“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”
—Mark Twain
Habit #3: One-To-Many
Do you deal with people one-on-one, or many at a time? One-to-many communication is one of the obvious habits of the influential. So obvious that it’s typically overlooked in books about influence. It’s the most common thing missing for people who could become influential but can’t figure out why they’re not.
Habit #3: Influencers spend much of their time communicating one-to- many.
Influencers spend most of their time communicating in a one-to-many scenario, meaning they’ve got an audience or a following.
The more influential the person, the more significant the following they have. The reverse is also true—the more significant the following, the more influential the person.
The more influential the person,
the more significant the following they have.
Because their time is valuable to them, they choose to communicate with many people at once. They typically have gatekeepers to make sure they use their time to its full advantage and reserve one-on-one time for highly important meetings that are of strategic importance.
The average person can only maintain a social network of 150 close relationships15. Influencers sometimes have followings of thousands if not millions. They choose carefully who they allow into the inner 150.
How do you become one of those highly important people that an influencer would want to meet? Simply put, it’s most effective to become one of them. Start developing an audience in some fashion so that you’re playing the same game.
Leaders of large organizations are influential by default. The members of their organization are the equivalent of their following and are typically highly dedicated since they rely on that leader for their livelihood.
How influential a business leader will be is often dependent on the type of business or organization they run. Ironically, the most influential businesses require the least overhead relative to the amount of profit they create.
Creating an Influential Business
One of the most effective ways to move from one-on-one conversations into one-to-many conversations is by building an online presence. Online businesses are the simplest to run and have the lowest risk and overhead. There is no rent or mortgage to pay and little staff to hire relative to the amount of product and service that can be moved. They are the easiest businesses to turn into an automated structure. Building an online presence allows you to automate aspects of your business so that it can run without you. Most importantly they create the opportunity to have a large online audience that holds much influence. Automating your business gives you a luxury many business owners and leaders don’t have—the time and ability to work on improving your business.
How do you move from self-employed into a powerful leadership role of communicating one-to-many? What might building an audience look like? Options for creating an influential role for you could include professional speaker, conference or committee chair, or newsletter editor. You might have a large social media following or host a teleseminar series or podcast.
Maybe you’re on traditional television and you’re a reporter, talk show or radio host. There are even radio stations where you can buy your own show and sell your own advertising. As you’ll see in later chapters, these audiences are not necessarily synonymous with your customers.
Working one-to-many does not guarantee you’ll be influential, but it is near impossible to hold mass influence if you’re strictly working one-on-one. This concept is so obvious many people overlook it. Having the one-to-many conversation is a critical element to holding mass influence because as long as you’re dealing with people only one-on-one,
a) you’re not going to reach a lot of people, and
b) other influencers won’t consider you to be playing the same game they are and therefore, working with you won’t be a priority.
Exercise 11: Building Influential Connections
The spreadsheet for this exercise is included in the 30 Day Influence Challenge, tuition to which is complimentary with this book at www.MassInfluenceTheBook.com.
1. List ten influencers who are influential in the area in which you wish to be influential. This list can be a continuation of the list you started in Exercise 3 and could include professional speakers, leaders of a professional group, event or a conference hosts, editors, magazine writers, bloggers, radio or TV personalities.
2. Number this list based on how accessible these people are to you. 1 being the most accessible, 10 being the least accessible. These ten names will serve as a starting point, because you will start contacting the “easier” influencers first. As you build relationships with them, they’ll help connect you with the influencers who are more difficult to connect with.
3. Tracking your activity and conversations will help you remember important details. Set up this spreadsheet so that it can become a living document. I suggest setting it up on Excel or in your contacts database or in Google spreadsheets, allowing you to continue to add people to this sheet. Ultimately, this information will become part of your contact management, but for now, it’s useful to see it as a spreadsheet.
4. As you’re filling out the sheet, list the tools that those influencers use to reach their audience. This information will help you when you’re connecting with them. You want to know what their strengths are so that you can meet them in the conversation that they’re in. You might write things like, professional speaking, newsletter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
5. Include a Notes section and fill in details of the last point of contact, so the next time you’re speaking with them, you’ve got something to jog your memory. If you use a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system, I’d recommend you embed this information there.
Unspoken Rule #4
If you don’t work in a one-to-many context, at least in one area, influencers view you to be playing a completely different game. Therefore, they generally don’t want to play with you.
Rank | Influencer | Who Knows them | Their Tools Notes
Receiving Endorsements
Generally when top influencers in your field start endorsing you, your project or business starts growing exponentially. Remember the exercise you did at the beginning of the book (Exercise 3) where you estimated the value of an endorsement? My students often tell me when they do the work and do the work right, they’ve grossly underestimated the value of these relationships with influencers.
As you complete the upcoming exercises, remember to notice what starts happening with the number and quality of endorsements you start to receive. It won’t happen right away, but stay the course and pay attention.
Playing Badminton on the Hockey Rink
Liz was venting about the arrogance of the women she wanted to connect with.
“She’s so arrogant,” Liz complained. “She thinks she’s better than everyone else. She won’t return my calls.”
