turn, a proxy for the agony of not knowing herself. she is piling bandaids on top of bandaids on top of bandaids on top of hemorrhages.

rapunzel: she is trapped in her own story. an evil witch kidnapped the magical lost princess, who escaped and came home; a miracle. the sundrop gifted its power to the lost princess; destiny. she a peacemaker and a mediator; it is her job to fix problems. narratives piled on narratives and she’s lost—or rather, never had—the insight to recognize that there is more to her than the stories people tell about her.

varian: his crushing need for approval is the key thing standing in his way. it isn’t just that his father’s disappointment or his village’s distrust make him warier of free experimentation; it is also, and perhaps even more so, that he is afraid of finding the wrong answers. answers that won’t help people. answers that his friends and allies won’t like. answers that change his basic view of the world in ways that feel antithetical to who he is. this fear holds him back from pursuing the truth.

caine: she is looking in the wrong direction; she is trying to not care, as if by not caring she can trick the universe into not taking anything else away. she is someone who cares so deeply trying to sever herself from everything she cares about without actually letting it go, which is of course an exercise in futility.

zhan tiri: what she wants is, quite simply, impossible. this is not a human answer because she is not human. contentment is and will always be something she is not capable of feeling, and chasing it is nothing but another exercise in insatiable hunger.

#3: what are they going to do about it?

this is about ACTION. it is not an option for a character to do nothing; the nature of the unfulfilled desire is that they are COMPELLED to seek it, somehow, by some means. if the answer to this question does not involve the character DOING SOMETHING, you need to return to question number one and fix the answer there.

EXAMPLES:

cassandra: she is going to fling herself headlong and without hesitation after whatever concrete goals feel like they might “fix” the lack she feels. even if a short term goal (like helping rapunzel sneak out) clashes or is contradictory with a longer term goal (like joining the watch). even if it is an obviously stupid idea (like her secret correspondence with rosalia morcant). even if it is an impulse with little if any rational basis (like fixating on finding varian, or joining the fight in socona). she is, essentially, throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, because without knowing what she wants, she can’t form a coherent “quest” for herself.

rapunzel: she is going to follow the path of least resistance with whatever narrative feels the least restrictive to her at any given time. when she is fresh out of the tower, reconnecting with her real family and throwing herself into becoming a princess is that narrative. later, taking adira’s and xavier’s advice to pursue her destiny by questing for the moonstone replaces that narrative. since none of these narratives fully suit her—they are all boxes she tries to fit into—she will eventually grow discontent and cast them aside to try something new, until she finally breaks this cycle.

varian: he is going to fall into a cycle of hesitant side-stepping leading to crisis leading to frantic charge forward until he identifies this pattern and chooses to step calmly but courageously into unknown territory. his instinct is to try to go around, to find an oblique solution, but to get what he wants he will ultimately need to just face his fear head on—and deep down he is willing to do that.

caine: she is going to run, and fight, and keep running and fighting until her legs give out beneath her. vengeance appeals to her, and she’s going to chase it with everything she’s got while trying to protect what she has; her intense drive is tempered by caution, which manifests in a pragmatic approach to pursuit of her exterior goals.

zhan tiri: she is going to continuously and experimentally refine and broaden her definition of “hunger” with the aim of hitting on something that allows her to feel satiated. she is going to line up goals and systematically chew threw them until there’s nothing left. she is, eventually, going to devour the whole cosmos and then probably die.

#4: who do they think they are?

this is a question about the character’s SELF-IDENTIFICATION. how do they PERCEIVE themselves? how do they choose to DEFINE themselves? what do they see when they look in the mirror?

EXAMPLES:

cassandra: she is untrustworthy. she is ignored. she is likable but not lovable. she doesn’t fit anywhere. she’s empty. she’s unsure. she’s drowning in doubt. she is insignificant, unimportant. she has been wronged, somehow. she wants to be a hero. she is someone who wants to do the right thing. she never stops trying. she’s stupid and reckless and incapable and doesn’t deserve any of the things she wants. she probably cares too much.

rapunzel: she is good. she is kind. (she is better than other people, in some small way. she sees the potential for goodness that other people can’t, or won’t.) she is worthless. she exists to make the world a better place. she is a princess, so she has to lead. she is the sundrop, so she has to heal. she is strong. (she is weak.) her determination to be kind and willingness to trust are her best qualities.

varian: he’s probably a lot smarter than most people he knows. he doesn’t know anything, but he wants to. he’s reckless. he’s not good enough. he can’t replace his mom. he’s accident prone. he’s a disappointment. he moves too fast. he thinks too fast. he doesn’t really need to sleep. he’s better with chemicals and formulas and machines than people. he’s not someone people want to be friends with. he could do great things if people—especially his dad—would just believe in him for once.

caine: she is an asshole and there is nothing wrong with her. she’s callous. she’s selfish. she’s out for her own interest first. she’s fine. (it was her fault cornaīn died. it’ll be her fault if her mom dies, or if neasa dies, or if any more of her crew dies, or if cassandra dies.) she isn’t afraid, she isn’t hurt, she’s angry. the only person she can rely on is herself, and the only person she wants to rely on is herself. she’s not anxious, she’s being smart.

zhan tiri: she loves, and it hurts, and she loves anyway. there is a way to break the circle and she is going to find it; it isn’t over until the end; but nothing lasts but hunger. she has done nothing wrong, ever, in her life. she has so many regrets she could drown in them if she weren’t immortal. she is beautiful, stop screaming.

…and that’s the bedrock of a character. 

every individual action, every specific goal, every thought and feeling, is ultimately guided by the clash between this internal core with the realities of the setting, plot, and choices of other characters. cognitive dissonance between answers #1-3 and answer #4 is a breeding ground for inner conflict, and answers #1-3 are the raw material from which the spine of the character’s arc is sculpted.

[bonus round: this method comes from a scene in the pre-broadway houston run of the musical wonderland, wherein a character poses these questions to alice; her answers are:

#1: “i’m looking for my lost child.*”

*this being both literally her child who is lost but also metaphorically her own sense of wonder and discovery, which she has lost touch with.

#2: “i do! i keep getting in my own way, it’s all i do!”

#3: “i’m trying to figure that out!”

#4: “i’m chloe’s mother. i’m married to jack. these people are my friends. i’m a writer. i’m a teacher. i’m the dreamer of this dream. i’m lots of things; i’m my own invention!”

and when i first listened to this audio i was blown away by just how perfectly this distilled the character of alice down to her purest essentials so i immediately adopted it for character building purposes and i have never looked back because it is simple and it works.

in this scene there is also a fifth question, “what are you afraid of?” (paraphrasing: “losing the people i love”) which i have over time sort of just lumped in with how i answer the other four, because i find it to be less evocative on its own. however, it is useful information to know about a character and i recommend keeping it in mind when answering the other four.]

[pope-francis-quotes]

6th Oct >> Pope Francis' full speech to “Child Dignity in the Digital World” Congress Your Eminences, President of the Senate, Madame Minister, Your Excellencies, Father Rector, Distinguished Ambassadors and Civil Authorities, Dear Professors, Ladies and Gentlemen, I thank the Rector of the Gregorian University, Father Nuno da Silva Gonçalves, and the young lady representative of the youth for their kind and informative words of introduction to our meeting. I am grateful to all of you for being here this morning and informing me of the results of your work. Above all, I thank you for sharing your concerns and your commitment to confront together, for the sake of young people worldwide, a grave new problem felt in our time. A problem that had not yet been studied and discussed by a broad spectrum of experts from various fields and areas of responsibility as you have done in these days: the problem of the effective protection of the dignity of minors in the digital world. The acknowledgment and defense of the dignity of the human person is the origin and basis of every right social and political order, and the Church has recognized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as “a true milestone on the path of moral progress of humanity” (cf. JOHN PAUL II, Addresses to the United Nations Organization, 1979 and 1995). So too, in the knowledge that children are among those most in need of care and protection, the Holy See received the Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1959) and adhered to the relative Convention (1990) and its two optional protocols (2001). The dignity and rights of children must be protected by legal systems as priceless goods for the entire human family (cf. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Nos. 244-245). While completely and firmly agreed on these principles, we must work together on their basis. We need to do this decisively and with genuine passion, considering with tender affection all those children who come into this world every day and in every place. They need our respect, but also our care and affection, so that they can grow and achieve all their rich potential. Scripture tells us that man and woman are created by God in his own image. Could any more forceful statement be made about our human dignity? The Gospel speaks to us of the affection with which Jesus welcomes children; he takes them in his arms and blesses them (cf. Mk 10:16), because “it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs” (Mt 19:14). Jesus’ harshest words are reserved for those who give scandal to the little ones: “It were better for them to have a great millstone fastened around their neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mt 18:6). It follows that we must work to protect the dignity of minors, gently yet firmly, opposing with all our might the throwaway culture nowadays that is everywhere apparent, to the detriment especially of the weak and the most vulnerable, such as minors. We are living in a new world that, when we were young, we could hardly have imagined. We define it by two simple words as a “digital world”, but it is the fruit of extraordinary achievements of science and technology. In a few decades, it has changed the way we live and communicate. Even now, it is in some sense changing our very way of thinking and of being, and profoundly influencing the perception of our possibilities and our identity. If, on the one hand, we are filled with real wonder and admiration at the new and impressive horizons opening up before us, on the other, we can sense a certain concern and even apprehension when we consider how quickly this development has taken place, the new and unforeseen problems it sets before us, and the negative consequences it entails. Those consequences are seldom willed, and yet are quite real. We rightly wonder if we are capable of guiding the processes we ourselves have set in motion, whether they might be escaping our grasp, and whether we are doing enough to keep them in check. This is the great existential question facing humanity today, in light of a global crisis at once environmental, social, economic, political, moral and spiritual. As representatives of various scientific disciplines and the fields of digital communications, law and political life, you have come together precisely because you realize the gravity of these challenges linked to scientific and technical progress. With great foresight, you have concentrated on what is probably the most crucial challenge for the future of the human family: the protection of young people’s dignity, their healthy development, their joy and their hope. We know that minors are presently more than a quarter of the over 3 billion users of the internet; this means that over 800 million minors are navigating the internet. We know that within two years, in India alone, over 500 million persons will have access to the internet, and that half of these will be minors. What do they find on the net? And how are they regarded by those who exercise various kinds of influence over the net? We have to keep our eyes open and not hide from an unpleasant truth that we would rather not see. For that matter, surely we have realized sufficiently in recent years that concealing the reality of sexual abuse is a grave error and the source of many other evils? So let us face reality, as you have done in these days. We encounter extremely troubling things on the net, including the spread of ever more extreme pornography, since habitual use raises the threshold of stimulation; the increasing phenomenon of sexting between young men and women who use the social media; and the growth of online bullying, a true form of moral and physical attack on the dignity of other young people. To this can be added sextortion; the solicitation of minors for sexual purposes, now widely reported in the news; to say nothing of the grave and appalling crimes of online trafficking in persons, prostitution, and even the commissioning and live viewing of acts of rape and violence against minors in other parts of the world. The net has its dark side (the “dark net”), where evil finds ever new, effective and pervasive ways to act and to expand. The spread of printed pornography in the past was a relatively small phenomenon compared to the proliferation of pornography on the net. You have addressed this clearly, based on solid research and documentation, and for this we are grateful. Faced with these facts, we are naturally alarmed. But, regrettably, we also remain bewildered. As you know well, and are teaching us, what is distinctive about the net is precisely that it is worldwide; it covers the planet, breaking down every barrier, becoming ever more pervasive, reaching everywhere and to every kind of user, including children, due to mobile devices that are becoming smaller and easier to use. As a result, today no one in the world, or any single national authority, feels capable of monitoring and adequately controlling the extent and the growth of these phenomena, themselves interconnected and linked to other grave problems associated with the net, such as illicit trafficking, economic and financial crimes, and international terrorism. From an educational standpoint too, we feel bewildered, because the speed of its growth has left the older generation on the sidelines, rendering extremely difficult, if not impossible, intergenerational dialogue and a serene transmission of rules and wisdom acquired by years of life and experience. But we must not let ourselves be overcome by fear, which is always a poor counsellor. Nor let ourselves be paralyzed by the sense of powerlessness that overwhelms us before the difficulty of the task before us. Rather, we are called to join forces, realizing that we need one another in order to seek and find the right means and approaches needed for effective responses. We must be confident that “we can broaden our vision. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral” (Laudato Si’, 112). For such a mobilization to be effective, I encourage you to oppose firmly certain potentially mistaken approaches. I will limit myself to indicating three of these. The first is to underestimate the harm done to minors by these phenomena. The difficulty of countering them can lead us to be tempted to say: “Really, the situation is not so bad as all that...” But the progress of neurobiology, psychology and psychiatry have brought to light the profound impact of violent and sexual images on the impressionable minds of children, the psychological problems that emerge as they grow older, the dependent behaviours and situations, and genuine enslavement that result from a steady diet of provocative or violent images. These problems will surely have a serious and life-long effect on today’s children. Here I would add an observation. We rightly insist on the gravity of these problems for minors. But we can also underestimate or overlook the extent that they are also problems for adults. Determining the age of minority and majority is important for legal systems, but it is insufficient for dealing with other issues. The spread of ever more extreme pornography and other improper uses of the net not only causes disorders, dependencies and grave harm among adults, but also has a real impact on the way we view love and relations between the sexes. We would be seriously deluding ourselves were we to think that a society where an abnormal consumption of internet sex is rampant among adults could be capable of effectively protecting minors. The second mistaken approach would be to think that automatic technical solutions, filters devised by ever more refined algorithms in order to identify and block the spread of abusive and harmful images, are sufficient to deal with these problems. Certainly, such measures are necessary. Certainly, businesses that provide millions of people with social media and increasingly powerful, speedy and pervasive software should invest in this area a fair portion of their great profits. But there is also an urgent need, as part of the process of technological growth itself, for all those involved to acknowledge and address the ethical concerns that this growth raises, in all its breadth and its various consequences. Here we find ourselves having to reckon with a third potentially mistaken approach, which consists in an ideological and mythical vision of the net as a realm of unlimited freedom. Quite rightly, your meeting includes representatives of lawmakers and law enforcement agencies whose task is to provide for and to protect the common good and the good of individual persons. The net has opened a vast new forum for free expression and the exchange of ideas and information. This is certainly beneficial, but, as we have seen, it has also offered new means for engaging in heinous illicit activities, and, in the area with which we are concerned, for the abuse of minors and offences against their dignity, for the corruption of their minds and violence against their bodies. This has nothing to do with the exercise of freedom; it has to do with crimes that need to be fought with intelligence and determination, through a broader cooperation among governments and law enforcement agencies on the global level, even as the net itself is now global. You have been discussing all these matters and, in the “Declaration” you presented me, you have pointed out a variety of different ways to promote concrete cooperation among all concerned parties working to combat the great challenge of defending the dignity of minors in the digital world. I firmly and enthusiastically support the commitments that you have undertaken. These include raising awareness of the gravity of the problems, enacting suitable legislation, overseeing developments in technology, identifying victims and prosecuting those guilty of crimes. They include assisting minors who have been affected and providing for their rehabilitation, assisting educators and families, and finding creative ways of training young people in the proper use of the internet in ways healthy for themselves and for other minors. They also include fostering greater sensitivity and providing moral formation, as well as continuing scientific research in all the fields associated with this challenge. Very appropriately, you have expressed the hope that religious leaders and communities of believers can also share in this common effort, drawing on their experience, their authority and their resources for education and for moral and spiritual formation. In effect, only the light and the strength that come from God can enable us to face these new challenges. As for the Catholic Church, I would assure you of her commitment and her readiness to help. As all of us know, in recent years the Church has come to acknowledge her own failures in providing for the protection of children: extremely grave facts have come to light, for which we have to accept our responsibility before God, before the victims and before public opinion. For this very reason, as a result of these painful experiences and the skills gained in the process of conversion and purification, the Church today feels especially bound to work strenuously and with foresight for the protection of minors and their dignity, not only within her own ranks, but in society as a whole and throughout the world. She does not attempt to do this alone – for that is clearly not enough – but by offering her own effective and ready cooperation to all those individuals and groups in society that are committed to the same end. In this sense, the Church adheres to the goal of putting an end to “the abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children” set by the United Nations in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Target 16.2). On many occasions, and in many different countries, I gaze into the eyes of children, poor and rich, healthy and ill, joyful and suffering. To see children looking us in the eye is an experience we have all had. It touches our hearts and requires us to examine our consciences. What are we doing to ensure that those children can continue smiling at us, with clear eyes and faces filled with trust and hope? What are we doing to make sure that they are not robbed of this light, to ensure that those eyes will not be not darkened and corrupted by what they will find on the internet, which will soon be so integral and important a part of their daily lives? Let us work together, then, so that we will always have the right, the courage and the joy to be able to look into the eyes of the children of our world.

