The Influencer Project Recap

The folks over at ThoughtLead presented today what they call the “shortest marketing conference ever” – The Influencer Project. The concept is simple, 60 Speakers in 60 Seconds delivering bite-sized advice on how to be influential online.

I liked the concept (a lot) and I thought they had a great line-up of speakers delivering some solid advice. There were some points where I wish a presenter had the opportunity to elaborate on his/her thoughts and at some points it felt as if the speaker was rushed, but like I said, all in all, some solid advice there.

If you missed it, don’t worry, there’ll be an mp3 and transcript available for download shortly. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some of the points that stood out for me…

60 Ways to Increase Your Influence Online:

I listed to the conference in it’s entirety but missed a few points here and there. That’s ok because the audio and transcript will be available for download at a future date. In the meantime, I wanted to hi-light some of my favorite points and expand on why I thought they were great insights. I’d love it if you shared some of your favorite points in the comments below.

What you need to do is stop talking about your products and services. Everything you create on the web should be valuable information for the people you’re trying to reach and should focus less on your products and services. People care deeply about solving their problems. – David Meerman Scott

David opened up the mini-conference with some important and accurate insight. As a business, you should focus less on shouting the greatness of your product through the loudspeaker and focus more on finding solutions to people’s problems. People don’t care about your product, they care about how it’s going to fix their problem.

Consistency. Consistency demonstrates commitment. For the people that you serve, if you are consistent, they’re going to keep coming back. – Michael Port

I always tell people that the success of their blog is dependent on their ability to develop good content consistently. Here, Michael emphasizes the fact that consistency is key across all aspects of what you do. If you want people to connect with you and come back time after time, focus on consistently delivering good content.

You have to know where you’re going. Nobody’s going to want to follow you if you don’t know where you’re going. Then stand up and look at the people around you and make it all about them. – Liz Strauss

Liz Strauss is brilliant. Period. And she knows what it takes to build a thriving community. Here she offers some straight-forward but incredibly effective advice. Before you can lead a tribe, you have to know where you’re going. What’s your mission? What’s your purpose? Then, you have to empower your audience to share in that mission (by making it about them).

Make connections with people online and then go meet them in person in the real world offline. Combine the two together.  – Scott Porad

Social media is great for it’s ability to connect people with a larger audience. But it’s even better when you can turn on-line connections into off-line connections (a point hi-lighted very well by Scott Porad). You should be doing everything you can to solidify your on-line connections by looking for opportunities to connect with those people off-line.

No matter who you are, you need to look under the hood of the technologies that are available. Each month, assign yourself three digital trends you’ve been hearing about and do a test-drive. – Laurel Toby

Laurel offered a solid tip for staying on top of the digital trends curve. Each month, pick out a few new technologies and give them a test-drive. If you find something you like, and it’s effective, go with it. If it’s not, ditch it. Either way, you know that you’re staying on top of today’s trends.

Storytelling. People are buying the story. They either connect with your story or they don’t. – Michael Margolis

Michael hit on an important point. And that is that every business should get better at storytelling. Why? Because people connect with stories and they are either connecting with yours or they aren’t. So what’s your story? And how can you work on communicating that story better?

Find people who have your audience already but are not selling them the things that you’re selling. Partner with them and co-sell. – Dave Navarro

If you’re selling an information product or can partner with someone to deliver a better service offering, I think this is a great approach. And Dave’s right, by partnering with other people, you’re opening yourself up to other communities that you’re not already tapped into with a testimonial from the partner that essentially validates your service offering. It’s a great strategy and makes a ton of sense!

Give it wings and give it roots. Ground your content solidly in who you are. Also give it wings by making it easily shareable around the web. – Ann Handley

I loved Ann’s parenting analogy here and from a content creation perspective it makes a ton of sense. Understand who you are, what your about, and always write content from that perspective (with your own personal touch to it). Then, make that content easily shareable. People who connect with who you are and what you’re about, will spread your message easily.

Get very, very good at filtering and aggregating content. – John Janstch

This wasn’t all of John’s messaging; I missed the last bit but I understand his point. We live in an age of information overload. The only way to stay on top of the game and get sought after as a leader and information resource is to get good at filtering content to weed out the bad stuff and share all of the good stuff. The better you get at filtering content and consistently providing value, the more influential you’ll become.

Share good content consistently. – Jason Falls

So simple but oh so effective. Jason is somebody who consistently provides valuable content to his community (through his blogs and his social networks). People see him as a reliable information resource because he’s consistent. How consistent are you? Can you work on providing more value consistently?

Over To You:

I missed some of the conference but these were some of my favorite points that stood out. How about you? What were your favorite tips or bullet points from the speakers? What’s one piece of actionable advice that you took away and that you’re going to implement?