By Gulshan Kaur Batra & Dharmesh Dave
The term ‘influence’ connects our mind instantly to influential leaders, who have made a difference – be it decades ago or present day. But most of us have never tried to go deeper to understand how only a few have mastered the art to influence others so flawlessly? Is it that we do not have the spark within or maybe it just needs some fuel – maybe we all have the unexplored potential to be a ‘Chanakya in our daily life’!
Every individual of any level has the capacity to influence others. It begins with how we inspire, not only to our fellow teammates but also our ownself. We may not be celebrated but we surely have the ability to create a difference at a small scale day-in & day-out. One should note that every idea is a big idea and many either tend to hesitate or not find an opportunity to speak it out loud. However, as rightly said, ‘A pen is mightier than the sword’. We live in a digital world; have access to emails/blogs; and of course, a pen and paper. ‘Documentation’ of our thoughts and experience is something we all have an access to. You never know, what you pen down today, may become points for reference/motivation for others.
While influence is the ability to impact and shape somebody, it requires modification with time – matching the current and futuristic trends. For instance, in today’s day and age, digitalisation is one of the biggest trends. In order to mark an influence, it is one’s ability to create a memorable, yet fun experience using technology. One such example is, MD, CEO of Godrej, Mr. Vivek Gambhir who presents the company’s review to his global counterparts through a rap video. Hard to believe, but he did it. He utilized technology and creativity to make the communication not only effective but also saved time as opposed to lengthy mundane presentations.
The art of influencing comes with experience. The more we understand our work, industry, the trends, the workplace; the better we are able to articulate them. This experience, to our surprise, does not come with time; rather it is equal to an algorithm. The purpose of the experience is not what and for how long you have done something, but it is the ability of how we respond to similar situations in future. One of the important aspects to gain a fruitful experience is to make right career choices that help improve one’s learning curve.
Interestingly, our life revolves around ‘Karma’ and so does the power to influence. While we seek influence from others, we need to inspire ourselves enough to be able to influence others, creating a vicious circle of a positively influenced and a better world.
Right from school days, we have been evaluated on our learning. While we move towards the journey of influencing others, it becomes equally important for us to evaluate at every step to create the right impact. Being in a communication industry, we have the power to evaluate through the use of both digital media and PR. Therefore, create the right communication strategy for our brands to equally hold an influential share in the market. Most of us tend to hook upon influencers to spread the word, but did you know that our very own Meltwater gives us the liberty to evaluate the right influencers for your brand? Similarly, in PR too, achieving business goals is not through sharing AV (Ad Value) or generating ROI (Return on Investment), but it is by achieving ROO (Return on Objectives). It is imperative to lay down PR and Communication objectives in order to take a step towards achieving business goals, using the 3 I’s – Insights, Innovation, and Integration.
Undoubtedly, the ‘Influence Now’ seminar gave us a lot of such learning. But we found ourselves fortunate enough to realise that our workplace – Ideosphere & Ourbit have already embarked their journey towards futuristic trends in order to grow, blossom and master in this industry of communication. Right from being innovative, insights-driven, to using softwares like Meltwater – we have it all. Lastly, not forgetting to mention the iteration by Dr. Ramkrishnan Pillai: “A great influencer always documents and therefore everybody should write a book about their experience, irrespective if anyone would read it or not.” Voila! We at Ideosphere have just taken a step further with the book on our collective experiences – OPEN.
So OPEN your doors to inspiration and pass on the positive influences.