[evil-diabolical-oops]

About Aaron

Here’s the thing about Aaron Minyard: he just wants to be normal (whatever that is). Or special, perhaps, but in the positive ways of being special: intelligent, good-looking, and appreciated. He doesn’t want to be associated with those he perceives to be losers, but the universe has conspired against him. He wasn’t born into a normal family, and things haven’t improved much since then.

I’ve talked about Aaron and the maturation plot before, but didn’t hit on some things in that discussion that I’d like to dig into now. The maturation plot is about going from a narrow, self-centered view of the world to realizing the world doesn’t revolve around you and learning how to navigate that larger world. Character change in the maturation plot is gradual, not sudden. It’s also about learning that you can’t rely on someone else (normally parents, but in Aaron’s case Andrew) to take care of you for the rest of your life. In the previous post, I discussed Aaron’s need for love and freedom from Andrew. In this one, I’m going to deal with his motivation to be normal.

Since you can’t talk about Aaron in this fandom without a crowd yelling about his homophobia, let’s start with that.

Aaron & Homophobia

“Thank you,” Neil said belatedly. “Huh? Oh, no. Don’t worry about it. You can make it up to me some other time when the others aren’t around.” “Can you try and get ass when I’m not standing right here?” Aaron asked. “You could leave and let me and Neil get to know each other better.” “I’ll tell Erik on you.” “Bald-faced lie. When’s the last time you said a civil word to him?” Neil didn’t know any Foxes past or present with that name. “Who is Erik?” “Oh, he’s my husband,” Nicky said happily. “Or will be, eventually. He was my home-stay brother for a year in Berlin and we moved in together after graduation.”

“Ja,” Nicky said. “You heard us earlier with the mumbo-jumbo, right? That was German. The little punks studied it at high school because they knew I could help them pass. If you take German as your elective here, just let me know and I’ll tutor you. I’m good with my tongue.” “Enough. Let’s play,” Aaron said, putting the bucket of balls down.

Let’s unpack some things about Aaron’s behavior here.

1. Aaron’s internalized homophobia

I am of the opinion it exists. I do think Aaron is very much “I don’t mind if you’re gay just don’t be so in front of me.”

“Can you try and get ass when I’m not standing right here?” Aaron asked.

It’s easy to look at lines like this and read them as purely homophobic and move on. But that’s oversimplifying.

2. Aaron resents Nicky abandoning him when he went to Germany

One common fandom belief is that Aaron is resentful of Nicky abandoning him alone with Tilda while Nicky ran off to Germany. Is that why he doesn’t like Erik? Or is it homophobia? Maybe he doesn’t like Erik’s sunny well-adjusted attitude. We don’t know.

3. Aaron wants to be normal

Aaron and the culture he grew up in probably doesn’t see being gay as “normal.” Nicky’s actions are calling attention to the fact that he’s not “normal,” and Aaron doesn’t want to be around that. Aaron doesn’t want to stick out. That’s feedback into point number one. Some people would lump it under homophobia. It is, but I want to stress that his motivation is not wanting to deviate from the norm. Because it gets a little bit more complicated than that.

The Foxes first group meeting in TFC:

“The death threats were creative, though,“ Nicky said. "Maybe this time they’ll follow through and actually kill one of us. Let’s vote. I nominate Seth.” “Fuck you, faggot,” Seth said. “I don’t like that word,” Andrew said. “Don’t use it.” “I would say ‘fuck you, freak’, but then you wouldn’t know which one of you I was talking to.” “Don’t talk to us at all,” Aaron said. “You never have anything useful to say.”

Aaron’s homophobia goes strangely absent. It’s not his battle. He doesn’t have to speak up here at all. You could speculate his homophobia isn’t that strong to begin with. And/or you could speculate there is a priority to it. Family generally wins (that deal with Andrew which Aaron stands by here but not at pesky times when Andrew wants him to), especially family against people Aaron considers to be losers. This is why I think it is his need to be normal and not homophobia that is the underlying drive for his actions.

But in the cases involving Nicky and Neil, Nicky’s actions/flirting are also a bit over-the-top, overly sexual, and don’t respect boundaries. Neil has already said he doesn’t swing, but in the passage at the start Nicky is still trying. Aaron finds Nicky’s behavior embarrassing, not just because he’s gay, but also because he’s making a spectacle of himself and hanging all over someone who doesn’t want him. Aaron doesn’t want to be embarrassed in front of others. 

Why else would Aaron care about this type of behavior? Let’s look to Tilda.

4. Aaron’s mommy issues

We don’t know much about Tilda, but she wasn’t a good mother. We get the sense there were a lot of men coming and going in Aaron’s life. So many that she had to broaden her radius and that’s how Andrew’s and Aaron’s worlds end up colliding. Perhaps she was overly flirtatious with these men and that’s why Aaron hates that behavior. It’s not like he was shielded from it either. It’s conjecture, but it’s not far-fetched.

At the very least, it was probably a bit humiliating for him to realize that she showed them more affection than she showed motherly affection to him. Her behavior was embarrassing, and all Aaron wanted was to be normal. Have I driven that point home enough yet? Sorry, I’m not done.

Let’s look at another favorite passage people use to prove Aaron’s homophobia:

“What?” Neil asked. “Just wondering how you went from your whole I-don’t-date high horse to Andrew’s bed,” Aaron said. “Either you were lying to us to hide the fact you’re a flamer, or you saw Drake rape Andrew and realized he’s easy prey.”

This is at the cabin when Aaron is gauging Neil’s feelings for Andrew. The use of "flamer” is definitely a slur. But Aaron is betting a lot (his happiness with Katelyn) on getting a reaction out of Neil. His words are meant to be as inflammatory as possible. I think it’s actually hard to say how much he means it as a slur he believes in and how much he means it to help get a reaction out of Neil.

Because you also have this following Neil punching him in reaction:

Despite his cruel words, his expression was calm and searching. Neil had the distinct feeling he’d been had, but that didn’t soothe his outrage any.

Aaron isn’t feeling very passionate about what he just said. They were words meant to hurt, not words with deep-held beliefs.

Aaron & PDA

I’m of the opinion that Aaron spends most of the series somewhat averse to PDA, in large part because of point number four above. His mother ruined it for him. He keeps his PDA fairly tame and standard: hand holding, cuddling on the couch, a kiss goodnight. Why am I bothering to point this out?

Near the end of the series after a win against the Bearcats:

Aaron was one of the first off the court. He shoved his racquet at Nicky and dropped his helmet and gloves on his way to the cheerleaders. Katelyn tossed her pom-poms aside at his approach and jumped into his waiting arms to kiss him. The Vixens bounced around them, cheering and waving to the crowd.

I think that this is a huge growth moment for Aaron. It’s a sign that he’s shifting his view on what’s normal. This level of PDA doesn’t have to be embarrassing. It can be heartfelt and exciting. A moment of shared joy.

Admittedly some of the perceived PDA hesitance could be the limit of Neil’s POV and Aaron hiding Katelyn because of his deal with Andrew. This isn’t central to my discussion, though, if you don’t agree with it. 

Aaron & Being “Normal”

Aaron couldn’t hold onto his view of normal forever because it wasn’t realistic. What changed? When does Aaron cross the threshold of what he perceives to be normal with no possibilty of return?

The moment he kills Drake.

Normal people don’t kill others. It is certainly justified, but it’s also a life-changing event. After that, he sees Andrew differently, understands him a little better. Probably sees himself differently. It’s a moment he can’t take back, wouldn’t take back, and can only move forward from.

