According to Ira Chalef, courage is the ability to step forward through fear. One of the manifestations of courage is pushing beyond your comfort zone.

I require every student in my social business and personal branding courses at The University of Nevada to make a brief “about me” video to post on their blog at the end of the semester. Considering how little guidance I give them, some of my students have produced impressive videos. Kendra Wilson’s video busting the myths about snowskating is the best one I’ve seen so far.

But my favorite video was made by Caitlin Durkin. Before I even hit the “play” button, I knew it must have taken tremendous courage for Caitlin to make this video. She pushed WAY outside of her comfort zone to do this, and I admire and respect that kind of courage.

Sure, it’s just a video, and not a perfect one at that. But I think it demonstrates that Caitlin understands that if she wants to have courage in the “big” things in her life and career, she has to find courage in the small, seemingly insignificant details of routine assignments. Caitlin could have sat at her kitchen table in front of a laptop and recorded a video that was “good enough.” Instead, she took a one hour drive to the shores of Lake Tahoe and spent considerable time recording this video while strangers wandered by and stopped to watch what she was doing.

Caitlin flexed her courage muscle and gave herself permission to shoot for excellence. I am very, very proud of her. As you watch the video, please feel free to shout out loud “hell yes!”

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I’m talking social business today at Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship (NCET). It’s a variation of some of my most recent presentations on social business with one exception. In this one, I am going to recommend the book No Bullshit Social Media by Jason Falls and Erik Deckers. A few of my slides toward the end of the presentation reflect content from the book. I’ve not officially recommended it yet with a blog, that I’ll do that soon. Here is a quote I love:

Social media marketing is about building relationships, not receipts. The receipts will come, but only if you invest the time and attention it takes to build relationships with your customers. Think lifetime value, not sale value. (p. 180).

I strongly concur. The good news is that most of your competitors are sleeping through this time of tremendous opportunity to create community and word-of-mouth marketing around their brands. It’s still early, but the clock is ticking. It’s time for you to stop making excuses and get started – no bullshit.

I had the honor of speaking to ProNet Reno today about Personal Branding. I was impressed with the quality of support this group provided its members that are searching for employment. It was a serious business meeting with a serious group of folks.

I hope some of them will take my advice and change their minds about what it means to assume responsibility for marketing yourself with these new tools of content generation and engagement. Never before have we had so much opportunity to be able to document and target our value – what we can do uniquely well to help others address opportunities and solve problems that matter to them. It’s our value, not our personality, that makes us remarkable. But creating content and marketing that content is a paradigm shift in the way to establish and maintain a career. I hope some of them will give themselves permission to be excellent by choosing to do things others are not willing to do (e.g. blog).

Now is the time to establish your digital citizenship. Companies that fully grasp the potential of social business will be looking for people have a demonstrated track record of being professionally personal in their increasingly connected social networks. Focus on increasingly associating your name and face with searchable and shareable content that is valued by others and you will never again have to fear being either invisible or irrelevant.

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I teach courses in personal branding and social business at the University of Nevada, Reno. When Trey Pennington died on Sunday, September 4, 2011, a lot of conversation began to develop around that event on a variety of social media platforms. As an educator, I find that conversation very interesting.

I did a Google search on Trey Pennington the day of his death to learn more about him. His personal Facebook page, with almost 5000 followers, was ranked high in the search so I went to that site to learn more. When I viewed the site Sunday afternoon, there were already dozens of comments left by Trey’s friends on his Facebook wall. I found the original comment where someone reported Trey’s death and was personally fascinated by the conversation that developed around that thread. I took screen shots of that conversation so I could share it with my class. Trey’s personal Facebook page has been shut down, so I made this video of the screen shots to share with you.

Watch the video to see the conversation. Pause the video if you need more time to read the text. After you watch the video, please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Last night I tried to explain to my daughter that I am a scientist. She laughed – way too hard. Her reply was “You are not a scientist, you are a business professor.”

That’s true; however I’ve always thought of myself as a scientist that teaches. In reality I am increasingly more of a teacher that practices science. Five years from now, I wouldn’t mind being neither.

