Raising Your Visibility and Influence in a Social Media World

I ran across a great article from the BusinessWeek web site on Getting Noticed.  “Doctors, accountants, and other professionals need to market their businesses, too,” says the subhead. Professionals may be experts in their particular fields, but most have absolutely no training in how to market themselves.  Nor is this an isolated problem, as 75% percent of architects, 66% of accountants, and even 30% of physicians work in smaller offices, where the duties of building a client base fall squarely on the professionals.

Some of the ideas mentioned include:

• appearing as an expert guest on a local TV show
• providing a popular though perhaps unprofitable service that brings traffic (e.g., botox injections)
• hold events for current clients and guests, or for the community at large
• picking a niche specialty that professional peers will see as supplemental rather than competitive to their own practices
• network, network, network.

I know you’re going to tell me that none of these things have anything to do with being visible online.  My point is that there really isn’t any dividing line between real-world visibility and online visibility.  The two should supplement each other, so that activities in one area support activities in another. 

I’m not a regular reader of the Harvard Business Review and its siblings, though I suppose I ought to be because I enjoy them when I do. So I just recently ran across Gill Corkindale’s two-part Letter from London post on personal branding. Corkindale feels, as I do, that visibility and influence are two critical aspects of managing your personal brand. Among her 11 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand:

• Make yourself visible. Build your profile internally and externally. Ways to do this include networking, signing up for high-profile projects, showcasing your skills in presentations or workshops, writing for internal or external publications, volunteering for committees or panel discussions at a conference.
• Build and manage your marketing network. Your friends, colleagues, clients, and customers are an important marketing vehicle for your brand. What is said about you will determine the value of your brand.
• Learn to influence. Use your personal power, your role and your network. But use them sensitively and intelligently, or else you will not be regarded as a credible or trustworthy leader.

I’m not surprised to see how important networking figures in her list, as you use your interactions with your colleagues clients, and friends both as a channel to “market yourself” and as an invaluable source of feedback and perspective. Note also that volunteering, sharing your expertise, and helping others also figure prominently in all aspects of building a personal brand. As I said in an earlier post, one of the amazing things about expertise is that the more you share it the more of an expert you become.

Some of the comments to Gill Corkindale’s posts are well worth reading. Bruce Temkin of Customer Experience Matters points out that:

In the “old days,” only a handful of people were known outside of their immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. So there was no reason to worry about your “brand” when just about everyone who might care about it knew who you were already. But along came the ability to search the Internet — for anybody. Who hasn’t put their own name into Google to see what shows up? Now there are vast numbers of people who might find out something about you. And since you can’t actually meet all of those people, you need to think about what they see and read about you. You need to think about your brand.

It is true that everything global is now local, as it’s just as easy (or difficult) to chat with someone on the other side of the world as it is with someone across town, and search puts everything (that’s online) at your fingertips.  Temkin, of course, is talking about the sort of visibility you have when someone already knows your name.  I think it’s equally important to work on getting found and being visible when someone doesn’t know it’s you they’re looking for!

Steve Bauer of The Referral Academy mentioned something to me the other day that got me thinking. Steve’s comment was that a lot of professionals — like lawyers, engineers, and consultants — are hesitant to be seen as “too pushy” in marketing themselves. This makes sense, as the one thing a professional must never do is surrender the position of “trusted advisor.” The moment a professional acts like a sales person, always looking to deliver that next pitch, is the moment that they lose the trust of their client and fail as a professional.

There is a distinction between seeking and being sought-after. Professionals want to be sought-after, because a person coming to you looking for advice is already convinced that your are an advisor to be trusted. When you are seeking, you have to sell yourself.

So, how can you get yourself out of seeking mode and in to sought-after mode? I think that social media provide professionals and consultants with a powerful set of tools to attract pre-sold and pre-qualified prospects. If done right, social media tools can enhance a professional’s positioning as a trusted advisor.

The strategy involves a couple of key elements:

Trusted networks. Sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook allow you to connect with clients, colleagues, and other people of influence that you know and trust. People often misunderstand how these sites work. The value is not in who you know (you already know them) but rather in who those people know (the friend-of-a-friend factor). If you rely on word-of-mouth and referrals to drive your business, then you should seriously consider using LinkedIn and Facebook (or whichever social media site best reaches your network and your prospective clients).

Put real effort into growing your online connections, but also carefully screen your network to ensure that it consists of people you know and trust. If you wouldn’t vouch for their work in a discussion with your top client, then why would you want them in your network?

A strong, effective profile. A LinkedIn profile is a tricky thing, as it needs to be both machine-readable and people-friendly. You need a profile that is full of keywords because that will ensure that people will find you when they search for someone with your capabilities. That is the machine-readable part. Never forget, though, that a person will make the decision to click on your profile and then act on it. That is where the people-friendly comes in.

I’ve written extensively about what makes a good LinkedIn profile over on my Fun With Networking blog.