He’s not going to change overnight. He’s got a long road ahead of him. We see glimpses of it, even through Neil, about how much happier Aaron becomes toward the end when he isn’t trying to live up to someone else’s standard of what he should be or under the rules of his brother.

The part of Aaron’s story arc that dealt with freedom from Andrew and finding love with Katelyn is complete at the end of the series. The shift in his worldview on what he perceives to be normal is not. It’s reasonable to think that the climax comes at the trial. That he’ll have another huge growth moment with Andrew. Because of the way the series ends on a positive, you would also expect this to end on the positive. The extra content, if you want to use that, confirms this. He does gain a deeper understanding of Andrew. They keep attending sessions with Bee together. They work through some of their issues. They regularly message each other in the future.

I’d like to give Andrew some credit and think he wouldn’t try to be close with Aaron if Aaron held on to his homophobic thinking. And again the series ends positive, so I would expect the twins to stay in touch in the future even if somewhat strained at times while they work things out.

In Summary

Aaron spends most of the series letting the world dictate what he should want through his desire to be normal until he finally manages to gain his freedom from that thinking and is able to decide for himself what he wants. Once the foundational desire to be normal collapses, he has the potential to overcome the feedback loop driving his homophobia and other behaviors. That’s why I’m optimistic he’s going to change.

[socialattractionuk]

Why I’m only dating Muslim men

A few months ago, the only real experience I had with dating apps was through friends as I messed around and swiped through their profiles. It seemed like an intriguing but daunting world, and one I didn’t necessarily see myself in.

My family is Muslim and strict about dating and boyfriends. It wasn’t something to be thought about until I was in my mid-20s and of a ‘marriageable age’, and even then it was restricted to coffee or maybe dinner dates – definitely no sleepovers. 

But having turned 25, I had been getting not so subtle hints from my mum about finding someone. In my Arab culture marriage is highly valued and seen as the start of a woman’s life. I don’t necessarily agree with this sentiment but I do want to meet someone. I figured it made sense to put myself out there, and with lockdown I had plenty of time on my hands.

I downloaded an app and initially chatted to both Muslim and non-Muslim men. Sharing a faith is important to me but I was curious; this was my first time on dating apps and I wanted to experience it all. It didn’t take me long to start noticing some differences between the two. 

Non-Muslim guys were, overall, quite blase about dating, playing the whole thing cool. There was a lot of small talk, a lot of casual messages, and replies would sometimes take days. Some were explicit in their profiles that they were just looking for some fun and nothing serious. 

What really stood out was their reaction and attitude when they realised I was Muslim, something I made sure was blatant in my profile. Some instantly unmatched with me.

A lot of Muslim men alluded to marriage in their profiles, with phrases such as ‘looking for a wife’ (Picture: Shahed Ezaydi)

Those that stuck around asked a lot of questions like ‘is it true you can’t have sex?’ or ‘if you’re Muslim, why don’t you wear a headscarf?’. I found myself spending a lot of time explaining my faith, which got boring pretty quickly.  

There were, of course, non-Muslim guys who were interesting and made the effort, but I didn’t want to date someone who has absolutely no clue about my faith and background, who would potentially need constant education.

In the end, I decided to filter my preferences to just Muslim men. At least there would be some common ground to start off with.  

I started swiping – and soon noticed something interesting about them, too. 

A lot alluded to marriage in their profiles, with phrases such as ‘looking for a wife’ or ‘I want someone who will make my house a home’.  

It was a real surprise – this never comes up when I talk to Muslim men in real life. It made me feel out of my depth and nervous about how much was at stake. Yes, I want to get married, but in a few years’ time. Would these guys even wait that long? 

After we matched, the conversation was much more intense and fast-paced than it had been with the non-Muslim men, almost like speed dating. One guy, Ali, jumped straight to questions about my future goals and what I wanted in a partner. 

Muslim men clearly take dating more seriously than their non-Muslim counterparts (Picture: Shahed Ezaydi)

It was like he was filtering out people so he wouldn’t waste any of his time. Another, Adam, wanted to talk about the position of women in society and how he didn’t believe in feminism. No small talk, nothing. His opening line was ‘isn’t feminism awful?’.

He presumably didn’t want to date a woman with ‘awful’ feminist views, so made sure to screen them out early. Conversations like this made up a significant proportion of my matches.

I came to be very wary of phrases such as ‘looking for a wife’. Women, as individuals, get lost in words like that – they didn’t exactly make me feel valued, and they made looking for love seem like a box-ticking exercise rather than the search for a proper connection.  

I felt that Muslim men clearly take dating more seriously than their non-Muslim counterparts. Maybe they feel the same pressure to get married as Muslim women do? Or perhaps they think the onus is on them; I do think that men are generally expected to be the more dominant gender in my culture. 

However, perhaps the biggest shock was that I was receptive to their approach. Small talk can be a good thing to get conversations going but I’ve realised that I actually like it when men just get right to it. 

I’m hopeful that when some form of normality resumes, I’ll start meeting the men I’ve connected with (Picture: Shahed Ezaydi)

It gives me the opportunity to bring up topics or questions that I might have previously been reluctant to delve into, such as politics, family and children. I’ve seen some of the women in my family give up their dreams and careers because it was one of their husband’s caveats to marriage and I don’t want the same for me. 

Apart from the likes of Adam, I found most Muslim men were open to discussions on what equality in a relationship would look like.

Having these conversations early on also helped me gauge if there were red flags from the get go (instead of finding out six months down the line) and it made it a lot easier for me to work out what I wanted in a person. The expectations were clearer for everyone.

Lockdown has meant that I haven’t had the chance to go on any physical dates yet, but I have potential ones in the works. I’m hopeful that when some form of normality resumes, I’ll start meeting the men I’ve connected with.

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For now, I’m going to keep my focus on Muslim men, which my parents will be happy to hear. This pressure to do so annoyed me when I was younger but having a partner my mum and dad approve of has become increasingly important to me.

I have also broadened my understanding that love is about seeing parts of yourself within another person and for me, this includes my faith. I want to share my life with someone I can talk about it with. 

Love is tricky to navigate at the best of times without throwing religion into the mix. In time, I hope I’ll be able to root out the guys who are looking for the idea of it, rather than a person to fall in love with.

Last week in Love Or Something Like It: How my lover, my boyfriend and I made it through lockdown

SHARE YOUR LOVE STORY

Love, Or Something Like It is a regular series for Metro.co.uk, covering everything from mating and dating to lust and loss, to find out what love is and how to find it in the present day. If you have a love story to share, email rosy.edwards@metro.co.uk

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[catholicwatertown]

Pope Francis: speech to World Congress on Child Dignity in Digital World

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis addressed the participants in the World Congress on Child Dignity in the Digital World. Hosted by the Pontifical Gregorian University and its Centre for Child Protection, the four-day event brought together different government and police representatives, software companies, religious leaders and medical experts specialized in the impact of on-line abuse. Below, please find the full text of Pope Francis' prepared remarks, in their official English translation. 

***********************************************

Your Eminences, President of the Senate, Madame Minister, Your Excellencies, Father Rector, Distinguished Ambassadors and Civil Authorities, Dear Professors, Ladies and Gentlemen,

         I thank the Rector of the Gregorian University, Father Nuno da Silva Gonçalves, and the young lady representative of the youth for their kind and informative words of introduction to our meeting.  I am grateful to all of you for being here this morning and informing me of the results of your work.  Above all, I thank you for sharing your concerns and your commitment to confront together, for the sake of young people worldwide, a grave new problem felt in our time.  A problem that had not yet been studied and discussed by a broad spectrum of experts from various fields and areas of responsibility as you have done in these days: the problem of the effective protection of the dignity of minors in the digital world.

         The acknowledgment and defense of the dignity of the human person is the origin and basis of every right social and political order, and the Church has recognized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as “a true milestone on the path of moral progress of humanity” (cf. JOHN PAUL II, Addresses to the United Nations Organization, 1979 and 1995).  So too, in the knowledge that children are among those most in need of care and protection, the Holy See received the Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1959) and adhered to the relative Convention (1990) and its two optional protocols (2001).  The dignity and rights of children must be protected by legal systems as priceless goods for the entire human family (cf. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Nos. 244-245).

         While completely and firmly agreed on these principles, we must work together on their basis.  We need to do this decisively and with genuine passion, considering with tender affection all those children who come into this world every day and in every place.  They need our respect, but also our care and affection, so that they can grow and achieve all their rich potential.

         Scripture tells us that man and woman are created by God in his own image.  Could any more forceful statement be made about our human dignity?  The Gospel speaks to us of the affection with which Jesus welcomes children; he takes them in his arms and blesses them (cf. Mk 10:16), because “it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs” (Mt 19:14).  Jesus’ harshest words are reserved for those who give scandal to the little ones: “It were better for them to have a great millstone fastened around their neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mt 18:6).  It follows that we must work to protect the dignity of minors, gently yet firmly, opposing with all our might the throwaway culture nowadays that is everywhere apparent, to the detriment especially of the weak and the most vulnerable, such as minors.

         We are living in a new world that, when we were young, we could hardly have imagined.  We define it by two simple words as a “digital world”, but it is the fruit of extraordinary achievements of science and technology.  In a few decades, it has changed the way we live and communicate.  Even now, it is in some sense changing our very way of thinking and of being, and profoundly influencing the perception of our possibilities and our identity.

         If, on the one hand, we are filled with real wonder and admiration at the new and impressive horizons opening up before us, on the other, we can sense a certain concern and even apprehension when we consider how quickly this development has taken place, the new and unforeseen problems it sets before us, and the negative consequences it entails.  Those consequences are seldom willed, and yet are quite real.  We rightly wonder if we are capable of guiding the processes we ourselves have set in motion, whether they might be escaping our grasp, and whether we are doing enough to keep them in check.

         This is the great existential question facing humanity today, in light of a global crisis at once environmental, social, economic, political, moral and spiritual.

         As representatives of various scientific disciplines and the fields of digital communications, law and political life, you have come together precisely because you realize the gravity of these challenges linked to scientific and technical progress.  With great foresight, you have concentrated on what is probably the most crucial challenge for the future of the human family: the protection of young people’s dignity, their healthy development, their joy and their hope.

         We know that minors are presently more than a quarter of the over 3 billion users of the internet; this means that over 800 million minors are navigating the internet. We know that within two years, in India alone, over 500 million persons will have access to the internet, and that half of these will be minors.  What do they find on the net?  And how are they regarded by those who exercise various kinds of influence over the net?

         We have to keep our eyes open and not hide from an unpleasant truth that we would rather not see.  For that matter, surely we have realized sufficiently in recent years that concealing the reality of sexual abuse is a grave error and the source of many other evils?  So let us face reality, as you have done in these days.  We encounter extremely troubling things on the net, including the spread of ever more extreme pornography, since habitual use raises the threshold of stimulation; the increasing phenomenon of sexting between young men and women who use the social media; and the growth of online bullying, a true form of moral and physical attack on the dignity of other young people.  To this can be added sextortion; the solicitation of minors for sexual purposes, now widely reported in the news; to say nothing of the grave and appalling crimes of online trafficking in persons, prostitution, and even the commissioning and live viewing of acts of rape and violence against minors in other parts of the world.  The net has its dark side (the “dark net”), where evil finds ever new, effective and pervasive ways to act and to expand.  The spread of printed pornography in the past was a relatively small phenomenon compared to the proliferation of pornography on the net.  You have addressed this clearly, based on solid research and documentation, and for this we are grateful.

         Faced with these facts, we are naturally alarmed.  But, regrettably, we also remain bewildered.  As you know well, and are teaching us, what is distinctive about the net is precisely that it is worldwide; it covers the planet, breaking down every barrier, becoming ever more pervasive, reaching everywhere and to every kind of user, including children, due to mobile devices that are becoming smaller and easier to use.  As a result, today no one in the world, or any single national authority, feels capable of monitoring and adequately controlling the extent and the growth of these phenomena, themselves interconnected and linked to other grave problems associated with the net, such as illicit trafficking, economic and financial crimes, and international terrorism.  From an educational standpoint too, we feel bewildered, because the speed of its growth has left the older generation on the sidelines, rendering extremely difficult, if not impossible, intergenerational dialogue and a serene transmission of rules and wisdom acquired by years of life and experience.