“Are you sure it’s arrogance?” I ask. “Maybe she just doesn’t see a benefit in the connection.”
“I’m a good person,” insists Liz. “If she doesn’t see my value, she’s just full of herself.”
I can feel compassion towards Liz’s venting. I’ve been there myself. Yet consider another possibility. If you’re trying to build relationship with an influencer and you hold no influence yourself, you are trying to play badminton with a hockey player. It’s easy to blame their lack of response on arrogance, but it is seldom true.
You may be taking their lack of response or communication as a personal rejection, when they’re simply telling you “You’re not playing the same game as me, so it’s weird that you insist that we would be good friends or people who should connect a lot. Why would a hockey player want to play with someone who clearly wants to play badminton?”
Give up your belief that an influencer is being arrogant or judgmental if they don’t want to connect with you. Generally people want to connect with other people who share their passion. Influencers are passionate about influence. If you’re not in the Influence Game, they’re not likely to put a high priority on connecting with you.
The Easiest Way to Work One-to-Many
The best way to connect with hockey players is to play hockey or become involved with hockey at some professional level. The best way to play with influencers then is to be in a one-to-many conversation. If you don’t already have some tools for this, social media is the easiest way to start.
Most basic forms of social media—such as your Facebook personal profile, Twitter and LinkedIn—have you speaking to a broad audience all at the same time. You’re connected to many and they are connected to many. It’s like you’re all equals at a big crowded networking event and all talking to each other.
It is a form of social influence. If you’re well respected and well liked in that community, it does hold sway and influencers will pay attention to a certain extent. They may notice the number of Facebook friends you have. The limitation of social media is that they are not areas where you can be seen as a content expert. In other words, you’re not seen as the one expert speaking to many people at the same time. Influencers will not put as much weight on many-to-many tools.
Higher quality tools would be a podcast, a Facebook fan page, a personal blog or newsletter. These tools involve a single content expert who’s known, liked and trusted by the audience and who is sending information out to a broad audience.
You may be sitting there saying, “I hate selling my stuff on social media.”
Let me just assure you up front: your social media is not to sell you.
Social media, or other tools of influence, allows you to gift influence to other influential people. When you want to meet the new neighbor, you typically bring them a lasagna or apple pie. Your tools of influence become the nice gesture you use to meet and build relationship with other influential people.
We’ll be diving into this concept more in later sections. Just know now that I won’t be asking you to go out and promote yourself to other people.
Finding the Right Tool
Choose at least one tool in the many-to-many conversation (Facebook, Twitter etc.), and one in the one-to-many conversation (e.g., blog, podcast, newsletter). For the duration of this book, use the two tools you choose to complete these exercises. If you don’t know where to start, I recommend Facebook because most of the planet is on Facebook. If you’re predominantly trying to reach a business crowd, LinkedIn is the better tool for business.
Gear your choice of the tool to your personality. Do you prefer writing or speaking? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Introverts or writers may want to lean toward a blog or newsletter, while speakers or extroverts might prefer a podcast a YouTube channel.
Ultimately, most influencers have many of these tools, and you can apply the principles to multiple tools, but for now, focus on improving your strength and agility in at least one area.
Hire Professionals
If you’re just starting out and you don’t know where to begin, a blog is one of the best tools out there for you to be seen as an influencer who’s known, liked and trusted. They’re fairly easy to set up on your own, but if you have the money, hire someone. You want to be focused on content creation and doing the things that create influence and make you money, not the tedious administrative tasks that other people are better at.
This isn’t a social media book, although I will be giving you some tips and strategies. If you’re really struggling on social media, I recommend you hire someone or take a course.
Grow Your Following
Focus on growing your following. Spend five minutes every day on exercises that are going to help you reach a broader audience. The credibility of having a following will help you be seen as an influencer in some capacity.
One tool I like is SocialBuzzClub.com, which was developed by Laura Rubinstein. The basic level for the SocialBuzzClub is free and it allows you to develop relationships with other social media influencers by sharing their content. Once you’ve built up enough points from sharing other people’s content, you can submit Buzz of your own. You can put tweets and Facebook posts up and ask other people to share them. This is a great way to help you spread your expert content and grow your following. If you focus just on Twitter or Facebook shares, it’s a great way to grow your number of friends or fans in your following. This is one tool you might want to spend three or four minutes on every day.
Most influencers love it if you repost a teaser to their articles with a link back to their blog. Reposting their stuff shows them you think highly of them and helps them rise in search engine ranks. Let them know when you do. Send them a quick note, or if you’re posting on Facebook, tag them in the post16.
As you start connecting with more and more influencers, it’s going to be hard to keep track of who you’ve connected with and what you’ve been doing. I recommend keeping a record in the spreadsheet you started, so that you can recall your last conversation with each influencer —it will also give you a place to start the next conversation.
Exercise 12: Building your Social Media Influence
1. Choose one or two social media tools you want to focus on.
2. For the next week, spend five minutes a day using these social media tools to promote the content for the influencers on your list. Start with the most accessible influencers first. Look for their content and/or events and send it out to your following.
3. When you share their content: