It’s dead, isn’t it?
How many times have you heard something like this?
- Direct mail is dead.
- Outbound marketing is dead.
- Email is dead.
- Podcasting is dead.
- MySpace is dead.
If someone is shouting loudly that something is dead, that’s a good indicator to take a look at it. The ploy of claiming something is dead is typically shouted loudest by two kinds of people: the deeply attention deficit disorder crowd that desperately needs something shiny and new to momentarily occupy their addled minds, or the sales guy who has to make his numbers and can’t when the mainstream option is beating him up. Either way, you know something’s up or they wouldn’t be spending their energy on moving you away from it.
If the masses are indeed moving away from something, that’s an even better time to look at it, because if it’s resource-practical to implement, soon you might have no competition in that space. Not only can you study something old to learn something new, you might be able to actually do something old and have it work again because the middle of the bell curve has gone somewhere else. When was the last time you had a singing telegram visit your doorstep? Would it make an impression on you if one showed up?
Do what other people aren’t doing. Do it competently, and your lack of competition will give you the room you need to thrive.
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Lighting mediocrity’s darkness with personal branding
Much has been said about personal branding, about establishing an unmistakeable identity in the online and offline worlds. Some judge it to be essential, while others call it the height of narcissism. That said, there’s an overwhelming tide racing to the shore now that only things like personal branding can endure: a tide of enforced mediocrity.
Take a read of this article about West Potomac High School all but removing failing grades as part of the educational process. By effectively removing the ability to fail, the school blurs the line between those students who are capable of doing good work in a timely fashion and those students who do mediocre work whenever they feel like it.
Here’s the problem: under this system, there’s no way to tell a B or C level student who works hard from a B or C level student who has no discipline. Changes such as this effectively make things like GPA (which were already fairly skewed and not terribly useful measures) and academic records useless measures of quality. As trends like this spread (and they invariably do), we remove more and more ways to judge a person’s capabilities.
Who would you rather hire? A hard worker or a lazy, undisciplined worker? Under models like West Potomac’s, you can’t tell the difference from academic track record. The diploma looks the same.
This is where personal branding comes in. This is where personal branding transcends being an exercise in self-congratulation and becomes a useful tool. As we continue to enforce mediocrity throughout our society in the name of self-esteem, those people who invest the time and effort to build credible personal brands will have the advantage when it comes to being hired, being promoted, and being valued. This is especially true for new college graduates, since they typically don’t have a track record of achievement and experience to point to, making one bachelor’s degree as good as the next.
So what should you do to build a personal brand? What should you advise your kids, your coworkers, your friends to do? Start obviously by stacking up achievements and doing great work. If you have no latitude to do interesting things in your current workplace, volunteer somewhere to put your talents to use in unconventional ways. Reinforce your great work by building out a strong content presence, blogging about what you’re doing, connecting and building a strong network as quickly as possible, and finding more opportunities to add to your track record of achievement.
Who would you rather hire? A B or C level student with a diploma and nothing else, or a B or C level student with a diploma, blog about your industry or vertical, well connected network, maybe even a magazine article or two, and a pile of LinkedIn recommendations praising them for their hard work as a volunteer? It’s a no-brainer if you’re looking to hire talented people.
No matter how much we neuter academic achievement or homogenize education for a consistently mediocre result, there is no way to disguise hard work, dedication, focus, and achievement in real world results. Your personal brand is your single best method for communicating that to the world, and as more and more signals of quality get diluted for the sake of poor achievers’ self-esteem, building a credible personal brand should become higher and higher priority for you.
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How to build a Twitter audience in 8 steps
I got an email recently from someone who was quite put out by my communications style, letting me know in no uncertain terms that they were unsubscribing from everything and anything I had to publish. In the past, that email might have gotten me worked up a bit, but all it inspired in me was a gentle nod of understanding and a reply wishing them well.