         But we must not let ourselves be overcome by fear, which is always a poor counsellor.  Nor let ourselves be paralyzed by the sense of powerlessness that overwhelms us before the difficulty of the task before us.  Rather, we are called to join forces, realizing that we need one another in order to seek and find the right means and approaches needed for effective responses.  We must be confident that “we can broaden our vision.  We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral” (Laudato Si’, 112).

         For such a mobilization to be effective, I encourage you to oppose firmly certain potentially mistaken approaches.  I will limit myself to indicating three of these.

         The first is to underestimate the harm done to minors by these phenomena.  The difficulty of countering them can lead us to be tempted to say: “Really, the situation is not so bad as all that…”   But the progress of neurobiology, psychology and psychiatry have brought to light the profound impact of violent and sexual images on the impressionable minds of children, the psychological problems that emerge as they grow older, the dependent behaviours and situations, and genuine enslavement that result from a steady diet of provocative or violent images.  These problems will surely have a serious and life-long effect on today’s children.

         Here I would add an observation.  We rightly insist on the gravity of these problems for minors.  But we can also underestimate or overlook the extent that they are also problems for adults.  Determining the age of minority and majority is important for legal systems, but it is insufficient for dealing with other issues.  The spread of ever more extreme pornography and other improper uses of the net not only causes disorders, dependencies and grave harm among adults, but also has a real impact on the way we view love and relations between the sexes.  We would be seriously deluding ourselves were we to think that a society where an abnormal consumption of internet sex is rampant among adults could be capable of effectively protecting minors.

         The second mistaken approach would be to think that automatic technical solutions, filters devised by ever more refined algorithms in order to identify and block the spread of abusive and harmful images, are sufficient to deal with these problems.  Certainly, such measures are necessary. Certainly, businesses that provide millions of people with social media and increasingly powerful, speedy and pervasive software should invest in this area a fair portion of their great profits.  But there is also an urgent need, as part of the process of technological growth itself, for all those involved to acknowledge and address the ethical concerns that this growth raises, in all its breadth and its various consequences.

         Here we find ourselves having to reckon with a third potentially mistaken approach, which consists in an ideological and mythical vision of the net as a realm of unlimited freedom. Quite rightly, your meeting includes representatives of lawmakers and law enforcement agencies whose task is to provide for and to protect the common good and the good of individual persons.  The net has opened a vast new forum for free expression and the exchange of ideas and information.  This is certainly beneficial, but, as we have seen, it has also offered new means for engaging in heinous illicit activities, and, in the area with which we are concerned, for the abuse of minors and offences against their dignity, for the corruption of their minds and violence against their bodies.  This has nothing to do with the exercise of freedom; it has to do with crimes that need to be fought with intelligence and determination, through a broader cooperation among governments and law enforcement agencies on the global level, even as the net itself is now global.

         You have been discussing all these matters and, in the “Declaration” you presented me, you have pointed out a variety of different ways to promote concrete cooperation among all concerned parties working to combat the great challenge of defending the dignity of minors in the digital world.  I firmly and enthusiastically support the commitments that you have undertaken.

         These include raising awareness of the gravity of the problems, enacting suitable legislation, overseeing developments in technology, identifying victims and prosecuting those guilty of crimes.  They include assisting minors who have been affected and providing for their rehabilitation, assisting educators and families, and finding creative ways of training young people in the proper use of the internet in ways healthy for themselves and for other minors.  They also include fostering greater sensitivity and providing moral formation, as well as continuing scientific research in all the fields associated with this challenge.

         Very appropriately, you have expressed the hope that religious leaders and communities of believers can also share in this common effort, drawing on their experience, their authority and their resources for education and for moral and spiritual formation.  In effect, only the light and the strength that come from God can enable us to face these new challenges.  As for the Catholic Church, I would assure you of her commitment and her readiness to help.  As all of us know, in recent years the Church has come to acknowledge her own failures in providing for the protection of children: extremely grave facts have come to light, for which we have to accept our responsibility before God, before the victims and before public opinion.  For this very reason, as a result of these painful experiences and the skills gained in the process of conversion and purification, the Church today feels especially bound to work strenuously and with foresight for the protection of minors and their dignity, not only within her own ranks, but in society as a whole and throughout the world.  She does not attempt to do this alone – for that is clearly not enough – but by offering her own effective and ready cooperation to all those individuals and groups in society that are committed to the same end.  In this sense, the Church adheres to the goal of putting an end to “the abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children” set by the United Nations in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Target 16.2).

         On many occasions, and in many different countries, I gaze into the eyes of children, poor and rich, healthy and ill, joyful and suffering.  To see children looking us in the eye is an experience we have all had.  It touches our hearts and requires us to examine our consciences.  What are we doing to ensure that those children can continue smiling at us, with clear eyes and faces filled with trust and hope?  What are we doing to make sure that they are not robbed of this light, to ensure that those eyes will not be not darkened and corrupted by what they will find on the internet, which will soon be so integral and important a part of their daily lives?

         Let us work together, then, so that we will always have the right, the courage and the joy to be able to look into the eyes of the children of our world.

(from Vatican Radio) from News.va http://ift.tt/2y4Jl7g via IFTTT from Blogger http://ift.tt/2xZvdK9

[davidschnuckel]

A New Vernacular:

Young Glass 2017 Speaks to the Trajectory of Contemporary Glass

The Fall issue of GASnews is hot off the digital press! ​Content in this issue is motivated by the theme of TECHNOLOGY and measures a wide variety of ways in which technology is influencing contemporary glass.  With putting so much thought and effort in developing a paper presented at the 2015 Robert M. Minkoff Foundation Academic Symposium regarding the intersection of glass education and technology, I felt less inclined to pursue an article so directly relating to the theme.  However, conversations regarding what happens when digital capabilities become integrated within a field so traditionally tactile and hands-on is definitely an interesting one.  It's a conversation regarding transformation: how standard approaches to things can undergo a significant change  when colliding with seemingly foreign or unrelated things.  In turn, I wanted to examine that conversation within the context of a perfectly timed exhibition that has always stood as both metaphor and measuring stick of change within the international glass field. For this issue, I traveled to Denmark to write an an illustrative overview of the "Young Glass 2017" exhibition at the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft...one that only happens once every 10 years.  Although knowing that the generation represented within the exhibition would be noticeably embracing various technologies in the development and showing of their work, the article also uses that same exhibition to paint a broader picture: a way to  describe and speculate upon the evolution of the processes and techniques that have come to epitomize contemporary glass practice. Below is the draft I submitted to my Editor in its full, unedited version to serve as supplemental material to what is seen in the Summer 2017 issue of GASnews:

One of the most exciting barometers within contemporary glass provided a new measurement at which the field is expanding this past June. Young Glass 2017 is the fourth installment of a competitively juried exhibition established, organized, and hosted by Glasmuseet Ebeltoft housed in Ebeltoft, Denmark. The exhibition premise is unique in its vision on a couple of fronts.  The first is in its intent to seek innovative approaches to thinking about and working with glass from practitioners specifically under the age of 35. The second is that this is a decennially occurring opportunity – that it only comes around every ten years. Due to these distinctive conditions, Young Glass functions in the short-term as an opportunity to highlight the diversity of approach and accomplishment at which a budding generation of artists and designers challenge and redefine conventional glass practice.  In the long-term, the decades in between each Young Glass event noticeably documents the rate at which our field changes from decade to decade; not only from a technical standpoint in what is done with glass and how, but in the evolution of ideas and creative impulse its application is in service to. Following the opening of Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in 1986, founder Finn Lynggaard shared an interest with several colleagues to initiate a strategy to provide recognition and support for up-and-coming glass workers; one that would also suggest the future of the field as seen in the work of those who could potentially be paving the way. In turn, the first iteration of Young Glass was then launched in 1987, putting forth a call for applications to be reviewed by a jury of established, international glass artists. The precedent to have a rotating selection committee had then been set to follow in 1997 and again in 2007; ultimately broadening to host jurors who were not only artists, but museum directors, artistic directors, educators, and writers in the field.  Jurors for Young Glass 2017 included Susan Warner, Artistic Director at the Museum of Glass (USA), Maja Heuer, Museum Director of The Glass Factory (Sweden), Jeffrey Sarmiento, Artist and Programme Leader of the University of Sunderland (United Kingdom), and Dan Mølgaard, Executive Director of Glasmuseet Ebeltoft (Denmark). Young Glass 2017 includes 57 artists from 326 applicants, a highly international show representing 18 countries.  The work within the show is as equally diverse. No matter the approach in how each exhibition participant had engaged glass within the show, terms like craftsmanship and tradition are as honored as they are challenged. When it comes to object making, work within the show under this umbrella maintains a reverence – and a highly acute sensibility – towards excellence in glass working protocol.  Whether oriented in a sculptural- or design-based pursuit, work that culminates in the object applies a much more refined handle on a wide variety of glass working processes than ever before; approaches to glassblowing, cold working, flame working, kiln forming, and imaging withhold a highly refined approach to things like surface and form (O’Neill), life-like representations of the natural world (Skyriver), cultural referencing and iconographic commentary (Peterson), and sculptural narrative (Deleurme). Even in the case where glass objects are being made, there are instances where glass is utilized as a supplementary material or a component instead of a primary focus within a time-based work (Weinberg).   Glass is also being found or – in some particular cases – repurposed; in one example debris resurrected from pulverized uselessness along the bed of a lap wheel to highly purposeful in the formal structure of a work (Thebault). More often than not, when objects are at play, it’s work that isn’t taking on the shape of identifiable forms or engaging the laborious glory of skill for its own sake.  Not because “it’s cheap” as famously noted by our Studio Movement forefather, but because the sophistication of the questions these young artists are asking by way of glass is collectively broader than ever before. Pursuits in “beauty” for the sake of beauty seem passé.  “Symbolism” and intentional “meaning” seem dated.  Work geared towards the “explicit” or “straightforward” nearly extinct.  The legacies of the “easy read” and the “one liner” have evolved into a level of thinking and making that demand more time and consideration in one’s general viewing.   One family of work within the show advances technical capability as equally as it advances the imaginative inquiry that perpetuates it.  The other family of work maintains a similar thoughtfulness and complexity of intent, but puts reverence for material, process, skill, and “the object” in the backseat to chance, the experimental, and/or phenomenology. As the scale of artistic vision in Young Glass 2017 indicates new breakthroughs in what working with glass now means, it also showcases a broader vocabulary of ideas and resolve in using it. The rising popularity between glass and performance, projection, and video are accounted for; non-object works that speak to live action art experience between artist and audience (Roux), multi-media installations projecting the beautifully redundant labors of physical activity (Houghton), and the blatantly tasteless merging of glass disaster and cinephilia (Skrott) are wonderful examples of each respectively. Even beyond those genres of artmaking are interesting glimpses into the young glass practitioner’s consideration of the body.  One approach is in wearable work thinking of glass as fabric, transparent garment as an opportunity to speak towards ideas of exposure and vulnerability (Gonjo).  Works culminating in objects, performances, and documentation of the human body performing glass-related tasks (Feracci), engaging common day-to-day occurrences with glass-based extensions (Rikken), or visualizing the negative space of one’s body through blown glass impressions of face and torso (Kudel) also abound. In thinking about the body in relation to glass from a material engineering angle, it’s interesting to see work pursued that merges the poetic consideration of place, the raw ingredients within it, and how that culminates in fascinating work rooted in glass chemistry(Jahncke).  Another work along the same spirit of merging art and science creates an opportunity to view chemical reactions come and go in an Arduino programmed, temperature-changing chamber hosting Sodium Acetate; a sophisticated glass display case of constant crystallization and thawing activity (Kubelková). Speaking of digital tools, new technology is more readily integrated within the work of Young Glass 2017.  Aside from what equipment video and projection requires to exhibit work of that nature, manufacturing processes such as water-jet cutting glass (Dickson) and 3D scanning and printing processes (Arday) are a tool that has been added to the young practitioner’s arsenal within a traditionally “hands-on”, tactile field of making. Time-based sensors, motion-activated sensors, kinetics, sound, circuitry and lighting all also becoming standard accessories; not only a counter to the customarily static nature of exhibited glass, but an opportunity to heighten the sensory experience within a viewing of work to places beyond the visual. To think about what all in the past 10 years has potentially impacted or influenced the direction with which young practitioners are approaching glass in Young Glass 2017 is equally intriguing; educational changes, economic tragedy, industrial shifts, environmental reconsiderations, cultural movements, and influential tremors from contemporary art are just a few potential provocateurs – of regional and international impression.  I’m sure there are many more… There’s so much more to assess and speculate.  Not only about what the participants in this show are revealing about the trajectory of the glass field, but what further it could suggest when compared against what had defined the essence of what was deemed “new” and “fresh” in previous generations of Young Glass exhibitions.  Regardless, it is my recommendation that anyone in the community who is curious where the puck of contemporary glass working is going should do what they can to purchase a catalog of the Young Glass 2017 exhibition.  Whether young ourselves, seasoned, or somewhere in between, we all could find opportunity to reexamine our place within its progressive course. http://glasmuseet.dk/young-glass/?lang=en David Schnuckel is an artist and educator, currently serving as Lecturer within the Glass Program of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. ​

[djgblogger-blog]

How Lula evolved from Brazil's top politician to its most notable convict

http://bit.ly/2w2kVur

Brazilians watched along with the rest of the world as one of the country’s leading federal judges ruled that its most popular political figure is a criminal.

