by Nick Morgan
Finally, the whole point of these efforts is to start a conversation. Once you have some good content to point people to, start engaging with people who are active in your field. Offer guest blog posts to people who write on similar topics. Connect with people on Twitter and other social networks. Answer questions and ask them. Soon enough, people will begin to know you for your ideas and will come to you.
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74 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications The internally consistent persona
is where it all begins
Let’s step back a bit and think more deeply about what works in the online world along personal branding lines. What promotes success? What should we strive to look like online? How should we think about our online life? And how do we ultimately control it? Are there any limits, or does anything truly go?
Fortunately, the mental test is simple: we relate to brands the same way we relate to friends and other people—and vice versa.
We are drawn to people who exhibit warmth and competence.
If we find either one lacking, we respond with suspicion, pity, or disgust.
Brands elicit similar feelings. We want warmth and competence. If we’re low on warmth, we get suspicion. If we’re low on competence, we get pity. Low on both, we get contempt.
Now, credibility (competence) and trust (warmth) are also prime success factors in communications. Study after study has found that audiences want credibility and trust from their speakers, for example.4
The basic outlines of the online persona are thus very human, straightforward, and similar for both people, products, and organizations. According to Susan Fiske and Chris Malone, authors of The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companie s, the biggest surprise from their research comes in the area of making mistakes.5 Counterintuitive as it might seem, the best time to relate to your customers, the authors find, is when you’ve made a mistake. Provided you respond with authentic contrition and own up to the mistake, you may develop a stronger bond. (The risk, of course, is that because of the fragile nature of trust and connection online, the bond that is broken will be abandoned, not made stronger.)
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You can take three steps to build your desired online presence.
Think first of all about how you are connecting with your audiences and potential audiences. Where’s the warmth? Which of your projected qualities are charming and human?
Second, how are you projecting competence? Do you have a video, a YouTube channel, a blog, an ebook, a published book, a TV or radio show, or some other platform? You need some way to show the world that you know what you’re doing.
Third, what are you doing to show authenticity? You don’t set out to make mistakes, but you probably will make mistakes in the long run. So you might as well make an acknowledgment of this likelihood part of your long-term narrative. How do you use those mistakes to get closer to your audience?
The human psyche is simple when it comes down to our daily heuristics for determining friendship, brand loyalty, organizational affiliation, and whether we like someone. Ignore human nature at your peril in any of those areas.
In the long run, in sum, keeping track of your digital persona, updating it, and ensuring that it accurately represents what you’re trying to achieve are essential parts of taking control of your life and managing your career. All too often, most of us let these important elements slide.
Your online persona is table stakes
Now, all this work I’ve described is simply the basic hygienic online package you need to create so that the internet—or worse, some enemy, troll, or competitor—doesn’t control you. And yet most people will never take the time to think through the issues relating to online personas, branding, and how the online world captures their personalities.
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76 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications It’s a great mistake. Don’t fall victim to online passivity. Take control. If you don’t take control and disaster does strike, then the only glimpse the rest of the world will ever get of you will be the impression connected to this disaster.
“Nick Morgan” is a common enough name that there are several competitors out there for primacy on Google. My persona dominates simply because I’ve been far more active online than anyone else who bears my name. But there’s a sad twist on the name and an example of how the internet can hijack things you think belong to you.6 Morgan Nick was a beautiful little girl who disappeared from a Little League baseball game in 1995, apparently kidnapped. She has never been seen again. Her mother worked at turning this tragedy into something positive, creating the Morgan Nick Foundation to help other families whose children have been kidnapped.
In the early days of the internet, Morgan Nick came up every time I googled my own name. Now, Google is more selective and its search engines have improved, so I have to google “Morgan Nick” to find her story anywhere near the top page. Because her name is my name reversed, over the years I’ve come to imagine an upside-down world where all the Nick Morgans and Morgan Nicks get together, play baseball, and celebrate family. A sort of virtual-name family reunion.
I can afford to take a long view, since my persona is robustly established online. But if you haven’t done that work, be prepared to be hijacked by the news one day.
Passivity is dangerous online
You either own and control your persona, or the internet creates and controls one for you. You may or may not like the second version. Certainly, it will not be created with your feelings in mind.
