People LIke Her(26)

I guess one moral I ought to draw from all this is that there is a reason I do not usually get to do the social organizing.

All afternoon the same woman—white-haired, I would guess in her mid-to late sixties, neatly dressed—had been sitting in her coat at the same seat at the same corner table, nursing the same half-pint glass of Diet Coke and occasionally smiling indulgently as one of the kids careered into the back of her chair, watching fondly as Coco ran around the room shrieking. From time to time we would catch each other’s eye and give each other a little smile of acknowledgment. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the room was booked for a private function. Given the lack of other takers, I was tempted to go over and see if she wanted any cake.

Emmy’s party, in contrast, Coco’s “official” birthday celebration, is a complete triumph. Of course it is. Emmy has worked bloody hard to ensure that it will be.

The thing people always get wrong about influencing for a living is that they think this stuff is easy—organizing events, getting the right pictures, planning the various neat little touches and flourishes in the arrangements and the decorations and the layout of this room. That they could do it if they wanted to—which, of course, they don’t. They hardly even look at Instagram, not more than five or six times a day, when they check in to see what my wife has been up to, what she has posted, what a load of other people have had to say about it.

I probably thought that myself, at the start. That influencing was easy, I mean. That all you had to do was be a bit fit and take a half-decent photo of yourself or a nice meal and say something appropriately banal once or twice a day. That as long as you were pretty enough, bland enough, I took it for granted the followers would flock in—with the only limit on your success being the value you placed on your own privacy.

This is absolute nonsense.

It’s not that people should be more cynical about social media or influencers, it’s that they are cynical about them in such naive ways.

One misconception it took me some time to rid myself of was that the words in an Instagram post don’t matter, that anybody could write this stuff, that just because the syntax is awry and even the cliché they were aiming for has come out garbled, no thought or effort or planning was required.

This is the kind of intellectual snobbery I often find my mother falling into when we talk about what Emmy does for a living—which is something, for the record, I try to avoid. “Well, of course,” she might comment, “it’s not real writing like you do.” Meaning, I suppose, that Emmy has never spent a whole morning hesitating over a comma, never anguished over the rhythm of a sentence, never felt her heart sink as she realizes the mot juste she’s spent hours grasping for was the same mot juste she used two pages earlier. Meaning, I guess, that her readers are just normal people, looking at their phones in the car waiting to pick the kids up from school, who let her know when they like what she’s saying and it resonates. My imagined readers, on the other hand, are some combination of the ghost of Flaubert, a snarky tutor I failed to impress at Cambridge, a bunch of book reviewers (most of whom I hate), my deceased father, and the agent I suspect gave up any hope some time ago that anyone connected to my literary career would be making any money. The truth is there is something genuinely amazing about Emmy’s ability to find the right words (which are often, technically, the wrong words) to establish a connection with people. It is a talent. It is a skill. It is something she has put time and effort and thought into.

Because the other thing, the main thing, that people fail to understand is that this is work. Hard work. Planning ahead. Knowing when and where and how to mention your brand partners, finding ways of just slipping in references to Pampers, Gap, Boden, as if they’re simply part of the texture of your life, the brand names that come to mind rather than ones who have paid thousands of pounds for a mention. Emmy might split the occasional infinitive, but if you think she’s winging it when it comes to strategy, you are very much mistaken. There are spreadsheets of this stuff, timelines that stretch off months into the future. Possibly years. I suspect there are parts of the grand plan that even I’m not privy to.

And just like everyone else, Instagrammers put on a different persona when they are in professional mode. Just as you would if you worked in a restaurant, or a university, or a school. And when Emmy is at one of these events, she’s at work. She’s making sure the photographer gets the right photos, that all the people who want a moment with her get one (as long as they have something to offer in return, of course). She’s thinking three steps ahead to ensure she doesn’t get stuck talking to the wrong person and that whoever she’s ducking doesn’t even realize (“Bella, you gorgeous creature, you must talk to the fascinating Lucy! I have spent weeks telling you all about each other!”) they’re being ducked. She’s making a mental note, when she meets someone, of that one thing they tell her she’ll remember and that will make them think they really made an impression on her when they meet again—and that will remind her, when they do, of their name. She’s keeping an eye on Coco—or at least keeping an eye on the person who’s been charged with keeping an eye on Coco. She’s keeping an eye on who is talking to who, what alliances are forming, what tensions are beginning to simmer that she might be able to exploit. She’s laughing. She’s joking. She’s talking shop. She’s listening. She is making people feel special.