On July 12, Sergio Moro, the federal judge leading Brazil’s massive “car wash” investigation, convicted former two-term President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva of corruption and sentenced him to nine and a half years in prison.

My academic engagement with Brazil began in the late 1970s, well before Lula – as he’s commonly known – finally won the presidency in 2002 after three tries. Over these four decades, I witnessed his remarkable rise and now his devastating fall, and met him three times.

Given that Lula is practically synonymous with brand Brazil, I believe his conviction confirms the total bankruptcy of Brazilian politics and raises serious doubts about the future of Latin America’s largest country.

Lula’s rise

Lula’s improbable emergence from the poverty of the Northeast and slums of Sao Paulo to the highest office in the land is well-documented.

As a young political scientist focused on Latin America, I first became aware of Lula the union organizer and political activist in the industrial suburbs of Sao Paulo during the country’s harsh military dictatorship (1964 to 1985). On three occasions our paths crossed.

The first came in the halls of Congress in the late 1980s when he served as a deputy following Brazil’s return to civilian rule. I initially dismissed Lula as a being too far on the leftist fringe to become a serious national player. But he defied skeptics like me and rapidly rose to prominence, where he remains today.

In 1989, in Brazil’s first democratic election since 1960, Lula made his first bid for the presidency. Although he lost, he made a much stronger showing than predicted. The campaign rallies I observed were large and impassioned.

Throughout the 1990s, Lula and his socialist Workers’ Party (PT) strengthened their hold on politics. The party increased its representation in Congress as well as at the state and local level. Lula ran again in the 1994 and 1998 presidential elections. Again, he fared well but lost.

Eventually Lula and the PT leadership saw the need to broaden their base beyond blue collar workers, urban slum dwellers and the rural poor if they were to win power and govern. This meant moderating their hard left image.

Lula was branded a hard-core leftist in his early days. In 1995, he met with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. AP Photo/Agencia Estado, Ed Ferreira

Moving to the center

I witnessed the beginning of this effort in the 1994 campaign.

A respected public figure – who was not a PT militant but saw Lula’s potential – set up a trip for the candidate and his advisers to Washington and New York. The goal was to assure political and business leaders that he would not upset U.S.-Brazil relations if elected.

I was invited to sit in on a meeting of the delegation with two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to attend a reception where one of the hosts was Lincoln Gordon, ambassador to Brazil during the 1964 military coup. In the minds of many Brazilians, Gordon represented Washington’s support for the armed takeover and would not have expected Lula to meet with him.

On another occasion five years later, a Lula adviser approached me during a trip to Brazil and asked if a delegation of institutional investors I was accompanying would be interested in meeting his boss, who was dining at the same Brasilia restaurant. To me, this was another instance of reassuring foreign investors they could continue to make money in Brazil.

These and many other examples of outreach to the center proved decisive to Lula’s eventual victory in 2002. His “Letter to the Brazilian People” promised that his government would pursue market-friendly economic policies. This pledge neutralized business opposition and calmed the middle class. He also promised to root our corruption from politics.

Lula celebrates with his wife after finally winning the presidency in 2002. AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills

Lula’s pledges

Because of the widely perceived failure of Brazil to realize its potential, Brazil was branded as “the country of the future … and always will be.”

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had a mandate to lead Brazil into the future by integrating the dispossessed 40 percent of the population into the nation while working with the private sector to grow the economy and strengthen the rule of law.

In an annual assessment of the Latin American business environment, published from 1999 to 2014, I chronicled Lula’s considerable accomplishments in fulfilling two-thirds of his promises: His government coupled redistributive social programs with pro-growth measures, and as a result the economy boomed, poverty declined and life got better for all Brazilians.

Achievements at home won Lula and Brazil recognition and respect abroad. Brazil’s reward for becoming a “serious country” under Lula was hosting the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Lula finished his second term as “the most popular politician on Earth.”

But it was his failure to address his last promise, to clean up politics and to strengthen the rule of law, that appeared to be his undoing.

Lula’s fall

While in office, Lula managed to deflect charges of corruption – even though there was a congressional vote-buying scandal and key members of the government were forced to resign to fight criminal charges.

The car wash (lava jato) investigation, which has focused on corruption involving the national oil company, Petrobras, has already taken down many once-“untouchables” in politics and business, such as former Speaker of the House Edardo Cunha and construction mogul Marcelo Odebrecht.

And it has now laid bare the full extent to which Lula and PT leaders engaged in politics as usual. They now join the rogues’ gallery of those under investigation, convicted or in prison. Its ranks include President Michele Temer and the presidential runner-up to Dilma Rousseff in 2014, Sen. Aecio Neves.

So far, more than 200 lawmakers, former presidents, Cabinet officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption as a result of the car wash investigation. With Lula joining their ranks, it shows clearly that Brazil’s current political class has lost all credibility.

Rousseff, for her part, was impeached last year, but it was not for corruption.

Brazil without Lula

Lula is not going quietly.

He proclaims his innocence, claiming the charges against him are politically motivated. And he says he will run for president in the 2018 election – a contest in which he remains the favorite in the most recent polls – and is campaigning while his conviction is appealed.

Even should his conviction be reversed, however, I believe that after three-plus decades as the commanding figure of Brazilian politics, the Lula era is over. He faces other criminal charges. And although still popular, his negatives are rising. One recent poll shows 46 percent of those surveyed would vote against Lula.

So where does that leave Brazil? How much of the good he accomplished will survive is uncertain, as is who will replace him to lead Brazil into the future.

Brazilians can only hope that it is someone who shares Lula’s commitment to social justice and economic partnership with the private sector, yet unlike him has a genuine commitment to strengthening rule of law. The one thing we know for sure is this person will not come from the bankrupt political class.

One person who fits that bill in the view of an increasing number of Brazilians is Judge Sergio Moto, whose integrity they see as unimpeachable.

Terry L. McCoy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

[mercedessharonwo1]

Why Micro-Influencers Make a Winning Influencer Strategy

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. As one of the most effective forms of promoting a business, it’s increasingly used as a means of increasing brand awareness, gaining more traffic and more engagement, and boosting overall sales.

With social media, though, social influencers can be very diverse—not necessarily in terms of their niches, but rather in terms of the size of their audience and their popularity. Most brands tend to go for the big names in their respective industries—after all, they’re very well-known and respected, and they could possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers just on social media.

That being said, what if you could get amazing results with smaller, micro-influencers? Or even regular people who have a decent following on social media and who hold their own influence, only over a smaller crowd?

There’s no denying the power and influence of a macro-influencer with a large audience of loyal followers. But, largely because of this very reason, it’s also more difficult and more expensive to employ macro-influencers to help promote your business.

To give you an idea of the kind of numbers involved in using macro-influencers, say you have a clothing brand and are looking to use one of the many Instagram female models and top influencers to help promote your clothes. You could be looking at an investment of over $1000 per single Instagram post, while for male models, you could potentially have to shell out around $700 per promotional post. And if you want to go for the biggest names in the business, then you’re probably looking at prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

Micro-influencers, though, are much more accessible, and with enough work, you can get similar results—improved brand awareness, more traffic to your website, and more engagement on social media—but at a much lower price.

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. Click To Tweet What Are Micro-Influencers?

Micro-influencers are social influencers that have an audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers. They have a loyal following, although smaller, but it doesn’t affect the influence they hold. In fact, as they have fewer followers, this also usually means that they are much more engaged with them on a day to day basis, compared to some of the hugely influential people with hundreds of thousands of followers who couldn’t possibly have the possibility to engage with their followers at a high rate.

Another thing that happens when an influencers’ popularity grows and they start getting more and more followers is that their audiences broaden exponentially. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a much more compact, targeted audience, which is much more useful when you’re actually selling something.

For example, if you look at some of the biggest gaming vloggers in the world, like PewDieDie or Markiplier, they have huge audiences, of millions of subscribers. When we’re talking about audiences this size, you get people from all walks of life, with all kinds of interests and passions. The more famous someone becomes, the more attention they get from a wide variety of people—people that otherwise probably wouldn’t have had any interest.

Influencers, usually, are thought leaders in their respective niches. They tend to stick to a certain niche, and their popularity grows because of their thoughts, views, and expertise in that particular industry.

What to Look for in a Micro-Influencer

Before you can start an influencer marketing campaign, you need to establish what your goals are. Do you simply want to raise brand awareness? To get more traffic to your business blog? Do you want influencers to help promote a product so as to drive more sales?

Once you’ve established these goals, you can start looking into what micro-influencers you can use. When researching influencers (in general, not necessarily just in the case of micro-influencers), these are the main things that you need to look into.

Niche

What niche would you put them into? What sorts of subjects do they cover and talk about the most? What is their area of expertise, if any?

Engagement vs. Followers

While an influencer’s number of followers definitely has some bearing, it’s much more important to look into the amount of engagement they receive, as well as give. Check to see how often people engage with these influencers, as well as the engagement and response rates of the influencers themselves. The more they engage, and the more genuine the engagement, the better.

This is one of the big benefits of using micro-influencers. Because they don’t have as many followers, they can afford to interact more with them. If an influencer has a lot of followers, but they’re rarely engaging with them, or their followers aren’t engaging with them, then they won’t be of much help to your promotional campaigns. You can use this Twitter Report Card to not only get a quick snapshot of any account, including their followers and engagement, but you can also compare several accounts at the same time.

Audience

Who forms their audience? Do you share a similar target audience? Is their audience in the same location you’re operating in (where applicable)? When using influencers, the end goal should be to reach more of your target audience, so that you can raise awareness of your brand and make more conversions. Because of this, if an influencer doesn’t share a similar target audience, then they won’t help much in achieving your ultimate goals.

For example, if I were to use to use influencer outreach to promote a digital marketing business to entrepreneurs, I wouldn’t get much value from using an influencer whose target audience is formed by corporations. Even though they might cover the same subjects, they are targeting a different audience. Most likely, I won’t get many inquiries from my target audience based on this promotion. You need to look beyond the subjects they usually cover and the niche they are in to make sure you have a very similar target audience.

What They Share

What kinds of links, tools, apps, and so on are they sharing with their audiences? If, for example, your goal from influencer marketing is to raise traffic to your website, then you should look into the types of links they tend to share to get an idea of what types of content they prefer. The more you understand what types of content they like, the better you will be able to create content that they would want to share and, therefore, increase your chances of getting your own content shared by them.

Authenticity

How authentic is the influencer? People tend to be much more trusting of those who are authentic and have an organic approach to promotion. If an influencer is very aggressive in the way they’re pushing a product or a brand, more often than not, this will put off their followers. This could even impact the advertised brand negatively.