Here’s why such stuff isn’t important to me any more: I recognize that I have a worldview and style that is unique, different, and most certainly not for everyone. At best, how I see the world work and how I choose to communicate with the world is appropriate only for a very tiny minority of people, a very rare and special kind of person. (that’s probably you if you’re reading this)
Consider this simple number. As of this writing, I have about 24,000 followers on Twitter. You may express some sense of wonder at an audience of that size, but now consider this: Twitter is on track to very soon hit 200,000,000 users. The people who choose to follow me represent 0.012% of Twitter. In the grand scheme of things, that’s completely insignificant, and I’m okay with that.
Now consider this: the top followed celebrity on Twitter, the person with the greatest audience is Lady Gaga, with 7.086 million followers. Think about that. Gaga, for all of her appeal and star power, merits only 3.5% of Twitter’s userbase as a following. That means 96.5% of Twitter doesn’t care about what she has to say enough to follow her.
If you think Twitter is still all about followers, you’re really barking up the wrong tree. Twitter’s top performer by the numbers is rejected 96.5% of the time. If your success in your regular employment met with a 96.5% failure rate, how quickly do you think you’d get fired?
So what matters? Findability. You see, everyone has a viewpoint, a worldview, a way of communicating that will appeal to some small portion of the human race as a whole. Everyone has an audience willing to listen, but virtually all of the time, our ability to find and be found by that audience is non-existent. If there’s a secret sauce of social media, it’s the ability to find and be found by the people who want to find you but don’t know you exist.
Do you want to grow your audience on Twitter quickly and effectively? Do you want that audience to be people to whom you are perceived as influential? Here’s the recipe to find them.
1. Tweet stuff of value that’s worth sharing. All of this will be useless if you’re posting bullshit. Sorry, but true.
2. Build up your audience of people you know and who like you already. The easiest way to do this? Email your friends and colleagues letting them know about your Twitter account. Ask them to follow you. If you’re active on other networks like Facebook, let them know as well.
3. Keep proving value by doing step 1 over and over again. You cannot skip by these steps or the rest of this recipe will not work for you.
4. After about 30 days of seeding your audience and sharing good stuff, go to TweetReach.com and type in your Twitter handle with the @ sign. Here’s an example. If you have access to other social CRM tools like Radian6, JitterJam, etc., feel free to use them for this step instead. Those paid tools will do this step much more effectively, but TweetReach will get you started for free.
5. Find the list of people who have retweeted you to their audiences. Remember, these are the people who think you are so much value that not only do they follow along, but they share with their audiences. There is some likelihood that the people who follow them will have some part of their worldview in common, which means they might have something in common with you as well.
6. Follow everyone who follows them. Ideally start with the people who retweet you the most, because their audiences will have heard about you the most. This is advertising 101: you’re directly contacting people who have been exposed to your brand. Instead of billboards advertising a soft drink, you’re reaching out with considerably greater accuracy to people who have heard about you from someone they follow.
7. Repeat step 1 daily.
8. After you get through the list from steps 5 and 6, wait a couple of weeks while repeating step 1. Once you’ve had a few weeks to get in front of the new friends you’ve probably picked up and proven your value to them, repeat this exercise to see who is new in your audience that’s retweeting you. Begin the exercise over again.
Be findable by the audience you want by tweeting stuff that you consider to be of value. If others agree, they’ll become a part of your audience. Find more people who may think you offer something of value based on who is retweeting you already.
And for those of you who appreciate my unique, occasionally abrasive, definitely not normal worldview, thank you for being part of it and for listening to what I have to share. I appreciate your attention so very much.