If I’m doing something entirely different five years from now, it will mean one of two things. Either I got my ass fired for telling some important person something they did not want to hear (e.g. No!), or I found the courage to make my own luck and reinvent my career.

I’m very thankful to be what I am, but I’m not satisfied. I’d like my next five years of my career to be the best five ever. I hope to keep saying that until they have to wheel me out the back door take away my key.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

photo credit

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Whenever I speak to groups about social business, the most common question I am asked is “how much time does it take?” The related question is “how do we measure ROI?” but what folks really think they want to know is “is this worth my time?”

From a tactical perspective, these are all legitimate questions. From a strategic perspective, they are the wrong questions.

If you and your business have not yet fully embraced the emerging relational internet and mobile technologies as a way to transform every aspect of your business and continually improve your ability to impress your employees and customers, the question that should be keeping you awake at night is this:

Am I too late?

If your competitors are embracing social business and you are not, then they are defining the competitive landscape. When your competitor reinvents the rules of the game, the best you can ever hope to achieve, if you even survive, is competitive parity. While you scramble to try to imitate what you think they are doing, they will be busy creating the future again.

There is no free lunch in social business. It takes time for you and your employees to learn how to blog, tweet, make videos, and interact with people in professionally personal ways on LinkedIn, Facebook, and now Google +. But if you never invest the time, you will never develop the skills and never build a formidable river of relevant content that flows through the social networks of your customers, employees and suppliers, working for your brand around the clock, every day of the week.

If you don’t create the content, it will be almost impossible for you to convene conversations with customers at sites you own. If you never convene conversations with customers around things that matter to them, you’ll never build a strong community of people that care about you and your business because you first cared about them. You can’t buy communities of people that trust you so much they are willing to publicly associate their names with yours, you have to build them, and that takes time.

Our economy has been rocked harder the last few years than it has at any time in my life. Businesses have cut their workforces, and many businesses have closed. But at the very same time in history, sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have created the unprecedented ability for people to participate in many-to-many conversations where they quickly and easily share information about things that matter to them. These conversations are archived and shareable. It’s nothing short of a paradigm shift in the way we communicate with each other.

Business as usual has been a recipe for disaster for so many companies in this dismal economy. The paradox is this has been a time of tremendous opportunity to practice business unusual for those that had the foresight to embrace the paradigm shift being driven by relational technologies.

It’s still very early. Make social business a strategic imperative and you still have the opportunity to seize the initiative on your competition, to force them into battle for competitive parity.

The clock is ticking. It’s time for you to give serious thought to how you and your business will respond to the new reality of social business.

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I’m a big fan of the principles of inbound marketing. In contrast to traditional marketing, which blasts out messages in an attempt to interrupt people’s attention, inbound marketing purposes to attract people to your business by providing content about then building conversation and community around issues that matter to your customers. Inbound marketing earns a customer’s trust and permission to eventually share marketing messages by first approaching the customer with a sincere motivation to provide valuable and helpful information, not to sell.

Your company website is the “hub” for your inbound marketing efforts. A blog on your website provides your business with relational capacity – the ability to continuously publish helpful content and to develop conversation and community with customers around that content. Your customers and employees can serve as “spokes” off of your hub, taking your content and sharing it in their social networks, and drawing the people connected to their hubs back to yours. Strangers become friends, friends become customers, and they spread the word about you and your business in places you never imagined you could reach. The content you produce at your website becomes trusted when the people connected to your hub – your friends – share it with their friends. (the picture is adapted from the work of Brian Solis).

If you want to get the full value from inbound marketing for your business, you need to be personally involved in the effort. Hire or develop at least one good “digital citizen” to help you, but do not neglect personally engaging in the effort.

If you keep social media at arm’s length, you will never fully understand what people are doing, why they are doing it, and how to leverage that knowledge to give your company a formidable competitive engine with your use of the relational web. If you let others filter this understanding for you, your company will most likely spend it’s time copying what others are doing instead of forcing your competition to copy what you are doing. Its the difference between competitive parity and sustainable competitive advantage.