As an example, look at Joe Pulizzi’s Twitter account. Although he does actively promote his blog posts, he also shares other information that might be relevant to his audience, he live tweets from the events he attends, and, in turn, he always receives likes and retweets from his followers. If you take a look at his “Tweets & Replies,” he also takes the time to engage with other users and respond to any of their questions.

Now that we’ve gone through what to look for when researching social media influencers, here’s how to actually find them.

How to Find Micro-Influencers for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

If you’re using social media often, then you’re probably already aware of some of the influencers in your niche. However, for many influencer marketing campaigns, you’ll need to find and reach out to a much larger number of influencers.

There are quite a few options for tools you can use to find influencers. First, start by looking at your own followers to find influencers that are already following you, as well as any followers that have a decent-sized audience (in the thousands) that is very engaged with them. For this, you can use something like Agorapulse.

As you can see from the screenshot above, any influencer or brand ambassador in your list of followers is tagged as such, and they are ordered in terms of their social media popularity and the size of their audience. If you can find any relevant influencers this way, you have the big advantage of already being connected with them, which means it will be that much easier to get them on your team.

To find more influencers, there are many different tools you can use. Some of the most popular include BuzzSumo (for influencer research) and GroupHigh (for influencer research and for outreach).

With BuzzSumo, for example, you start by searching for influencers with relevant keywords:

From there, you can filter your results so that you can easily find the right influencers for you. You can filter by type of influencer (everything from regular people to companies), as well as by city or country, and you also have the option to order your result by follower numbers, reply ratio, or average retweets, among others. These filtering options make it very easy to find influencers that are not only appropriate for your campaign, but also that have a certain amount of followers. Plus, you can also get an idea of how engaged they are, as well as what types of links they tend to share:

Once you’ve compiled a list of influencers to use, you can use a tool like the aforementioned GroupHigh or Buzzstream to start reaching out to them.

Micro-influencers and regular people can be a highly effective promotional tool. So long as you share a similar audience and they are actively engaging with their followers on a daily basis, they can be just as useful as a macro-influencer.

Are you using micro-influencers to promote your business online?

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2plm21n

[christinesumpmg1]

Why Micro-Influencers Make a Winning Influencer Strategy

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. As one of the most effective forms of promoting a business, it’s increasingly used as a means of increasing brand awareness, gaining more traffic and more engagement, and boosting overall sales.

With social media, though, social influencers can be very diverse—not necessarily in terms of their niches, but rather in terms of the size of their audience and their popularity. Most brands tend to go for the big names in their respective industries—after all, they’re very well-known and respected, and they could possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers just on social media.

That being said, what if you could get amazing results with smaller, micro-influencers? Or even regular people who have a decent following on social media and who hold their own influence, only over a smaller crowd?

There’s no denying the power and influence of a macro-influencer with a large audience of loyal followers. But, largely because of this very reason, it’s also more difficult and more expensive to employ macro-influencers to help promote your business.

To give you an idea of the kind of numbers involved in using macro-influencers, say you have a clothing brand and are looking to use one of the many Instagram female models and top influencers to help promote your clothes. You could be looking at an investment of over $1000 per single Instagram post, while for male models, you could potentially have to shell out around $700 per promotional post. And if you want to go for the biggest names in the business, then you’re probably looking at prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

Micro-influencers, though, are much more accessible, and with enough work, you can get similar results—improved brand awareness, more traffic to your website, and more engagement on social media—but at a much lower price.

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. Click To Tweet What Are Micro-Influencers?

Micro-influencers are social influencers that have an audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers. They have a loyal following, although smaller, but it doesn’t affect the influence they hold. In fact, as they have fewer followers, this also usually means that they are much more engaged with them on a day to day basis, compared to some of the hugely influential people with hundreds of thousands of followers who couldn’t possibly have the possibility to engage with their followers at a high rate.

Another thing that happens when an influencers’ popularity grows and they start getting more and more followers is that their audiences broaden exponentially. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a much more compact, targeted audience, which is much more useful when you’re actually selling something.

For example, if you look at some of the biggest gaming vloggers in the world, like PewDieDie or Markiplier, they have huge audiences, of millions of subscribers. When we’re talking about audiences this size, you get people from all walks of life, with all kinds of interests and passions. The more famous someone becomes, the more attention they get from a wide variety of people—people that otherwise probably wouldn’t have had any interest.

Influencers, usually, are thought leaders in their respective niches. They tend to stick to a certain niche, and their popularity grows because of their thoughts, views, and expertise in that particular industry.

What to Look for in a Micro-Influencer

Before you can start an influencer marketing campaign, you need to establish what your goals are. Do you simply want to raise brand awareness? To get more traffic to your business blog? Do you want influencers to help promote a product so as to drive more sales?

Once you’ve established these goals, you can start looking into what micro-influencers you can use. When researching influencers (in general, not necessarily just in the case of micro-influencers), these are the main things that you need to look into.

Niche

What niche would you put them into? What sorts of subjects do they cover and talk about the most? What is their area of expertise, if any?

Engagement vs. Followers

While an influencer’s number of followers definitely has some bearing, it’s much more important to look into the amount of engagement they receive, as well as give. Check to see how often people engage with these influencers, as well as the engagement and response rates of the influencers themselves. The more they engage, and the more genuine the engagement, the better.

This is one of the big benefits of using micro-influencers. Because they don’t have as many followers, they can afford to interact more with them. If an influencer has a lot of followers, but they’re rarely engaging with them, or their followers aren’t engaging with them, then they won’t be of much help to your promotional campaigns. You can use this Twitter Report Card to not only get a quick snapshot of any account, including their followers and engagement, but you can also compare several accounts at the same time.

Audience

Who forms their audience? Do you share a similar target audience? Is their audience in the same location you’re operating in (where applicable)? When using influencers, the end goal should be to reach more of your target audience, so that you can raise awareness of your brand and make more conversions. Because of this, if an influencer doesn’t share a similar target audience, then they won’t help much in achieving your ultimate goals.

For example, if I were to use to use influencer outreach to promote a digital marketing business to entrepreneurs, I wouldn’t get much value from using an influencer whose target audience is formed by corporations. Even though they might cover the same subjects, they are targeting a different audience. Most likely, I won’t get many inquiries from my target audience based on this promotion. You need to look beyond the subjects they usually cover and the niche they are in to make sure you have a very similar target audience.

What They Share

What kinds of links, tools, apps, and so on are they sharing with their audiences? If, for example, your goal from influencer marketing is to raise traffic to your website, then you should look into the types of links they tend to share to get an idea of what types of content they prefer. The more you understand what types of content they like, the better you will be able to create content that they would want to share and, therefore, increase your chances of getting your own content shared by them.

Authenticity

How authentic is the influencer? People tend to be much more trusting of those who are authentic and have an organic approach to promotion. If an influencer is very aggressive in the way they’re pushing a product or a brand, more often than not, this will put off their followers. This could even impact the advertised brand negatively.

As an example, look at Joe Pulizzi’s Twitter account. Although he does actively promote his blog posts, he also shares other information that might be relevant to his audience, he live tweets from the events he attends, and, in turn, he always receives likes and retweets from his followers. If you take a look at his “Tweets & Replies,” he also takes the time to engage with other users and respond to any of their questions.

Now that we’ve gone through what to look for when researching social media influencers, here’s how to actually find them.

How to Find Micro-Influencers for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

If you’re using social media often, then you’re probably already aware of some of the influencers in your niche. However, for many influencer marketing campaigns, you’ll need to find and reach out to a much larger number of influencers.

There are quite a few options for tools you can use to find influencers. First, start by looking at your own followers to find influencers that are already following you, as well as any followers that have a decent-sized audience (in the thousands) that is very engaged with them. For this, you can use something like Agorapulse.

As you can see from the screenshot above, any influencer or brand ambassador in your list of followers is tagged as such, and they are ordered in terms of their social media popularity and the size of their audience. If you can find any relevant influencers this way, you have the big advantage of already being connected with them, which means it will be that much easier to get them on your team.

To find more influencers, there are many different tools you can use. Some of the most popular include BuzzSumo (for influencer research) and GroupHigh (for influencer research and for outreach).

With BuzzSumo, for example, you start by searching for influencers with relevant keywords:

From there, you can filter your results so that you can easily find the right influencers for you. You can filter by type of influencer (everything from regular people to companies), as well as by city or country, and you also have the option to order your result by follower numbers, reply ratio, or average retweets, among others. These filtering options make it very easy to find influencers that are not only appropriate for your campaign, but also that have a certain amount of followers. Plus, you can also get an idea of how engaged they are, as well as what types of links they tend to share:

Once you’ve compiled a list of influencers to use, you can use a tool like the aforementioned GroupHigh or Buzzstream to start reaching out to them.

Micro-influencers and regular people can be a highly effective promotional tool. So long as you share a similar audience and they are actively engaging with their followers on a daily basis, they can be just as useful as a macro-influencer.

Are you using micro-influencers to promote your business online?

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2plm21n

[mariasolemarionqi]

Why Micro-Influencers Make a Winning Influencer Strategy

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. As one of the most effective forms of promoting a business, it’s increasingly used as a means of increasing brand awareness, gaining more traffic and more engagement, and boosting overall sales.

With social media, though, social influencers can be very diverse—not necessarily in terms of their niches, but rather in terms of the size of their audience and their popularity. Most brands tend to go for the big names in their respective industries—after all, they’re very well-known and respected, and they could possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers just on social media.

That being said, what if you could get amazing results with smaller, micro-influencers? Or even regular people who have a decent following on social media and who hold their own influence, only over a smaller crowd?

There’s no denying the power and influence of a macro-influencer with a large audience of loyal followers. But, largely because of this very reason, it’s also more difficult and more expensive to employ macro-influencers to help promote your business.

To give you an idea of the kind of numbers involved in using macro-influencers, say you have a clothing brand and are looking to use one of the many Instagram female models and top influencers to help promote your clothes. You could be looking at an investment of over $1000 per single Instagram post, while for male models, you could potentially have to shell out around $700 per promotional post. And if you want to go for the biggest names in the business, then you’re probably looking at prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

Micro-influencers, though, are much more accessible, and with enough work, you can get similar results—improved brand awareness, more traffic to your website, and more engagement on social media—but at a much lower price.

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. Click To Tweet What Are Micro-Influencers?

Micro-influencers are social influencers that have an audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers. They have a loyal following, although smaller, but it doesn’t affect the influence they hold. In fact, as they have fewer followers, this also usually means that they are much more engaged with them on a day to day basis, compared to some of the hugely influential people with hundreds of thousands of followers who couldn’t possibly have the possibility to engage with their followers at a high rate.

Another thing that happens when an influencers’ popularity grows and they start getting more and more followers is that their audiences broaden exponentially. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a much more compact, targeted audience, which is much more useful when you’re actually selling something.

For example, if you look at some of the biggest gaming vloggers in the world, like PewDieDie or Markiplier, they have huge audiences, of millions of subscribers. When we’re talking about audiences this size, you get people from all walks of life, with all kinds of interests and passions. The more famous someone becomes, the more attention they get from a wide variety of people—people that otherwise probably wouldn’t have had any interest.

Influencers, usually, are thought leaders in their respective niches. They tend to stick to a certain niche, and their popularity grows because of their thoughts, views, and expertise in that particular industry.

What to Look for in a Micro-Influencer

Before you can start an influencer marketing campaign, you need to establish what your goals are. Do you simply want to raise brand awareness? To get more traffic to your business blog? Do you want influencers to help promote a product so as to drive more sales?

Once you’ve established these goals, you can start looking into what micro-influencers you can use. When researching influencers (in general, not necessarily just in the case of micro-influencers), these are the main things that you need to look into.

Niche

What niche would you put them into? What sorts of subjects do they cover and talk about the most? What is their area of expertise, if any?

Engagement vs. Followers

While an influencer’s number of followers definitely has some bearing, it’s much more important to look into the amount of engagement they receive, as well as give. Check to see how often people engage with these influencers, as well as the engagement and response rates of the influencers themselves. The more they engage, and the more genuine the engagement, the better.