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#the5 for the week ending November 12, 2010
I tweet out #the5 regularly on weekday mornings. It's a list of the 5 things in my various channels that I think are worth paying attention to, usually culled from thousands of blogs and tweets in my Google Reader. Folks have asked in the past if they could somehow get these tweets in another fashion, but every Twitter/Wordpress plugin I've seen makes a mangled, annoying mess of processing the Twitterstream, so until there's a better option, I'll just throw out this digest. If you'd like to get these before the summary, just follow me on Twitter.- #the5: @julien tells you why every business is a machine: http://bit.ly/crZeu6
- #the5: @mashable: For Employees, Facebook Counts as Free Speech http://bit.ly/au02Gc
- #the5: @matthewebel tells America to stop waiting on Obama and fix your own damn economy: http://bit.ly/azQxXW
- #the5: @mitchjoel on becoming a better speaker: http://bit.ly/9h34mj
- #the5: @revenews: 10 Reasons SEO Didn’t Work For You http://bit.ly/bBoutG
- #the5: @seomoz crushes it again with helpful link building tips for your personal blog: http://bit.ly/ceMqY8
- #the5: @seomoz killer post on how to get community link building going: http://bit.ly/arPbCz
- #the5: @shoemoney gives you part 3 on selling information products online. Damn useful: http://bit.ly/9MdLqe
- #the5: Der Spiegel on the American economic nightmare: http://bit.ly/a6DIBO
- #the5: Do you have the will to focus? http://bit.ly/b9qUff
- #the5: Gevlon on how a few bad apples can ruin a team: http://bit.ly/aWar0a
- #the5: Google sponsoring free WiFi on some flights during the holidays: http://tcrn.ch/blPOXD
- #the5: HBR on how to avoid burnout by focusing on your team http://bit.ly/akLK0y
- #the5: Heavy insider dumping at Cisco indicates infrastructure economy problems? http://bit.ly/dxMyQz
- #the5: I tell you exactly when the best time to send email is. Try it: http://bit.ly/9GjEYH
- #the5: Mashable on the billion dollar eBook market: http://bit.ly/bArnr5
- #the5: One of mine, committing to the cut http://bit.ly/cL3ApC
- #the5: One of mine, first steps on the path to exceptional: http://bit.ly/d7jEHs
- #the5: Revenews on the 10 Reasons SEO Didn’t Work For You http://bit.ly/bBoutG
- #the5: Twitter Places on the way shortly? http://selnd.com/cPOK0u
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First steps on the path to exceptional
The path to becoming exceptional is relatively simple to get started on. In a world that has generally accepted mediocrity, if not outright failure, finding a few parts of your business to improve that will push you past your competitors is simple.
It starts with listening to yourself. Consider all of the complaints people have about your business and the businesses of others with whom you’re competing. Pay attention to the simplicity of the golden rule: that which is hateful to you, do not do to someone else.
Here’s an exercise to try right now. Get something to write with and a few moments of quiet. Ask yourself about the last five bad customer experiences you’ve had. What did you really hate? What stuff got you so riled up, so full of anger that you swore you’d never do business with that company again if you could help it? What did the company or companies specifically do to fail so hard?
If you can’t think of any for some strange reason, I’ll give you this starter list of companies that generally get people frothing with rage:
- Airline travel
- Retail customer service
- Banking
- Phone, Cable & Internet service provider technical support
- Government agencies
Got a good list of all the ways a company can fail you?
Now audit your own company, your own department, your own work for those failures and stop doing them.
If you hate that clerks at government agencies treat you with outright hostility at having to actually work, then fire people in your own company who behave the same way with startling speed.
If you hate that airlines lie like rugs and try every possible avenue to reduce expenses without caring how miserable it makes their customers, don’t do that to your customers.
If you go ballistic with every nickel and dime charge on your cell phone bill or every banking fee that banks can dream up, stop trying to cleverly milk your own customers for the same short term profit.
If you can’t stand calling for technical support and getting someone overseas who has never seen the product in their life and can’t possibly care less about actually helping you, then spare the extra expense by investing in support for your products and services.
If you can eliminate the things that you hate in other companies at your own company, you’ve taken a first and most important step towards becoming exceptional. You’ve removed the very worst parts of your company like cutting the line on a boat anchor tied to your ankle. You still have a lot of swimming to do, but now you’re at least not actively trying to drown yourself.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
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