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Indeed, most of us have far less control of our digital personas than we realize, simply because we haven’t been instrumental in their creation. Typically, a complicated, messy, mostly out-of-date digital legacy is what comes up every time someone googles your name.
Don’t think people google you very often? Nowadays, they google your name when you apply for a job, you are asked to give a speech, they meet you for the first time, you try to sell them something, they try to sell you something, you want to go on a date with them, they want to go on a date with you, their teenager wants to date your teenager, and on and on. The point is that googling the names of people we encounter is practically a daily occurrence. You can’t escape it.
Preventative maintenance is essential
How do we get ahead of this near-constant googling? Beyond the initial steps I’ve outlined above, there are three essential steps you should undertake monthly—or at least once a quarter to keep this flood in check.
Start by reviewing all the material that’s most immediately under your control. Clean up your own digital tracks—your website, your blog, your social media. Ask yourself, Is there still a consistent theme? Does it represent me in the way I want to be represented? What needs to change? What about me has changed but isn’t represented yet?
Then refresh and empty your browser, and google yourself to see what comes up. Is Google saying the right things about you? If not, what can you put out there now that will rise to the top of the Google rankings and supplant whatever’s there?
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78 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications If there’s material that doesn’t float your boat or market your company, your family, your town, your party—whatever you care about—well, then get to work adding material that does.
Plan to refresh your brand regularly, with expert help. The cobbler’s children never have any shoes, or so the saying goes.
And most people are busy doing whatever it is that is their main work. This important housecleaning job won’t get done if you don’t build it into your schedule. For any kind of control of your online life, you should
be refreshing your brand at minimum once a year. For many fields of expertise, more often than that will be necessary. And get expert help, because you won’t do it as well as someone with a little bit of distance will.
You are what shows up about you on the web, just as much as you are yourself in real life. In fact, for most people you interact with, your digital persona is more important than your face-to-face reality.
What does your persona say about you right now? Remember the double standard—the human tendency to judge other people more harshly than we judge ourselves—and all those other people with your name. Shape your own story online, lest you be shaped.
Understand the benefits and perils
of search engine optimization
If you’ve hung on this far in the chapter, it’s probably because you want to be more than merely perceived as consistent and somewhat au courant online. You want to be noticed. Of course, once you’re noticed, then the importance of all the aforementioned work increases exponentially, because the trolls will be out with their clubs for you, looking for inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
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So do the work first. But let’s say you have done it and now you want to get noticed online. What to do next? First, the bad news. There are no shortcuts to getting noticed online. It’s not about search engine optimization (SEO) or enjoying the sheer luck of going viral or some other voodoo. All that stuff changes so fast that if you chase it, you’ll be chasing a chimera forever.
What does it take to get noticed? You must build a community, that is, a community of people who have similar interests and who come to you as one locus of the discussion that interests them. This community is what insulates and protects you from the haters, the trolls, and the people looking to feed off your misery. If you have a strong-enough community, it will come to your aid when you most need it, when you’re under attack from some weird, angry troll.
You build a community with content and issue marketing.
The details of all the steps involved in such marketing lie outside the scope of this book. Whole books have been written on the subject, and none better than David Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Marketing and PR, a perennial best seller now in its sixth edition.7 Scott is an expert on the subject, and a quick internet search of his name will yield a good deal of free insight as well as his many books on the subject.
In brief, to create buzz today, you first need dedication to an area of content you are passionate about and have some expertise in. Then, when you put that content out there in the social media stream where the world will see it, Google will rank it and people will start to cluster around you to discuss it.
The test of sincerity in that kind of marketing is time and depth. We tend to believe experts who have spent the hours figuring out the issues in their field and have dug deep enough that they’ve uncovered some convincing answers. Initial attention and then the memories it takes in each human brain to get the Chapter_03.indd 79
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80 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications world to continue to pay attention are not created instantly; they need time to develop.
SEO comes from time and passion for a topic What sort of content helps focus that attention and create those memories? People have two mental processes to create memories. Either they remember things verbatim or they remember the gist.8 We’re more likely to remember verbatim phrases if they are clever, and rhyme or repeat in some way. We remember the gist better if it has a strong emotional component. “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.” At least that’s how I remember the phrase developed by the brilliant lawyer Johnnie Cochran to defend his client O. J. Simpson.
