One of the most important things thinkers who aspire to thought leadership need to do is to effectively manage the information they need to nurture and nourish their expertise…
I firmly believe the single most important issue in social media is not whether or not it works to generate leads; rather, how can I add social media to my already overflowing plate and still get home for supper. I think the first place where people can find additional time in their day is by more effectively handling e-mail. Conversely, I think it’s pretty difficult to think about the idea of becoming a thought leader if you have thousands of unread e-mails in your inbox especially when e-mail can be so easy to manage…
The first of the holy trio is Gmail. There are a lot of tips and tricks that you can apply to Gmail however I don’t think any one of them is more important than this: using e-mail for what I called just-in-time information — information that affects relationships and revenue. Everything else belongs somewhere else! If your e-mail inbox doesn’t look like this then you’re going to have a hard time adding the extra work that you need to do to establish your thought leadership position…
Your inbox CAN look like this most of the time…
The second member of the holy trio is feedly. I use feedly to track the sites, searches and sources that nourish my expertise. Instead of chasing information around the Internet I make the things I need to know flow to me. Because feedly is completely cross platform down to the smart phone level I can use it in Mac, Windows or Ubuntu [I prefer Chrome as my primary browser and all three] or on an Android or iOS device. Feedly gives me the ability to create a virtual newspaper jammed with the best content in the world and it’s free! It also allows me to quickly share the good things I find…
Use feedly to create a virtual newspaper that nourishes your expertise…
Last but by no means least is Evernote. Evernote is a cloud-based app that is completely cross platform down to the smart phone level so I can access the things I save from anywhere…
Evernote is the best platform for saving and sharing great information…
These three tools together give me everything I need to effectively manage the information I need to continually refresh my expertise. In the following screen cast of show you some of my favorite tips for using all three:
These are just the first three tools in my workflow — you can find more ideas here. If you could use some help managing the information you need to stay on top your game please contact me and ask me about personal digital coaching…
…and everything is right in my ‘Personal News Aggregation’ universe. For about a week, I was having problems syncing my accounts on feedly and Google Reader and it was really frustrating — especially since it has always worked so well in the past. As you can see, however, my desktop version…
…This is going to be a long one – I had an epiphany this morning…
Brilliance can be found in many places — especially if you keep your mouth shut and your ears open! First, a bit of a story; six months ago I decided to get off my fat ass and start exercising. Thanks to Endomondo, I know that I walked and biked for a total of 16 hours in the month of March. Being the overachiever that I am by the month of July I had doubled that time. The net result? Tendinitis…
I’m now in physical therapy trying to get back on the exercise path again. This morning, I asked my physical therapist Lynn to recommend a knee brace to help me. I was looking at all the options in Google and had visions of the mother of all knee braces…
…when I shared my plan with Lynn, however, she had a different perspective and her advice was brilliant; get as much support as you need and nothing more. I was blown away by the wisdom of her simple statement. It echoes the wisdom of great thinkers like David Allen and Stephen Covey.
How does this relate to thought leadership and getting found? Most likely you’ve heard me say before that, in the words of the immortal Albert Einstein “things must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”. The thought occurred to me this morning that in order to be recognized as a thought leader, or the obvious expert in your field you only need to think about three things:
Passion
Purpose
Plan
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on number one; Confucius said find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. If you don’t have passion for your “onlyness” you need to find it or move on…
Regarding number 2, it’s great to have a purpose but in order to be profitable your purpose has to solve a problem [reference Tim Kastelle’s classic post on The Underpants Gnomes]. Now call me Captain Obvious, but the best way to see what problems people are trying to solve is to see what problems people are trying to solve. That is not a typo. Read it again. “How do I do that?” you might say. Google is not only great for finding things, but it also happily shares the things people are looking for. Again with the Captain Obvious, but if I want to be found it seems to me that I should write about what people are looking for. If I understand my unique value proposition and can link it to what people are looking for I will be found as a solution.
The following screencast shows three different ways — ranked in order of complexity — of finding what people are looking for;
If you consistently find and share good information that effectively solves problems for which people are searching for solutions, over time you will be found and recognized as the expert in your field.
The short answer to number 3, is to consistently find and communicate that information that documents your expertise in your field. Again in the spirit of Einstein’s razor, I think there are only three tools you need to master in order to deepen and document your expertise:
Google Alerts and/or Google Reader
WordPress
Twitter using Twylah’s Power Tweet
I have written many times about the power of Google Reader but not so much about the power of Google Alerts. To me a Google Alert is a kind of a virtual intern that will scour the Internet 24x7x365 to find and deliver to you exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes the art of being an expert is to stay a page ahead of your followers; what better way then to search what people are searching for and put the answers all in one place? Captain Obvious again; why not take the most popular searches you find and turn them into Google Alerts? When you find good content in Google Reader using Google Alerts and either curate the content in the form of a blog post or tweet it using Twyla’s Power Tweet you attach that content to your domain on the Internet. Here’s how I do it [you may have a better solution]:
I may be wrong about this [I was actually wrong once back in the 80’s] but in my mind there is no simpler, faster, cheaper way to get found when people are looking for YOU. Comment below or connect with me so we can talk about how this applies to you and your situation…
Friend and client Nilofer Merchant just published a new book “11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra”. In Chapter 7, “Capture” she talks about one aspect of what she calls ‘levers of value’ and how social can be used to create and deliver work…
Work is freed from jobs. This means that human resources change when most of the people who create value are neither hired nor paid by you. And competition has changed so that any company can achieve the benefits of scale through a network of resources: for example, designing a product from anywhere, producing it through a 3-D printer, financing it communally, and distributing it from anywhere to anywhere.
