I have had many conversations with Tino Foy with whom I run PoiseSocial about the growth and the quality of interactions we have here. When I submitted my very first article to Tino for publishing I did not think that I was goint to be writing often for this platform, nor of what I was going to be writing about if I did.
At the back of my mind, however, I had always wanted to explore subjects at the intersection of culture, entertainment, society and marketing. I also knew I wanted to bring quality into my writing and to lay my thoughts via great storytelling. It is great that Tino was also flying across the same plane and we both clicked; and PoiseSocial, as it is today, is the little magic that was created from it.
One of the recurrent topics in the many conversations we have had over these past 3 years is the growth of our platform. I recently shared a tweet with him that said “one of the toughest skills in building niche audiences is not giving a f**k about those outside your niche.” It was to serve him as a reminder to focus on where we are going.
Because the truth is, it is hard not to care about those people outside of our niche. We do give a f**k. Very often we are tempted to branch out. Tino and I are very much aware of what lies beyond our niche. Just simply from a growth and a pecuniary perspective, we’d have a lot to gain if we were to water down the topics as well as the depth, length and even the grammar in our content, in order to be more accomodating – even just for something as small as the satisfaction we can get from knowing that we are touching a bigger number of people than we currently are. Because, as much as I know and I remind myself that I have to put impact over numbers, every once in a while, I get jealous of platforms with followings in the hundreds of thousands.
And then I look at Paola Audrey N …
For those of you who are more or less regular uses of Twitter, you must have come across Paola Audrey Ndengue. Describing Paola in great detail will probably eat up the space meant for the rest of the article. And so I can summarise by saying that, Paola is simply a reference point for pop culture and (now) politics in Africa. But even a definition that broad doesn’t seem enough to capture the breadth and length of what Paola does.
It’s interesting because she is so many things at the same time, and yet she has been able to consitently talk about these many fields in which she dabbles in, in a singular and individually-articulated manner, that you can define her as a ‘reference point for pop culture and politics’ and the essence of what she does is perfectly encapsulated in those 7 words.
Because in essence, Paola Audrey is a content curator, a music music critic but-not-quite-so, a fashion commentator, a lifestyle commentator, a digital content creator, a writer, a brand analyst, a PR consultant, a marketing strategist, a political commentator, and a web show presenter.
Many times she has asked not to be boxed into the mainstream labels of ‘blogger’ or ‘journalist’. Quite often, she has been called either one or the other, and even nominated for awards under those categories, and she has come out, at every one of those occasions, to remind her audience that she isn’t any of those – and for good reason. To simply say she is this or she is that is to undercut the wide spectrum of things that she is, and on which she is evenly spread.
Because, in reality, she is an interesting cocktail made of the giant maze of entertainment and of the wide corridors of politics. And it is this unique melange, coupled with her wit and sarcastic undertones that give a unique perspective and texture to her tweets and other content that spring from her personal, and intellectual firmaments.
The most interesting thing about Paola Audrey is perhaps how her popularity soared this year beyond her most-used social platform, Twitter. I’ll explain in a bit.
Paola is a native user of Twitter. She is one of the early birds on the platform (she joined in 2009, 3 years after the platform went live) and has seen it grow and mutate to what it is. I have been on that platform for 4 years and she was one the very first people I followed, on the recommendation of a friend.
What I have seen from Paola over these last four years is what I can describe as 80% value tweets and 20% random thoughts tweets. By value tweets, I mean that 80% of the time, she is tweeting about things that concern her interests and by default her job. That is communications, marketing, branding, PR, fashion, music, film, and politics. She has done hundreds of threads analysing marketing strategy, influencer strategy, market research, brand strategies, PR strategies, pop culture events, and political events and situations. She constantly shares articles, documentaries, interviews, reports, opinion pieces, screenshots and a host of other information that revolve around these subjects.
She also has a newsletter called Africa Digest (which you really should sign up to by the way), and is she is constantly engaging with her community of followers.
And she has been doing all this for at least 15 years, people! (She started blogging in 2002 when she was a teenager and launched a fashion magazine with some friends in 2007).
But to come back to the previously-mentioned soaring popularity; in my article about Burna Boy earlier this year, I mentioned something called the Lollapalooza Effect. It is, bascially,a disproportionately large outcome produced at the intersection of three to four independent but simultaneous factors. The Lollapalooza Effect usually happens after a long period of hard work and proactive consistency.
For Paola, it happened when she decided to do a web news show that explored mostly politics and society in Africa. And at least two factors which I can identify – her history of content creation and curation on Twitter and the rise in the consumption of digital media due to the coronavirus quarantine – were responsible for the overwhelmingly positive response she received about the show.
In 2018, she was already hosting a web show for the French TV station, TV5. Despite not wanting to be in front of the camera, she finally did a 5-minutes-per-episode show which was hosted on the TV5 Afrique website.
Then this year, she decided to do her own webTV news show that touched mainly on politics and society in Africa, called “Le Debrief.” The most interesting thing about Le Debrief – which she presents and posts every Sunday on her YouTube channel and on her Facebook page - is that it essentially brought to life the tweets she has been putting out all these years. It is not just the sheer volume of information and the admirable amount of reasearch and fact-checking, it is also the wit and humour and the personality that is brought to the screen.
It is basically the 80% value and the 20% random musing tweets coming to life.
Interestingly, unlike the web show on TV5 which flew under the radar, Le Debrief (the first season of the show) was a massive hit across francophone subsaharan Africa, both at home and in the diaspora. Paola Audrey herself said she was surprised at the receptions of the show and it proved her theory that young Africans, contrary to popular opinion, are very interested in politics. Perhaps what they needed was for it to be repackaged in a manner that, although still maintaining facts, was dressed up in a more lighthearted manner and was far less austere than what they have been used to for the past decades.
So succeful was the first season of Le Debrief that the 15 episodes of the first season have amassed well over 860,000 views. As a matter of fact, the show’s second season has since been delayed because many advertisers have made known their intention to finance the second season and Paola is taking her time to find the right partner(s) that will align with the brand and the mission of the show without taking away any aspective of creative control.
Last we heard, these have been sorted out and the seocond season will very likely resume streaming in January.
All this to say in the world today where young people are all looking for a fast break and hop on the internet to become the next blogger or YouTuber that will make it big, while being oblivious to the work and the patience that it takes to build a platform and a voice on the internet, Paola Audrey is a an example we can all look up to. She is a 15 year overnight success and she still not yet at the end nor at the middle of her journey. And yet she is on the grind day and night. I was not there when she started but it seems to me she is working as hard as when she started.
Today, the internet is very fragmented and just about everyone can find a piece of it. Even when five or six people are doing the same thing, every one of them can do it in their own voice and in their own unique way, and can succeed to gain a core, as well as a crossover following.
But growing a niche is hard work. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes dedication and commitment. It takes understanding of your niche. It also requires you to look outside at what other people are doing, not so you can copy, but to understand the process and in what ways iterations of that may or may not work for you. Growing a niche audience is what the bible rightfully calls ‘longsuffering’.
The internet is yours to grab. But it takes work for you to have a sustainable hold on it. Think of all the viral sensations that have fizzled out over the years. A slow and steady climb up the digital mountain is a far less tenuous way to make it up and to stay up.
Learn from Paola.
- Wandji Wilfred.