Repetition is key, as is simplicity. And pictures don’t serve for a thousand words. Pictures need to be simple and fit into people’s predetermined categories to be remembered well: puppies, kittens, cute small furry things. Words that create pictures in your mind are as good as—if not better than—pictures. But the internet likes pictures more and more, so you want to think about the visual representation of your ideas early and often. For more on this memory-making process, check neuroscientist Carmen Simon’s excellent book Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions.9
Get started with your online story
Here are five questions that I’ve found over the years help people get started developing their online brand and persona.
What do I stand for, and who is in my community? The first half of this question seems harder and more cosmic than the Chapter_03.indd 80
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latter half, so start with the latter if it’s easier. Imagine you had the single perfect community member in front of you. Who would that be? And then, what are the general demographics of your tribe—the people you want to address?
Once you clarify who your community is, then figuring out what you might say to them comes next with surprising ease.
OK, the job’s not done yet, but you have made a great start.
What really ticks me off? Rants are great ways to reveal values and positions. Asking yourself what you hate is not about going dark or negative, but is rather about finding the outlines of the light that you’re seeking. Rants are liberating, too. In every sphere of modern life except the political, we spend a good deal of time making nice, concealing our true feelings, and getting along with people we occasionally want to string up. So a rant is just healthy for the system.
What will the world look like if I’m able to change it? Looking ahead and assuming success, you get to play in an online world that’s at least partly your creation. It’s fun, and it’s liberating, too, to imagine a world cured of the ills you perceive and made better in the ways that matter to you. Get started describing that world.
What are three nonnegotiable values I live by? What am I willing to compromise on? Understanding the difference between your must-haves and nice-to-haves is a key way of delineating your values and your ideas. These vary enormously from person to person and system to system, so getting clear on the essentials and the frills takes you a long way down the road to an idea.
What’s the problem my community has for which my expertise or passion is the solution? This is the sand in the passion oyster—
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82 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications the issues that people turn to you for, time and again. It is the pain point that you can diagnose instantly and always see the way forward from. If you’re in an organization, it’s the problem that the rest of the team always calls on you for. Do they turn to you for people advice, systems issues, or procedural problems? Your expertise shows up naturally at certain moments and for certain needs. Focus on those needs, and you’ll know the way forward.
Control of your online persona and life is both a necessity and a discipline for any of us who have an online life. And if you don’t think you do, think again. You’re probably listed on at least several websites, not to mention Facebook and other social media.
It’s time to control your virtual presence.
I close this chapter with a return to the topic I raised at the beginning: a plea to end the double standard all too many of us have when it comes to online behavior and forgiveness. “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is a biblical dictum that is the inverse of the Golden Rule, and both admonitions should have huge currency on the internet. We need to reclaim our lost humanity on the web.
We need to restore the emotions that all too many of the digital conveniences of the modern world have silently and unthinkingly taken away. We don’t notice their loss until someone lashes out at us in a cold, hostile, or harsh way and we wonder, “What has happened to humanity? People never used to be like that!” What we really mean is that the online world has hurt us emotionally and it’s time to be
gin the work, every day and globally, of putting the emotions back into our online tribes, worlds, and communities. We need to act with charity, with kindness, with forbear-ance, and with an understanding of our shared humanity—and we want everyone else to act that way toward us as well. It takes us all, working together, to achieve anything like that.
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Let’s get started. Let’s agree to be truly consistent about ourselves and toward others and to remember the Golden Rule.
Practical fix
The published value statement
Every team that works together in the virtual space needs to spend some time at the beginning of the relationship establishing its jointly held values—and a process for voicing and resolving problems when those values are violated. Some examples of these value statements exist in work teams in the real world, but they are even more important in the virtual space, both for the work the team must do to establish them jointly and for the process of resolving value violations.
Use these questions to develop a value statement, either a personal one or a team one, that you publish online in a place that is appropriate for your or your team’s aims.
What do I (we) stand for, and who is in my (our) community?
What do I (we) love, and what do I (we) hate?
What are my (our) nonnegotiable values?
What’s the problem I’m (we’re) solving?
And the details, such as these questions: What’s the best way to communicate with me (us), how should people raise issues, what is my (our) process for resolving them, and how long do we anticipate working on the problem we’re getting together for?
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