Merchant, Nilofer (2012-09-12). 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era (Kindle Locations 665-670). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Along those lines, I want to share a couple of tactics I use to get other people to do my ‘Personal News Aggregation’ work by creating what I refer to as a ‘Personal News Agency’…
In this screencast I focus in on examples using Twitter, Pinterest, dlvr.it and Twylah to create Search Engine Optimization [SEO] value for your website by leveraging the things other people share…
UPDATED 10/8/2012: Hey, in the video above I struggled with getting an rss feed from Twitter. Thanks to @socmedsean, here’s how to do it:
Okay…here are the details. Start with getting your RSS feed. Twitter still provides access to their RSS feeds via the following URL:
Twitter allows you to customize your search queries by adding certain parameters. Check out this great post on Sociable.co to learn about the Twitter RSS parameters. Basically, by customizing the RSS search, the following RSS search gives me all of my tweets:
(the %3A is the URL encoded representation of the @ symbol)
and I can further refine that RSS search to only show those tweets that include “http”…which means that the search would return all of my tweets that also included links
(the %20 is the URL encoded representation of a space)
and finally, I could further refine the search so that it didn’t include retweets by simply telling the search to exclude any tweets with “RT” in them.
NOTE: The order in which I put the parameters is very important. The from has to come last or it didn’t work properly and the %20s are critical. If your feed isn’t working, check that it is similar to mine above.
Comment below or connect with me so we can talk about how this applies to you and your situation — I can show you how to deepen your expertise using the strategies and the tactics I talk about in the screencast…
I’ve come to the conclusion that I use email to distract myself. Whenever I feel the least bit uneasy, I check my email. Stuck while writing an article? Bored on a phone call? Standing in an elevator, frustrated in a meeting, anxious about an interaction? Might as well check email. It’s an ever-present, easy-access way to avoid my feelings of discomfort.
What makes it so compelling is that it’s so compelling. I wonder what’s waiting for me in my inbox? It’s scintillating.
It also feels legitimate, even responsible. I’m working. I need to make sure I don’t miss an important message or fail to respond in a timely fashion.
But it’s become a serious problem. When we don’t control our email habit, we are controlled by it. Everyone I know complains about email overload.
Email pours in, with no break to its flow. And like addicts, we check it incessantly, drawing ourselves away from meetings, conversations, personal time, or whatever is right in front of us.
Go to the source if you’d like to read the rest of his thoughts. I’d like to share with you a way that I have found to control my email habit…
Tools without thought or tactics are worthless so I try to remind myself that email is best used as a tool for ‘just in time’ information – information that affects relationships and revenue. All your ‘just in case’ information belongs in a virtual newspaper like Google Reader. Think of how much lighter your email load would be if you didn’t let newsletters and other detritus in? How often have you started down the path to Inbox Zero and then been waylaid by a Victoria’s Secret or Cabella’s catalog in your inbox. There’s a time and a place for that; the time is your ‘personal news aggregation’ time and the place is Google Reader. My advice? Use Gmail for email with a touch of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero and David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ and you’ll be an INBOX HERO in no time!
If you’re looking for help in this area, try my online book on ‘personal news aggregation’ or how to create your own personal news agency. You can register free at http://elevation.company/pna. Here are two recent lunch and learns I did on the topic of Gmail and Google Reader as well…
Here’s an interesting perspective on the ‘problem’ of email…
There’s a constant flow of “email is/is not broken” articles across the internet, but most of them miss the point. Email as a system is not broken, but we, through our email behaviors, are.
Nearly all of the articles written recently about fixing email have concentrated on technology and building a better client or implementing the specs more closely or bringing two systems together. These are all great ideas and have a ton of value, but they will not fix the inherent issue that people are experiencing with email, but which most articles fail to articulate: we think email is broken because we are overwhelmed by it and get less real work done because of it.
So instead of asking how we can make email better/faster/cooler, we need to ask ourselves how we can get more work done while still using email. Unfortunately, many experiences have shown over the past decade or so that this problem is not easily solved by new technology, as much as I would love that. It is solved by teaching people better email behaviors. This is certainly a less sexy solution, but guess what? It’s the attainable one. Here are some ideas that I’ve come across from others, and that warrant further investigation. They are all designed to help us get more real work done, which is the real problem with the email timesink.
You can go to the source and read the author’s perspective, but while you’re here consider this: I think email is ‘broken’ because we let the wrong things in to begin with — in other words, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Most peoples’ inboxes are like their kitchen junk drawers – how can they expect to find anything of value in there? Instead, try using email only for ‘just in case’ information – information that affects relationships and revenue and all that goes along with it – and use an rss reader like Google Reader for all the ‘just in case’ info. That philosophy alone will make your email infinitely more manageable! As you get more efficient, you can add David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done‘ principles to your approach…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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