The Art of Social Self-Promotion: A Satire on How to Become the Most Popular Woman You Know

The Art of Social Self-Promotion

A Satire on How to Become the Most Popular Woman You Know

Kathryn Latour

Copyright © 2022 Kathryn Latour

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-4227-8 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-4228-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Why You Need This Book

Why I Needed to Write This Book

Preface Number 1

Why You Need This Book

There are many people skilled in a particular area, often the result of years of study, practice, or some other form of hard work. We all recognize the effort that it takes to become a brilliant surgeon, a concert violinist, or the CEO of a large company. However, take two people with the same education and equal talent. Why does one achieve celebrity status and the other does not?

Let’s take the film industry as a case in point. We have all seen aspiring stars acting in community theater who are as talented—in many cases more talented—than certain famous movie stars we could name. You know the movie stars I’m talking about. We go to their movies mostly because they make so many of them. Due to the law of averages, we will occasionally find ourselves watching some of their mediocre performances almost against our will, not because we are impressed with their acting skills. How have they achieved stardom with obviously so little acting ability? Sure, luck plays a part. Moreover, good looks must be acknowledged as often tipping the balance.

But—and I cannot overstate this—there is something else that the acting profession does very well and which makes all the difference.

Actors have managers and agents who know how to promote them.

I would bet good money on the fact that the bigger the star, the better the agent. It seems that the acting talent of the celebrity is of far less importance in this equation. A few other industries such as music, sports, and politics also routinely employ promoters to maneuver their careers and find them work.

What about the rest of us who have no managers? What are we supposed to do?

The answer is simple. We need to become our own managers. We need to learn the fine art of self-promotion. This is all well and good, you say, when it comes to my career. Self-promotion can achieve career advancement and just makes good economic sense. While it is true that women (and, okay, even men) can use the skills in this book to help them succeed in their profession, the real value of this book is in helping women navigate the social seas to become socially popular.

I am not talking about high school popularity where your main concern was whether people actually liked you. I’m not talking about the mean girl type of popularity either, where popularity was based on intimidation. With high school behind you, you need to catch the vision of a deeper, more satisfying, celebrity-making popularity, where everyone in your community knows who you are and regards you as the most accomplished person they know.

See yourself as the most poised, the most accomplished, and the most talented woman in your wide circle of acquaintances. Without question, your children are more confident, beautiful, and smarter than anyone else’s are. Your husband is the most charismatic, brilliant, accomplished man anyone knows.

In time, because of your efforts at self-promotion, you and your family will become the standard to which everyone else aspires but cannot seem to achieve. And the best part is that you will do this without actually becoming smarter, more talented, or more accomplished! It is all about creating the illusion. Prepare yourself to become a master of friendly deception.

Preface Number 2

Why I Needed to Write This Book

Now that you have read my fake reasons for wanting to read this book, I’ll give it to you straight. I really hate these types of women, the type of women this book is teaching you to become.

There. I said it.

These women don’t just think they are better than the rest of us. They know it. It sickens me. The worst part of it is this: It’s as if they have memorized this book cover to cover because they have learned not to ever show their faults, they groom perfect snobbish children, and they greedily suck up every chair opportunity known to man. Finagle is their watchword.

They are social finaglers.

I truly have met social climbers like this. Boy, could I tell you some true stories! I won’t, though, mostly because I don’t want to be sued. Also, because some of these women think of me as their friend. I’m not sure why they do since they do everything in their power to keep me socially distanced in all the ways you are about to learn. But still, I suppose it’s better not to purposely make enemies.

Some are so successful at their own social promoting, it’s difficult for me to put my finger on why I detest them so. Maybe it’s because they say they want to be friends to my face. But then they do not do any of the normal things one expects of someone who really wants friendship. That is they never have personal one-on-one conversations about what a tough time their son is having in math, or what their husband did to annoy them yesterday, or something funny that happened in the market. No. They float above me in their little perfect lives as if everything breezed by them without incident or anecdote. And I am convinced they secretly enjoy making me feel little by comparison.

They have created the perfect illusion of perfection.

They never admit to error either. I mean they do hold themselves to an incredibly high standard—at least in public. But any faux pas—even those committed on purpose—is blamed on someone else every time. Or they petition the offended one with flowers and a whole story about how it was just a misunderstanding. (I am actually clenching my teeth together at the moment to keep from throwing up all over my computer.)

