Why less is more when it comes to influence - Women's Agenda

Why less is more when it comes to influence

There’s a lot you can say in 140 seconds. We discovered that earlier this year when we asked ten women to get on a soapbox and share an idea for women’s empowerment. 

We ran the Soapbox as part of our #PositionOfStrength partnership with Twitter Australia, encouraging women to have a stronger voice online. (Check out our next Melbourne event in October 7 for the latest). 

The 140 second time limit was set to represent the 140 characters available in a standard tweet. If you can be precise with your language and get your words right, you can achieve a lot in a small amount of time.

What matters with such language are the connections established. Influence comes through the engagement you create rather that the tone and volume of your voice. That’s where social media has provided some liberation.

Knowledge of news events no longer belongs alone to the mainstream press and their editors who determine what gets prominence and what does not. Reading and hearing the opinions of others is no longer filtered through a handful of newspapers, television shows and radio programs. It’s no longer about being talked at and told what’s what, but rather about participating and sharing what you personally see, hear and know.

This has been an encouraging shift, especially for women. The mainstream press has often ignored or failed to include a large proportion of women as sources in stories and as lead opinion writers. As Carol Schwartz’s most recent Women in Media report found, analyisng 82 newspapers in 2013, women accounted for just 20% of all commentary. That was at a time when Julia Gillard was still prime minister. The figures would likely be even lower now. 

So social media’s giving women the voice we’re not being given through more traditional means – including at boardroom tables and in the speaker line-ups of major events. It allows those who’ve previously been marginalised to connect and get heard, and to launch campaigns that can initiate change.

Everyone’s an editor on social media. Everyone can decide what should get prominence and what should not. Everyone has the opportunity to create their own communities and connections — to build an interactive audience for the views they want to share. Anyone can be charismatic, regardless of their gender, their race, and appearance.

We connect through many avenues: through emotion; through humour; through sympathy and empathy. We connect through powerful, single images that appear on our mobile devices unedited and uncensored.

Indeed, many of us connected when we saw photographs of three year old Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach. We know that thousands of people have died fleeing Syria for a better life, and yet that photograph garnered so much more raw emotion in us, encouraging us to share and talk about the current crisis in our own communities. We connected because that little boy – still wearing his shoes and lying on the sand as if he was sleeping – could have been our own son, or brother, or nephew or little friend.

Social media, with all its opportunities to get heard, to express emotions like humour, grief, pride, sadness and anger, mean we have more power than ever to create game-changing, like-minded communities.

But that also means there’s more information than ever to filter through.

And it also means that while those who share and appreciate your opinions can connect with you, so too can those who absolutely do not.

So how can you get heard? And how can you navigate social media platforms safely?

It’s because of the above questions that we decided to partner with Twitter, and have been running a series of events throughout the year encouraging women to have a voice on Twitter and to use it from a #PositionOfStrength.

We’ve seen women do incredible things when they’ve connected on Twitter, especially in the business community, where powerful new alliances and groups have come together to promote the work and needs of women.

We want to see more of this. More opinions. More voices. More influential connections. 

Our next event with Twitter is in Melbourne on the 7th October. It will feature a workshop on how to get more out of Twitter at 5pm, followed by an entertaining, engaging and empowering ‘Soapbox’ where an incredible line-up of women will take to the stage including The Hon Kelly O’Dwyer, Olympic Gold medalist Lydia Lassila, commentator and businesswoman Carol Schwartz and our new Women’s Agenda editor Jane Gilmore. 

Would you like to join us in Melbourne, to hear form the above women and learn how to get more out of Twitter?

Join our afternoon workshop, and then stay on for drinks, networking and to watch the Soapbox. Tickets are strictly limited, and available today for just $15

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