Real-world activities. LinkedIn works best if you integrate it into your everyday activities. Lots of people just put the most bare-bones information in their LinkedIn profiles – just their name, their current role, and their college or graduate school. Best practices are to put as much detail in your profile as possible about your past roles and your education. This gives people who know you from your past roles a “handle” that makes you easy to find. It also gives those who don’t know you a greater sense of the “whole person.”

And don’t stop at the past. Include some of your current activities. List your blog or your web site in LinkedIn. List your LinkedIn profile on your blog. If you are on the board of a local non-profit, list that. You would be amazed at how those little connections start to add up to make something really fantastic.

A willingness to share your expertise. One of the amazing things about expertise is that the more you share it the more of an expert you become. You can only become an expert by sharing your knowledge, and (I would venture to say) the act of sharing your knowledge makes you an expert.

LinkedIn has a marvelous tool called LinkedIn Answers where people can post questions on various topics and get feedback from people who presumably know a thing or two. These answers are rated, and getting a “Best Answer” rating gives you instant recognition as an expert (your LinkedIn profile will indeed show that you have expertise on the topic).

But sharing shouldn’t begin and end with social media. You should seek out opportunities to volunteer your help and share your expertise. Become the chairman of the local association for your profession, or become president of the Rotary. Speaking is another excellent way to share your expertise.

All these things will start making you a most sought-after person, both online and in the real world.

Yesterday I wrote about the 5 things you should consider when you start using new media to market your business or your career. Well and good, but this blog isn’t so much about getting started as it is about effective strategies to raise your personal and professional visibility and influence. So I thought I would create a second list: 5 strategies that will help you reach and motivate your target audience – be they clients, fellow-members, or general citizens.

1. Have something specific to say, to a specific audience. Something that is interesting. Something that is informative. Something that people will want to hear about. Something that people can’t hear about from anywhere else. AND, know who you want to say it to. Be specific about the people you want to reach. What other things do they read? What industry are they in? What decisions do they make? Where do they live and work?

This strategy is all about differentiation and targeting. You need to be different enough to be noticeable and noticed, so what you say and do needs to be distinct from everybody else that is writing and talking about this same topic. You can take a contrarian view on the topic, or you can focus on a specialized subdiscipline that everyone else has ignored, or you can talk about an new and emerging approach to a old discipline. Any of those will help differentiate you. As for targeting, I’ve mentioned before that targeting the whole world is ineffective. The more specific you are about who you want to reach with your efforts, the better you will be able to find them, meet their needs, and motivate them.

2. Be passionate. It’s not enough to be interesting. You need to feel a passion for what you are writing about. You should burn with a passion that will drive you to keep motivated in the face of adversity and the seeming indifference of the world. A passion that will help you overcome the dread of having to write yet another in a seemingly endless series of blog posts. A passion that carries over into your writing and infects your reader with your enthusiasm.

Is passion a strategy? Most definitely. Choosing to follow a path you feel passionate about is a strategic choice.

3. Do it as a “public service.” I’ve written in Fun With Networking about the Power of the Idea, of getting involved in something larger than yourself. Find an idea that energizes people and enlists them changing the world for the better, and you will have people fighting to help your cause. Mind you, it doesn’t have to be a great social cause, like eliminating world hunger or saving the whales. It can be about finding a better way to work, or a better way to work part-time, or a better way to manage software development projects.

Remember that what you are doing with social media is creating a community, and if you can find a common cause that unites your community, then there will be no stopping you. And, note, this strategy means that your social media network is no longer about you and your needs but rather about the community and its larger cause. If you do it right, you do well by doing good.  Plus, remember what I said about passion.  Find something you and your soon-to-be-growing community can feel passionate about.

4. Find an unmet information need. There are vast numbers of people in this world looking for answers to all sorts of questions. If you have an expertise that can help answer some of these unanswered questions, then the world will beat a path to your door. My Fun With Networking calendar, for example, got started because I couldn’t find a good, centralized source for information on networking events and groups in the Philadelphia area.

Naturally, you will want to pick a topic that showcases your expertise and allows you to build a reputation as the go-to person on the topic.

5. Read and respond to others. This is social media we are talking about, and what you are doing is carrying on a conversation with your readers and with others who have similar blogs and social media profiles. Engage them in a discussion by reading and commenting on their sites. Some people have suggested that you post 3 comments on other blogs and profiles for every posting to your own blog.

Well, this is by no means an exhausting list, but I think it’s a start. In the future, we’ll explore some of these ideas, and others, in more detail.

I just got off the phone with Lisa Haneberg, author of Two Weeks to a Breakthrough, a book I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone looking make a breakthrough in their personal or professional lives. Lisa was interviewing me for her new book on hipness and sageness. During our conversation, Lisa asked me to think of the five things I would tell a “mature professional” who wanted to use new media to market themselves or their business.

Well, I know a good topic for a blog post when I hear one, so here is a first stab at a list. Actually, I’ve worked up two lists, one list for those getting started and another for those looking to drive the effectiveness and visibility of their efforts. Today, I’ll talk about getting started.

Here are five things a mature professional should consider when starting off with using new media to market themselves or their business:

1. Do you really need to do it? It’s one thing to dabble in new media because you think it might be fun on a personal level. It’s quite another to do it to support a professional or business need. I think the decision is driven by the needs of your target customers. Go where your customer are. If they’re online and expect to learn about you and your services and skills online, then you better be online.