It is so unfair. That is what bugs me the most. Everyone has skills and abilities, and many fine people can be great chair-people if only given the chance. Most of us have tremendous children and capable, even charming, spouses. In short, if we are not the most impressive woman we know, it is probably because we allow our humanness to show, or we are never given the opportunity to shine. Or that we occasionally slip up and have to apologize.

And that is how it should be.

We should interact with each other in a friendly, friend-inducing manner. We should confess to error at times, especially if we offended someone. We should invite families to our homes simply to draw closer to them, not for any social agenda. We should name our children beautiful family names that we actually like, not those that will socially elevate them.

I could go on and on.

So read my book, if you must, but read it only for entertainment. It was cheaper for me to publish this than undergo a lifetime of anger management. And know this: if you take any portion of this book seriously, my wallet will thank you, but I will not. You will know you have succeeded when you realize that if I actually knew you, I would despise, even loathe, the socially self-promoted you.

Section 1

Use Your Committee to Elevate Your Status

Become the World’s Worst Volunteer…on Purpose

We all have twenty-four hours in the day. There are people who can function on three to four hours of sleep a night, and I say they have no excuse for not finding a cure for cancer. The rest of us have an excuse because we need more sleep than that. (Since you are now thinking of yourself as the most accomplished woman you know, you will readily agree that the need for sleep is the only thing holding you back from curing cancer. And you could do it, mind you, in between making breakfast and cleaning up after dinner.)

By the time we ready ourselves for the day, feed our families, clean up, throw a load or two of laundry in, and head for our paid job (if we have one), our days are full. Even if we have no outside-the-home work, between running kids to lessons and other errands, who has time to volunteer for extra jobs? You do. Let me say that again.

You do.

And here is how. You volunteer for any run-of-the-mill one-man job for your church, PTA, or community and then turn it into a fabulous committee with you as its head. You give your committee a cool and trendy name (clever acronyms are especially good) and generate an official-sounding mission statement. You make it sound as though your committee is important enough to solve world hunger, even if what you volunteered for is only the middle school PTA volunteer librarian (which, as those of us who have done it know, is actually a vital underappreciated calling.)

For example, if your volunteer job is the abovementioned librarian, your organization could have the cool name of MAI (pronounced may), which, in our hypothetical, stands for mothers against illiteracy. Your mission statement could be something like MAI is an organization dedicated to assuring that all children have access to inspiring literature to facilitate literacy.

Wouldn’t you want to be involved in such a vital committee if someone asked you to come on board?

The next step is to call everyone you know to be on the committee. The more people, the better. At this point, think of yourself as a spin doctor. You paint a picture to your friends of how necessary this committee is to the community and how, together, you are going to revamp the old system, bring real and much-needed change to how it’s been done before, and change the world one little step at a time.

Because—make no mistake about it—when you are done with your self-promoting, that is exactly what everyone will believe you can do. Bear in mind, this will initially take a few hours on the phone, and you will have to stroke the egos of all the women you call, relating stories (either actual or pretended) you have heard about their fabulous abilities.

This may sound like a lot of work, but keep in mind three things.

First, this will save you hours of time slogging through what would have been a solitary volunteer job with practically no reward or recognition.

Second, it will be infinitely more fun to have all your friends help you with this task and to have them stroke your ego about how brilliant you are for creating this fun committee while they are doing your work for you.

Third, your ultimate goal is to have your name be automatically associated with a leader of organizations. So tough it up and put some time into this. The more times you head an organization, the less time it will take you to convince others to help because your reputation for achieving something worthwhile will hereafter precede all your future requests for help.

Let us assume that you spend ten minutes each talking to six friends and get four of them to commit. First, consider this a huge success. You now have a posse. Second, you have only spent one hour, which is anyway a reasonable weekly time commitment for a volunteer job. And here comes the beauty part. After this initial one-hour investment (during which you get to chat with friends you might have called anyway just for aimless chatting), all you have to do is set up a regular meeting once a month to discuss goals and progress. You won’t actually have to do any of the one-hour shifts of real work.

That is what your committee does. It is their very purpose.

Oh, you might have to sign yourself up for a shift occasionally, but after ten minutes or so of real work, you make it a point to pull aside the employee who is supervising volunteer efforts, Ms. X, and engage her in a serious discussion regarding your committee’s goals.

Better yet, call Ms. X before your shift starts to ask if it would be possible to make a small presentation about your committee’s goals while you are there. The employee will be flattered to think that anyone would consider an underpaid underappreciated employee worthy enough to schedule a meeting with. During your presentation, you make sure to stroke the ego of