This is one of the big benefits of using micro-influencers. Because they don’t have as many followers, they can afford to interact more with them. If an influencer has a lot of followers, but they’re rarely engaging with them, or their followers aren’t engaging with them, then they won’t be of much help to your promotional campaigns. You can use this Twitter Report Card to not only get a quick snapshot of any account, including their followers and engagement, but you can also compare several accounts at the same time.

Audience

Who forms their audience? Do you share a similar target audience? Is their audience in the same location you’re operating in (where applicable)? When using influencers, the end goal should be to reach more of your target audience, so that you can raise awareness of your brand and make more conversions. Because of this, if an influencer doesn’t share a similar target audience, then they won’t help much in achieving your ultimate goals.

For example, if I were to use to use influencer outreach to promote a digital marketing business to entrepreneurs, I wouldn’t get much value from using an influencer whose target audience is formed by corporations. Even though they might cover the same subjects, they are targeting a different audience. Most likely, I won’t get many inquiries from my target audience based on this promotion. You need to look beyond the subjects they usually cover and the niche they are in to make sure you have a very similar target audience.

What They Share

What kinds of links, tools, apps, and so on are they sharing with their audiences? If, for example, your goal from influencer marketing is to raise traffic to your website, then you should look into the types of links they tend to share to get an idea of what types of content they prefer. The more you understand what types of content they like, the better you will be able to create content that they would want to share and, therefore, increase your chances of getting your own content shared by them.

Authenticity

How authentic is the influencer? People tend to be much more trusting of those who are authentic and have an organic approach to promotion. If an influencer is very aggressive in the way they’re pushing a product or a brand, more often than not, this will put off their followers. This could even impact the advertised brand negatively.

As an example, look at Joe Pulizzi’s Twitter account. Although he does actively promote his blog posts, he also shares other information that might be relevant to his audience, he live tweets from the events he attends, and, in turn, he always receives likes and retweets from his followers. If you take a look at his “Tweets & Replies,” he also takes the time to engage with other users and respond to any of their questions.

Now that we’ve gone through what to look for when researching social media influencers, here’s how to actually find them.

How to Find Micro-Influencers for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

If you’re using social media often, then you’re probably already aware of some of the influencers in your niche. However, for many influencer marketing campaigns, you’ll need to find and reach out to a much larger number of influencers.

There are quite a few options for tools you can use to find influencers. First, start by looking at your own followers to find influencers that are already following you, as well as any followers that have a decent-sized audience (in the thousands) that is very engaged with them. For this, you can use something like Agorapulse.

As you can see from the screenshot above, any influencer or brand ambassador in your list of followers is tagged as such, and they are ordered in terms of their social media popularity and the size of their audience. If you can find any relevant influencers this way, you have the big advantage of already being connected with them, which means it will be that much easier to get them on your team.

To find more influencers, there are many different tools you can use. Some of the most popular include BuzzSumo (for influencer research) and GroupHigh (for influencer research and for outreach).

With BuzzSumo, for example, you start by searching for influencers with relevant keywords:

From there, you can filter your results so that you can easily find the right influencers for you. You can filter by type of influencer (everything from regular people to companies), as well as by city or country, and you also have the option to order your result by follower numbers, reply ratio, or average retweets, among others. These filtering options make it very easy to find influencers that are not only appropriate for your campaign, but also that have a certain amount of followers. Plus, you can also get an idea of how engaged they are, as well as what types of links they tend to share:

Once you’ve compiled a list of influencers to use, you can use a tool like the aforementioned GroupHigh or Buzzstream to start reaching out to them.

Micro-influencers and regular people can be a highly effective promotional tool. So long as you share a similar audience and they are actively engaging with their followers on a daily basis, they can be just as useful as a macro-influencer.

Are you using micro-influencers to promote your business online?

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2plm21n

[maryhare96]

Why Micro-Influencers Make a Winning Influencer Strategy

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. As one of the most effective forms of promoting a business, it’s increasingly used as a means of increasing brand awareness, gaining more traffic and more engagement, and boosting overall sales.

With social media, though, social influencers can be very diverse—not necessarily in terms of their niches, but rather in terms of the size of their audience and their popularity. Most brands tend to go for the big names in their respective industries—after all, they’re very well-known and respected, and they could possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers just on social media.

That being said, what if you could get amazing results with smaller, micro-influencers? Or even regular people who have a decent following on social media and who hold their own influence, only over a smaller crowd?

There’s no denying the power and influence of a macro-influencer with a large audience of loyal followers. But, largely because of this very reason, it’s also more difficult and more expensive to employ macro-influencers to help promote your business.

To give you an idea of the kind of numbers involved in using macro-influencers, say you have a clothing brand and are looking to use one of the many Instagram female models and top influencers to help promote your clothes. You could be looking at an investment of over $1000 per single Instagram post, while for male models, you could potentially have to shell out around $700 per promotional post. And if you want to go for the biggest names in the business, then you’re probably looking at prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

Micro-influencers, though, are much more accessible, and with enough work, you can get similar results—improved brand awareness, more traffic to your website, and more engagement on social media—but at a much lower price.

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. Click To Tweet What Are Micro-Influencers?

Micro-influencers are social influencers that have an audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers. They have a loyal following, although smaller, but it doesn’t affect the influence they hold. In fact, as they have fewer followers, this also usually means that they are much more engaged with them on a day to day basis, compared to some of the hugely influential people with hundreds of thousands of followers who couldn’t possibly have the possibility to engage with their followers at a high rate.

Another thing that happens when an influencers’ popularity grows and they start getting more and more followers is that their audiences broaden exponentially. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a much more compact, targeted audience, which is much more useful when you’re actually selling something.

For example, if you look at some of the biggest gaming vloggers in the world, like PewDieDie or Markiplier, they have huge audiences, of millions of subscribers. When we’re talking about audiences this size, you get people from all walks of life, with all kinds of interests and passions. The more famous someone becomes, the more attention they get from a wide variety of people—people that otherwise probably wouldn’t have had any interest.

Influencers, usually, are thought leaders in their respective niches. They tend to stick to a certain niche, and their popularity grows because of their thoughts, views, and expertise in that particular industry.

What to Look for in a Micro-Influencer

Before you can start an influencer marketing campaign, you need to establish what your goals are. Do you simply want to raise brand awareness? To get more traffic to your business blog? Do you want influencers to help promote a product so as to drive more sales?

Once you’ve established these goals, you can start looking into what micro-influencers you can use. When researching influencers (in general, not necessarily just in the case of micro-influencers), these are the main things that you need to look into.

Niche

What niche would you put them into? What sorts of subjects do they cover and talk about the most? What is their area of expertise, if any?

Engagement vs. Followers

While an influencer’s number of followers definitely has some bearing, it’s much more important to look into the amount of engagement they receive, as well as give. Check to see how often people engage with these influencers, as well as the engagement and response rates of the influencers themselves. The more they engage, and the more genuine the engagement, the better.

This is one of the big benefits of using micro-influencers. Because they don’t have as many followers, they can afford to interact more with them. If an influencer has a lot of followers, but they’re rarely engaging with them, or their followers aren’t engaging with them, then they won’t be of much help to your promotional campaigns. You can use this Twitter Report Card to not only get a quick snapshot of any account, including their followers and engagement, but you can also compare several accounts at the same time.

Audience

Who forms their audience? Do you share a similar target audience? Is their audience in the same location you’re operating in (where applicable)? When using influencers, the end goal should be to reach more of your target audience, so that you can raise awareness of your brand and make more conversions. Because of this, if an influencer doesn’t share a similar target audience, then they won’t help much in achieving your ultimate goals.

For example, if I were to use to use influencer outreach to promote a digital marketing business to entrepreneurs, I wouldn’t get much value from using an influencer whose target audience is formed by corporations. Even though they might cover the same subjects, they are targeting a different audience. Most likely, I won’t get many inquiries from my target audience based on this promotion. You need to look beyond the subjects they usually cover and the niche they are in to make sure you have a very similar target audience.

What They Share

What kinds of links, tools, apps, and so on are they sharing with their audiences? If, for example, your goal from influencer marketing is to raise traffic to your website, then you should look into the types of links they tend to share to get an idea of what types of content they prefer. The more you understand what types of content they like, the better you will be able to create content that they would want to share and, therefore, increase your chances of getting your own content shared by them.

Authenticity

How authentic is the influencer? People tend to be much more trusting of those who are authentic and have an organic approach to promotion. If an influencer is very aggressive in the way they’re pushing a product or a brand, more often than not, this will put off their followers. This could even impact the advertised brand negatively.

As an example, look at Joe Pulizzi’s Twitter account. Although he does actively promote his blog posts, he also shares other information that might be relevant to his audience, he live tweets from the events he attends, and, in turn, he always receives likes and retweets from his followers. If you take a look at his “Tweets & Replies,” he also takes the time to engage with other users and respond to any of their questions.

Now that we’ve gone through what to look for when researching social media influencers, here’s how to actually find them.

How to Find Micro-Influencers for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

If you’re using social media often, then you’re probably already aware of some of the influencers in your niche. However, for many influencer marketing campaigns, you’ll need to find and reach out to a much larger number of influencers.

There are quite a few options for tools you can use to find influencers. First, start by looking at your own followers to find influencers that are already following you, as well as any followers that have a decent-sized audience (in the thousands) that is very engaged with them. For this, you can use something like Agorapulse.

As you can see from the screenshot above, any influencer or brand ambassador in your list of followers is tagged as such, and they are ordered in terms of their social media popularity and the size of their audience. If you can find any relevant influencers this way, you have the big advantage of already being connected with them, which means it will be that much easier to get them on your team.

To find more influencers, there are many different tools you can use. Some of the most popular include BuzzSumo (for influencer research) and GroupHigh (for influencer research and for outreach).

With BuzzSumo, for example, you start by searching for influencers with relevant keywords:

From there, you can filter your results so that you can easily find the right influencers for you. You can filter by type of influencer (everything from regular people to companies), as well as by city or country, and you also have the option to order your result by follower numbers, reply ratio, or average retweets, among others. These filtering options make it very easy to find influencers that are not only appropriate for your campaign, but also that have a certain amount of followers. Plus, you can also get an idea of how engaged they are, as well as what types of links they tend to share:

Once you’ve compiled a list of influencers to use, you can use a tool like the aforementioned GroupHigh or Buzzstream to start reaching out to them.

Micro-influencers and regular people can be a highly effective promotional tool. So long as you share a similar audience and they are actively engaging with their followers on a daily basis, they can be just as useful as a macro-influencer.

Are you using micro-influencers to promote your business online?

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2plm21n

[kraussoutene]

Why Micro-Influencers Make a Winning Influencer Strategy

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. As one of the most effective forms of promoting a business, it’s increasingly used as a means of increasing brand awareness, gaining more traffic and more engagement, and boosting overall sales.

With social media, though, social influencers can be very diverse—not necessarily in terms of their niches, but rather in terms of the size of their audience and their popularity. Most brands tend to go for the big names in their respective industries—after all, they’re very well-known and respected, and they could possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers just on social media.

That being said, what if you could get amazing results with smaller, micro-influencers? Or even regular people who have a decent following on social media and who hold their own influence, only over a smaller crowd?

There’s no denying the power and influence of a macro-influencer with a large audience of loyal followers. But, largely because of this very reason, it’s also more difficult and more expensive to employ macro-influencers to help promote your business.

To give you an idea of the kind of numbers involved in using macro-influencers, say you have a clothing brand and are looking to use one of the many Instagram female models and top influencers to help promote your clothes. You could be looking at an investment of over $1000 per single Instagram post, while for male models, you could potentially have to shell out around $700 per promotional post. And if you want to go for the biggest names in the business, then you’re probably looking at prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

Micro-influencers, though, are much more accessible, and with enough work, you can get similar results—improved brand awareness, more traffic to your website, and more engagement on social media—but at a much lower price.

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. Click To Tweet What Are Micro-Influencers?

Micro-influencers are social influencers that have an audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers. They have a loyal following, although smaller, but it doesn’t affect the influence they hold. In fact, as they have fewer followers, this also usually means that they are much more engaged with them on a day to day basis, compared to some of the hugely influential people with hundreds of thousands of followers who couldn’t possibly have the possibility to engage with their followers at a high rate.

