Categories: Articles

Humility And Having Something To Say

You have a voice.

Having a voice or an opinion or an idea is nothing new. What’s new is your ability to publish that voice, opinion or idea in text, images, audio and video, instantly (and for free) for the world to see and hear. It’s not complicated to do (in fact, it’s simple) and if you’re not one for one-long form content, the better news is that you can publish this voice, opinion or idea of yours in as little as 140 characters of text.

What are you going to say?

Don’t waste it. The hard thing for Marketers to wrap their heads (and hands) around is that last sentence. What they (usually) wind up sharing isn’t really a voice, opinion or idea. More often than not, it’s a perception of what they think will be a buying trigger for their consumers. It’s marketing material thinly veiled as a voice, opinion or an idea. The main question that brands want answered is: "having spent x amount of dollars over six months ago on a Social Media strategy and executing on it, why isn’t our output converting into more sales?" On a B2B Blog that I was recently following, the answer was obvious. One post was about a webinar they were hosting, another was about a new product feature that they were launching and the one after that was an announcement about a senior executive appointment from within their organization. No offense to their highly successful company, but…

Who cares?

David Weinberger (co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything Is Miscellaneous) brings a unique perspective to this new publishing platform: publish everything… put it out there. He’s right. If you want to tweet about the pizza you’re eating, go for it. If you want to Blog about the conference you’re attending, type away. If you want to publish a video on YouTube about your corporate picnic, knock yourself out. But, have the humility to know that the feedback you get from the world is a good indication of if your voice, opinion or idea is something that people will share and be excited about. Social Media is a great humility check. If people don’t follow you on Twitter, retweet your content, encourage others to follow, that’s saying something. If your Blog doesn’t get shared, talked about or commented on, that’s saying something. If people don’t view, embed and rate your videos on YouTube, that’s saying something too. And, while the amount of views, comments and retweets isn’t what’s critical… it’s crucial that whatever amount of people do connect with the content feel like it was valuable and worth sharing within their social graph.

A challenge.

If you really think that you have a unique voice, opinion or an idea to share, why not test it out? Instead of publishing your ideas on your own corporate Blog, why not get it published on The Huffington Post (or another big Blog publishing platform)? If your content can stand up in a forum like HuffPo (and yes, this includes the comments and how people then share it in places like Twitter and Facebook), your content can stand up anywhere.

Why do this?

Do this to to test yourself.
Do this to see if your content resonates.
Do this to push yourself to think about the people you’re connecting to
Do this to see if you can do it without trying to sell another widget of your product.
Do this as an exercise to see how well you can critically think about a topic.
Do this to add humility to your business.
Do this to move beyond trying to leverage Social Media as a direct-response selling engine (it can be so much more).

Why don’t more businesses and marketers do this?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.