Build trust with your customers over time via a community mechanism to grow an ever-widening moat of protection around your organization.

Read the following Forbes article to understand what I mean.

In part, this idea has been what every customer advocacy program I’ve been involved with has created as a byproduct of cultivating great customer advocates.

However, we often talk about customer advocacy as an effort that further’s the organization’s offensive strategy [voice-of-the-customer (VoC) sentiment helping attract and close new business, aid product improvement feedback loops, GTM messaging, and peer-to-peer insights that aid adoption] vs. a defensive one (VoC sentiment defending competitive nay sayers, or in crisis communications situations).

The article doesn’t explicitly come out and say that what it’s talking about is an organization’s community being a customer advocacy cultivation system, but that’s what it eludes to — and those approaching community well — are achieving that.

I recently stumbled upon Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast. I knew Rainn Wilson (actor who played Dwight Schrute on the show The Office) had written a book (affiliate) pondering various life questions – why are we here, why do we die, what’s a soul and why does it matter, mental health, spirituality, and on and on – but I hadn’t really explored anything about it further.

This Soul Boom podcast came up in my YouTube Shorts feed and it was with guest, Jeff Kober, who is also an actor, but more recently spends a lot of his time teaching mindfulness and spirituality meditation (affiliate) practices to others.

I’m sharing this because I think, at least, this particular episode is really worthwhile for people to check out. Especially, if you ever struggle with anxiety and self-destructive physical/mental habits, no matter how small you might think those destructive habits may be.

What I really like about this episode is this idea that over one’s lifetime the success of your journey is less about what you’ve accomplished externally in the world or the career success you’ve achieved – less about what you do – and more about what you’ve become. How far have you come as an individual – a self-realized individual who can be with, and learn from, their own insecurities and weaknesses to be wiser, more accepting and, in general, more loving to themselves and others.

I don’t take that to mean focus on your weaknesses to help strengthen them. There is always some level of that in play, but I take it to mean be balanced by embracing your strengths wholeheartedly while also acknowledging your weaknesses, fears and anxieties to accept them and understand how they are teachers and provide opportunities.

This can allow you to, as an individual, be more at peace with yourself and where you are presently to better embrace whatever is to come next and those who come along with it.

One thing I like to do to accept my anxiety and use it to my advantage, or at least minimize its paralyzing effect on me, is to verbally name your anxiety as it’s occurring. In other words, label the anxiety – “I’m anxious about X,” or, “When X happens I get nervous about Y.”  If you can identify your anxiety a bit, its power is diminished. It won’t totally go away, but it often takes the edge off to allow you to muster up your abilities to deal with it a little bit better. Writing down what you’re anxious about also often helps.

Being a fully remote worker doesn't always make it easy to find and identify an internal mentors at your employer organization. When you go to an office and see various groups of people from yours, and other functional areas, you can engage in spontaneous hallway conversations that lead to deeper work connections and even mentorship. It's certainly not impossible to do when you're remote, but there is less spontaneity about how it develops.

I have found though that I have access to some of the best mentors available via books. 

(Sigh) 

I get it. Books was not the professional hack you might have been after. However, staying motivated by curiosity and always wanting to improve is the best way to get creative about finding mentors and extracting their lessons for your own growth.  Books are one way to do that. I've shared this before, but I keep a running list of several of the books I've read on my website for others to find and potentially add to their list of mentors.

Side note:  I just recently picked up Scott Galloway's, The Algebra of Wealth - A Simple Formula for Financial Security (affiliate). I'm halfway through. He offers some direct tough love about the subject of becoming financially secure and determining what that looks like for you, but what's been interesting to me is the list of books he references within his own work are many of the titles on my recommended reading list.  

Action You Can Take To Engage in Mentorship:
If you're interested in gaining knowledge and improving through mentorship but feel like you don't have a lot of access to mentors, here's a multi-pronged approach you can use...

1. Start reading books, regularly...like...always
2. Network across LinkedIn to connect with and have Zoom intro chats with as many professionals in and around your field as you can fit in each week. Be sure to ask them about what has made them successful in their role (a little bit of a mentorship moment)
3. Introduce people you meet in your Zoom intro chats to others in your network where it makes sense (this is just good networking and encourages others to introduce their contacts to you - lead by example).
4. If you get the chance, in your networking conversations, share some of what you have learned from others and the books you've read -- the more you reiterate the lessons you've learned the more you deepen your comprehension of those lessons.

The Result:
You're proactively finding mentorship for yourself, growing your network to gain a diversity of ideas from others, and participating in a larger (though remote) professional community that provides potentially greater resources than what you can obtain solo and siloed.

For those of us in a rut. Those of us laid off. Those of us just wondering if what we do professionally even matters...it does...

I read the newsletter of Jason Feifer (author of book Build for Tomorrow), and it highlights that even the most seemingly menial work is noble. When what you do affects even one person in a positive way or just helps out slightly, it has meaning and is worthwhile.

It's important to be in service of something greater, directly to other individuals, to yourself, and it's almost always a compounding effort of work built on top of what has come before you through others' efforts.

Your piece of the progression is important if for no other reason than the fact that no one else can do it the way you do in the exact time and space that you need to accomplish the work to benefit someone else at the exact moment and in the precise way that they experience your work.

One of the things I love about community – using the definition from my previous post:

What is a community? In simple terms, it’s a group of people bound together by a shared interest or purpose

– is that a community in which you find yourself can subdivide into smaller off-shoot communities related to the initial, broader community, but be an entirely new community in and of itself. (Read more from David Spinks regarding intentional vs. unintentional communities and humanity's giant river of connective energy.)

This is how cultures and subcultures form. This is how we navigate life socially – how we “find our people.” 

It happens all the time. Just look at people’s favorite pro sport to watch. Many might say they love to watch baseball, and then have a sub-community of like-minded fans who like to root for the same team.

Or maybe you like Quentin Tarantino movies, but you are of a subset of Tarantino movie-lovers who are die hard fans of just one of his movie titles.

It’s not surprising, but when you think about it, it’s the ultimate discovery engine for you and I to get information and stay engaged vs. isolated in life.

It’s why word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful form of influence and discovery ever. It’s why businesses create communities with their customers around the shared connection of those customers using that product. 

When you have a bond with another person – even a stranger – over something in common between you, respect and trust around that commonality begins to bud and becomes the foundation for listening to one another and allowing each other to be influenced and shaped by what is shared.

Here’s what made me ponder this topic in the first place:

Last Friday night I performed music for a local concert series where I live. There was a cancellation in the scheduled musical line up and at the last minute I was asked to cover and fill the slot. I was happy to do so, but the crowd that might show up was not expecting me based on the advertisements they had seen.

The gist of this music series is to have live music that is available for local residents to come together and have something fun and free to do outdoors in the summer. Of course by design, there are businesses nearby that participate and benefit from the patronage of those who attend the event. However, the idea is that there is free entertainment and a place to gather if those in the local community are looking for something fun, free and family-friendly to do.

People may show up because they like to get out every Friday to gather and socialize with their neighbors in a casual environment. Others have kids driving them nuts with too much free time in the summer and they need to get out of the house so the kids can run around and play with other kids while mom and dad relax, have a beverage, and chat with their parental counterparts.

In this situation, as I was the live music performer, I’m the content. My performance is, from a high-level, fodder – something for them to consume while they’re gathering…perhaps a reason they came out to the event (though in this case I wasn’t the act they thought they would encounter) or maybe a reason, once there, that they stay (which was my hope, and many did, thankfully).

The point is, while I, as a music performer, may not have been the specific reason they came out, my performance may have resonated enough to encourage them to join my own community. My community of those who come together around the music I make and share.

That’s what’s interesting to me, that so many sub-communities of other communities pop up in all sorts of places (online and off) as a result of joining a community or showing up at a gathering of others generally interested in the initial common reason they’re gathering, and finding other subsets of people with whom to commune. For example, enjoying music from (to them) an unknown performer that they’re collectively enjoying and experiencing in that particular moment. 

This is how building a fanbase as a creator works. As a creator we’re using our art as a vehicle to bring people together through their shared interest in and experience with our creative work. 

Often, when starting to build that fanbase, we’re inserting ourselves and our craft into a broader, related community, so those in that broader community who express interest can dive deeper into a subset community around a more specific aspect of the broader community.

Not unlike going to a local event as something to do, discovering some art they like, and further discovering others in attendance who are also having a shared experience enjoying the same art. Now those people are connecting within this subset of the broader community that got them there, and the artist is gaining fans in his/her own community.

As iron sharpens iron, community sharpens community.

Trusting the doing. Being strategic vs executing.

When shifts happen we often want to strategize to have the right approach to deal with the change, but in some ways we likely get further behind by doing that.

Those who assess quickly start executing and iterate along the way will be further ahead of us by the time we finally start executing on our more refined strategic approach.

I sometimes forget that I’m better at connecting a few dots, executing, reassessing and doing it again than I am at pausing to formulate a grand strategy that can be beautifully executed when ready. Even though my urge is to do the latter, that’s not my actual strength.

Trusting those doing instincts is how things develop…

• It is how discoveries are made. 
• It is how progress is made. 
• It is how skills are learned. 
• It is how art is created.

I need to get back to trusting those doing instincts. How about you?

​It’s interesting to me that both B2C and especially B2B marketing likes to overcomplicate how they label and describe marketing efforts.

As an independent artist/musician we label marketing efforts as marketing/promotions, and fan interactions. That’s about it.

The point is: demand gen, ABM, customer marketing advocacy…however you label these efforts, it’s marketing/promotions and fan interactions.
​
No need to overthink it too much. Just create the strategy and execute.

We will follow a product or service recommendation of a friend or colleague, but not one from the organization that makes or provides that product/service, why?

Trust.

We have more trust in our friends and colleagues because we have a human relationship with them. Rapport has been built over time with them (the length of time doesn't necessarily matter).

Often with a friend or colleague, there is not an agenda to sell something to each other from the onset of the relationship. That allows some level of vulnerability and/or candor to enter into the relationship building process over time, which helps accelerate and solidify trust.

Brands are often interrupting one's attention and priorities to force an opportunity to build a relationship. This is true even in the most consultative of selling processes.

It often doesn't work because if the desire to build a trusted relationship of any kind is not mutual, the balance of power between the parties is off, and the "interrupted" party will be guarded in their interactions with the other.