2. Just start doing it. Forget theory. There is no substitute for just getting out and doing it yourself. It’s like learning a foreign language – learning it in class seldom works. You have to immerse yourself in it. So, set up your own Facebook page, start you own hosted blog on Blogger or Wordpress. They’re all free.

3. Start small and build. You should have a rough idea of what you want to write about in your blog or what you want to put in your profile of Facebook, but don’t try to get it all planned out and perfect before you make your first post. Get it started and then be open to changing your focus as you discover new things you and your readers would like to explore.

4. Keep it short. No one says you have to post long screeds that cover everything anyone might ever want to know about your topic or, in your LinkedIn profile, everything you ever did. In fact, it works better if you keep it short and snappy. Do posts like “Five Things Everyone Should Know About…” Post a couple of sentences about a new web site you just discovered and give people the URL. Just put a few key bullet points in your LinkedIn profile.

5. Keep doing it. Nothing looks more unprofessional than a blog that has been allowed to go stale. Keep posting regularly. Yes, it’s tough. Things happen. You get sick. You get busy. You get writer’s block. Just keep coming back to it and keep it fresh. Note that “fresh” can mean a post every day or every so often. It depends on the topic.

There are lots of other things to consider (Get your own domain name. Learn from the experts. Optimize for search engines.), but this blog really isn’t about technology but rather how to use technology to enhance your visibility.

My next post will focus on what I would say to someone who wants to drive their new media efforts to the next level.

It’s not enough to want to be more visible in this social media world. You need to know why you want to be visible and who you want to notice you. The mass market is dead. You need to target your visibility, and targeting means two things: knowing what you want, and knowing who can help you get it.

Know why you want to get noticed. By that I really mean “what professional or personal goal are you trying to achieve and how can being more visible help you?” That is the knowing what you want part of targeted personal visibility. If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, then you can’t focus your efforts on the things that will have the greatest impact.

Know who you want to notice you. The other side of targeted personal visibility is knowing who you want to see you. If you say, “everyone,” then you are wasting effort, diluting your message, and flirting with danger. Everyone is just too broad a target, and, frankly, you wouldn’t want all 7 billion people in world calling you up, right? So, who do you want calling you?

Photo uploaded by TJ Scenes

I ran across a cute little tool the other day that helps you calculate your “online identity.”  It turned out to be on the Career Distinction web site, which William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson used to launch their great book on personal branding last year.

The Google Quotient calculation involves going ego-surfing on Google and then counting both the total number of hits you get on the first three pages of results that are about you (rather than someone else) and the number of hits related to the “brand identity” you want to create for yourself.

My Google Quotient was a somewhat acceptable 7.8, with my score reduced by the stretch goals I have in place for developing my own brand identity and by my family history.  I am named for my grandfather and great-grandfather, both of whom were men of distinction who still merit standings in Google searches.

It struck me afterwards that the idea of a Google Quotient is only one minor part of a much larger equation.  Searching on your name and finding you is a great thing, if someone already knows to be looking for you by name!

What about the times when someone is looking for someone just like you, except they don’t know you or your name?  Is your value proposition distinct enough, are your online activities focused enough, are you visible enough to be found by someone who knows nothing about you except that they need someone just like you?

That’s what this blog is all about.

Now, I just need to come up with some whiz-bang online calculator to help you do it.

I’m starting this blog on Personal Visibility because I had a flash of inspiration the other day.  It was one of those moments when things I had seen, heard, and done over the past few months came together in an “Aha!” moment.

As I shared on my Fun With Networking blog, I recently gave a presentation on effective use of LinkedIn for networking and personal branding.  One of the audience members sent me an e-mail later, asking me if her profile should be about herself or about her company.  While the obvious answer is that your LinkedIn profile is about you, it also can be a valuable tool for marketing your company, if you do it right.

A friend later asked me if I could help train the recruiters in her office on using LinkedIn.  Yet another friend asked if I could help coach him on marketing himself as an actor and as a life coach.

It suddenly struck me that the growing use of social media tools like LinkedIn and Facebook are creating a world where “marketing” and “business” will be driven more and more by personal relationships, personal networks, and personal visibility.

My background is in public relations, and, if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to increase visibility.  But I’ve also learned that you have to increase your visibility the right way.

This blog is about how to make yourself visible the right way in this new social-media, friend-of-a-friend, I-have-27,328-friends-on-MySpace world.  I don’t mean 15-minutes-of-fame-viral-video-on-YouTube visible.  I mean the sort of visible where you are known as the go-to expert, who knows everything and everyone in your corner of the world.  Sustainable visibility.

I see this as a companion blog to my FunWithNetworking.com blog, which is about reaching out to people and establishing new connections and interconnections.  For the most part, FunWithNetworking is about face-to-face networking, with discussion of how the Internet can help you do it.

This blog is about using the Internet, your face-to-face networking, and your expertise to position yourself as a person of power and influence – to increase your visibility.