Until you develop a few internal digital citizens and become one yourself, a good PR or internet marketing firm can help you get your inbound marketing campaign off the ground. In his exceptional book “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs,” Dharmesh Shah suggests the following three filters you should use when selecting a PR or marketing agency (pp. 182-183):

1. Evaluate the senior leadership and every member on the team assigned to your company to see how fully engaged each of them are on the web. They should all have individual and active Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn accounts and the firm should have a blog. If they are not digital citizens, how can they help you become one?

2. Make sure they practice what they preach. Run the firm’s website through Website Grader to see how well the firm’s site performs. If they can’t manage their own site well, don’t trust them with yours.

3. Ask the agency for names of their other clients or examples of their best work. Run their clients through Website Grader to see how well the sites perform, taking particular note of the inbound links section.

I would add to #3 the following: do the sites the agency says represent it’s best work have remarkable and current content, with mechanisms for active conversation around that content? Is the site an active relational community that attracts and engages people or simply a digital billboard that could only serve to blast out broadcasts? If not, you should be skeptical of the agency’s claims of inbound marketing competence. Move on.

Don’t be fooled by slick websites with fancy graphics. Check under the hood and kick the tires. Your PR or marketing agency needs to keep the engine of your inbound marketing campaign in top operating condition – not just wax the paint and wash the windows.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Andrew Hanely wrote a great guest post today for Jason Falls entitled “That website ain’t gonna visit itself.” The article gave five excellent suggestions for ways to build a community of visitors and commenters at your blog.

You are not entitled to visitors just because you blog. Building community at your site requires an investment of time, effort, learning, and patience. It starts by doing for others that which you want them to do for you. If you are not subscribing to, tweeting, and commenting on the blogs of other’s, you have simply not earned the privilege to host an engaged community at your own site. You are not Seth Godin, so get over it and get to work!

I have to confess that I never heard of Andrew Hanely before today (sorry, Andrew). But I subscribe via RSS to Jason Fall’s excellent blog, and today Jason put his brand on Andrew’s brand by inviting him to guest blog. I read the article, vetted it, and then shared it with my community of followers on Twitter. I signaled Andrew that I had done so by adding his Twitter address to the Tweet. Andrew and I are now connected on Twitter, and I now also subscribe via RSS to his blog. That’s an example the networking Andrew described in his blog post.

Blogging really is like training for a marathon. I’ve run eight marathons, and each required detailed planning, a commitment to execution, and a passion to learn from others how to improve. I never took a class on marathon running. Once I decided it was a goal I wanted to accomplish, I bought a few books to learn the basics and then just started doing what the books advised. I networked with other runners and asked a lot of questions. It’s a tremendous amount of work but also extremely rewarding. The process, while not easy, is relatively simple and anyone that puts their mind to it can do it. The same is true for blogging.

One way I learn from others is by subscribing to blogs on leadership, management, and coaching – the kind of community of folks I want to host at my own site. My blogroll provides a list of some of these blogs I subscribe to and recommend without hesitation.

But I also subscribe to blogs about blogging and social business because they are a rich and robust source of learning how to improve my own skills. I don’t list these in my blogroll because the readers of my blog don’t come here to learn about blogging, but a few of my favorite ones are as follows:

• Build a Better Blog by Denise Wakeman
• Brand-yourself
• Convince and Convert by Jay Baer
• Junta 42 Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi
• Remarkablogger by Michael Martine
• Social Media Explorer by Jason Falls
• Web Ink Now by David Meerman Scott
• Brass Tack Thinking by Amber Naslund
• Brian Solis
• Hubspot
• Kikolani
• Problogger by Darren Rowse
• Scott McKain Viewpoint
• V3 Integrated Marketing by Shelly Kramer
• Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel
• Tentblogger
• Youintegrate by Kneale Mann
• Top Rank

Did I miss your favorite blog on blogging or social business? Do you have any other suggestions about how to build community with your blog? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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