Another thing that happens when an influencers’ popularity grows and they start getting more and more followers is that their audiences broaden exponentially. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a much more compact, targeted audience, which is much more useful when you’re actually selling something.

For example, if you look at some of the biggest gaming vloggers in the world, like PewDieDie or Markiplier, they have huge audiences, of millions of subscribers. When we’re talking about audiences this size, you get people from all walks of life, with all kinds of interests and passions. The more famous someone becomes, the more attention they get from a wide variety of people—people that otherwise probably wouldn’t have had any interest.

Influencers, usually, are thought leaders in their respective niches. They tend to stick to a certain niche, and their popularity grows because of their thoughts, views, and expertise in that particular industry.

What to Look for in a Micro-Influencer

Before you can start an influencer marketing campaign, you need to establish what your goals are. Do you simply want to raise brand awareness? To get more traffic to your business blog? Do you want influencers to help promote a product so as to drive more sales?

Once you’ve established these goals, you can start looking into what micro-influencers you can use. When researching influencers (in general, not necessarily just in the case of micro-influencers), these are the main things that you need to look into.

Niche

What niche would you put them into? What sorts of subjects do they cover and talk about the most? What is their area of expertise, if any?

Engagement vs. Followers

While an influencer’s number of followers definitely has some bearing, it’s much more important to look into the amount of engagement they receive, as well as give. Check to see how often people engage with these influencers, as well as the engagement and response rates of the influencers themselves. The more they engage, and the more genuine the engagement, the better.

This is one of the big benefits of using micro-influencers. Because they don’t have as many followers, they can afford to interact more with them. If an influencer has a lot of followers, but they’re rarely engaging with them, or their followers aren’t engaging with them, then they won’t be of much help to your promotional campaigns. You can use this Twitter Report Card to not only get a quick snapshot of any account, including their followers and engagement, but you can also compare several accounts at the same time.

Audience

Who forms their audience? Do you share a similar target audience? Is their audience in the same location you’re operating in (where applicable)? When using influencers, the end goal should be to reach more of your target audience, so that you can raise awareness of your brand and make more conversions. Because of this, if an influencer doesn’t share a similar target audience, then they won’t help much in achieving your ultimate goals.

For example, if I were to use to use influencer outreach to promote a digital marketing business to entrepreneurs, I wouldn’t get much value from using an influencer whose target audience is formed by corporations. Even though they might cover the same subjects, they are targeting a different audience. Most likely, I won’t get many inquiries from my target audience based on this promotion. You need to look beyond the subjects they usually cover and the niche they are in to make sure you have a very similar target audience.

What They Share

What kinds of links, tools, apps, and so on are they sharing with their audiences? If, for example, your goal from influencer marketing is to raise traffic to your website, then you should look into the types of links they tend to share to get an idea of what types of content they prefer. The more you understand what types of content they like, the better you will be able to create content that they would want to share and, therefore, increase your chances of getting your own content shared by them.

Authenticity

How authentic is the influencer? People tend to be much more trusting of those who are authentic and have an organic approach to promotion. If an influencer is very aggressive in the way they’re pushing a product or a brand, more often than not, this will put off their followers. This could even impact the advertised brand negatively.

As an example, look at Joe Pulizzi’s Twitter account. Although he does actively promote his blog posts, he also shares other information that might be relevant to his audience, he live tweets from the events he attends, and, in turn, he always receives likes and retweets from his followers. If you take a look at his “Tweets & Replies,” he also takes the time to engage with other users and respond to any of their questions.

Now that we’ve gone through what to look for when researching social media influencers, here’s how to actually find them.

How to Find Micro-Influencers for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

If you’re using social media often, then you’re probably already aware of some of the influencers in your niche. However, for many influencer marketing campaigns, you’ll need to find and reach out to a much larger number of influencers.

There are quite a few options for tools you can use to find influencers. First, start by looking at your own followers to find influencers that are already following you, as well as any followers that have a decent-sized audience (in the thousands) that is very engaged with them. For this, you can use something like Agorapulse.

As you can see from the screenshot above, any influencer or brand ambassador in your list of followers is tagged as such, and they are ordered in terms of their social media popularity and the size of their audience. If you can find any relevant influencers this way, you have the big advantage of already being connected with them, which means it will be that much easier to get them on your team.

To find more influencers, there are many different tools you can use. Some of the most popular include BuzzSumo (for influencer research) and GroupHigh (for influencer research and for outreach).

With BuzzSumo, for example, you start by searching for influencers with relevant keywords:

From there, you can filter your results so that you can easily find the right influencers for you. You can filter by type of influencer (everything from regular people to companies), as well as by city or country, and you also have the option to order your result by follower numbers, reply ratio, or average retweets, among others. These filtering options make it very easy to find influencers that are not only appropriate for your campaign, but also that have a certain amount of followers. Plus, you can also get an idea of how engaged they are, as well as what types of links they tend to share:

Once you’ve compiled a list of influencers to use, you can use a tool like the aforementioned GroupHigh or Buzzstream to start reaching out to them.

Micro-influencers and regular people can be a highly effective promotional tool. So long as you share a similar audience and they are actively engaging with their followers on a daily basis, they can be just as useful as a macro-influencer.

Are you using micro-influencers to promote your business online?

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2plm21n

[rodneyevesuarywk]

Why Micro-Influencers Make a Winning Influencer Strategy

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. As one of the most effective forms of promoting a business, it’s increasingly used as a means of increasing brand awareness, gaining more traffic and more engagement, and boosting overall sales.

With social media, though, social influencers can be very diverse—not necessarily in terms of their niches, but rather in terms of the size of their audience and their popularity. Most brands tend to go for the big names in their respective industries—after all, they’re very well-known and respected, and they could possibly have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers just on social media.

That being said, what if you could get amazing results with smaller, micro-influencers? Or even regular people who have a decent following on social media and who hold their own influence, only over a smaller crowd?

There’s no denying the power and influence of a macro-influencer with a large audience of loyal followers. But, largely because of this very reason, it’s also more difficult and more expensive to employ macro-influencers to help promote your business.

To give you an idea of the kind of numbers involved in using macro-influencers, say you have a clothing brand and are looking to use one of the many Instagram female models and top influencers to help promote your clothes. You could be looking at an investment of over $1000 per single Instagram post, while for male models, you could potentially have to shell out around $700 per promotional post. And if you want to go for the biggest names in the business, then you’re probably looking at prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

Micro-influencers, though, are much more accessible, and with enough work, you can get similar results—improved brand awareness, more traffic to your website, and more engagement on social media—but at a much lower price.

Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. Click To Tweet What Are Micro-Influencers?

Micro-influencers are social influencers that have an audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers. They have a loyal following, although smaller, but it doesn’t affect the influence they hold. In fact, as they have fewer followers, this also usually means that they are much more engaged with them on a day to day basis, compared to some of the hugely influential people with hundreds of thousands of followers who couldn’t possibly have the possibility to engage with their followers at a high rate.

Another thing that happens when an influencers’ popularity grows and they start getting more and more followers is that their audiences broaden exponentially. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, have a much more compact, targeted audience, which is much more useful when you’re actually selling something.

For example, if you look at some of the biggest gaming vloggers in the world, like PewDieDie or Markiplier, they have huge audiences, of millions of subscribers. When we’re talking about audiences this size, you get people from all walks of life, with all kinds of interests and passions. The more famous someone becomes, the more attention they get from a wide variety of people—people that otherwise probably wouldn’t have had any interest.

Influencers, usually, are thought leaders in their respective niches. They tend to stick to a certain niche, and their popularity grows because of their thoughts, views, and expertise in that particular industry.

What to Look for in a Micro-Influencer

Before you can start an influencer marketing campaign, you need to establish what your goals are. Do you simply want to raise brand awareness? To get more traffic to your business blog? Do you want influencers to help promote a product so as to drive more sales?

Once you’ve established these goals, you can start looking into what micro-influencers you can use. When researching influencers (in general, not necessarily just in the case of micro-influencers), these are the main things that you need to look into.

Niche

What niche would you put them into? What sorts of subjects do they cover and talk about the most? What is their area of expertise, if any?

Engagement vs. Followers

While an influencer’s number of followers definitely has some bearing, it’s much more important to look into the amount of engagement they receive, as well as give. Check to see how often people engage with these influencers, as well as the engagement and response rates of the influencers themselves. The more they engage, and the more genuine the engagement, the better.

This is one of the big benefits of using micro-influencers. Because they don’t have as many followers, they can afford to interact more with them. If an influencer has a lot of followers, but they’re rarely engaging with them, or their followers aren’t engaging with them, then they won’t be of much help to your promotional campaigns. You can use this Twitter Report Card to not only get a quick snapshot of any account, including their followers and engagement, but you can also compare several accounts at the same time.

Audience

Who forms their audience? Do you share a similar target audience? Is their audience in the same location you’re operating in (where applicable)? When using influencers, the end goal should be to reach more of your target audience, so that you can raise awareness of your brand and make more conversions. Because of this, if an influencer doesn’t share a similar target audience, then they won’t help much in achieving your ultimate goals.

For example, if I were to use to use influencer outreach to promote a digital marketing business to entrepreneurs, I wouldn’t get much value from using an influencer whose target audience is formed by corporations. Even though they might cover the same subjects, they are targeting a different audience. Most likely, I won’t get many inquiries from my target audience based on this promotion. You need to look beyond the subjects they usually cover and the niche they are in to make sure you have a very similar target audience.

What They Share

What kinds of links, tools, apps, and so on are they sharing with their audiences? If, for example, your goal from influencer marketing is to raise traffic to your website, then you should look into the types of links they tend to share to get an idea of what types of content they prefer. The more you understand what types of content they like, the better you will be able to create content that they would want to share and, therefore, increase your chances of getting your own content shared by them.

Authenticity

How authentic is the influencer? People tend to be much more trusting of those who are authentic and have an organic approach to promotion. If an influencer is very aggressive in the way they’re pushing a product or a brand, more often than not, this will put off their followers. This could even impact the advertised brand negatively.

As an example, look at Joe Pulizzi’s Twitter account. Although he does actively promote his blog posts, he also shares other information that might be relevant to his audience, he live tweets from the events he attends, and, in turn, he always receives likes and retweets from his followers. If you take a look at his “Tweets & Replies,” he also takes the time to engage with other users and respond to any of their questions.

Now that we’ve gone through what to look for when researching social media influencers, here’s how to actually find them.

How to Find Micro-Influencers for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

If you’re using social media often, then you’re probably already aware of some of the influencers in your niche. However, for many influencer marketing campaigns, you’ll need to find and reach out to a much larger number of influencers.

There are quite a few options for tools you can use to find influencers. First, start by looking at your own followers to find influencers that are already following you, as well as any followers that have a decent-sized audience (in the thousands) that is very engaged with them. For this, you can use something like Agorapulse.

As you can see from the screenshot above, any influencer or brand ambassador in your list of followers is tagged as such, and they are ordered in terms of their social media popularity and the size of their audience. If you can find any relevant influencers this way, you have the big advantage of already being connected with them, which means it will be that much easier to get them on your team.

To find more influencers, there are many different tools you can use. Some of the most popular include BuzzSumo (for influencer research) and GroupHigh (for influencer research and for outreach).

With BuzzSumo, for example, you start by searching for influencers with relevant keywords:

From there, you can filter your results so that you can easily find the right influencers for you. You can filter by type of influencer (everything from regular people to companies), as well as by city or country, and you also have the option to order your result by follower numbers, reply ratio, or average retweets, among others. These filtering options make it very easy to find influencers that are not only appropriate for your campaign, but also that have a certain amount of followers. Plus, you can also get an idea of how engaged they are, as well as what types of links they tend to share:

Once you’ve compiled a list of influencers to use, you can use a tool like the aforementioned GroupHigh or Buzzstream to start reaching out to them.

Micro-influencers and regular people can be a highly effective promotional tool. So long as you share a similar audience and they are actively engaging with their followers on a daily basis, they can be just as useful as a macro-influencer.

Are you using micro-influencers to promote your business online?

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