Bragging about your accomplishments is frowned upon, typically, as being self-aggrandizing or arrogant. And arrogance is one of those traits that nearly everyone agrees is unattractive and off-putting, either in business or in personal relationships.

But there is an incredibly fine line between being truly humble, and putting on airs of false humility.

False humility does damage to your reputation, your brand, and even your industry and colleagues. For example:

“Nah, I’m not really a writer, I just throw a bunch of words on paper and sometimes people read it.”

“No, I’m not a marketer, I just like helping people tell stories.”

“I’m not a salesperson, I just talk and occasionally get lucky and someone buys something.”

What the hell are we doing?

I don’t suggest walking around with a flashing neon sign touting your accomplishments, because yes, that’s unattractive. The difference between blatant arrogance and confidence is that the ego driven need to tell you constantly about what they’ve done, regardless of the conversation or social situation. For them, it’s a matter of constant, even militant, proof that they’re significant somehow (and they tend to have a knack for making it incredibly awkward).

Class and humility, however, are present in the artfully timed moment when someone asks about what you do, compliments your work, or provides an invited opportunity to share what you do professionally.

Confidence doesn’t require hubris, it requires simplicity and facts.

“Gosh, Amber, I read and loved The Now Revolution. Fantastic job on that”

“Thank you so much, Joe. We’re very proud of our book.”

Or take the dreaded networking event or conference:

“Hey, Susan, tell me a bit about what you do.”

“I’m a consultant that helps businesses develop and market their brand on the web.”

If she had answered “Oh, I’m just a marketing chick, you know. Just someone who writes a bunch of copy and makes fancy logos.” How much credibility do you give her out of the gate? Are you enthusiastic enough to ask her more about what he does? Is she someone you’d not only trust to help your business, but someone you’d put in front of clients if she doesn’t have a lick of confidence in her own work?

Also, what about your colleagues? If you’re selling short what you do, it reflects on your industry. Are all of your colleagues just pursuing work that doesn’t really matter all that much, too?

I get that you don’t want to sound like a braggart or a self-important jackhole. I get that this is a subtle art that takes practice. But you owe it to your business, your clients, and all of your unidentified prospects out there to own what you do. Not with a bunch of exaggerated adjectives. Not with a bunch of ridiculous, inflated marketing copy that borrows every superlative or buzzword in the book.

But talk about your work with surety. Why you do it. Clear, to the point, and with pride and assurance.

If it’s true that we buy from people we like, we also buy from people who we believe can actually do the work and do it well. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a “code monkey” designing my website, I want a professional developer. When I go to the doctor, I don’t want some guy who “just plays around with a stethoscope and prescribes meds on occasion”. I want an experienced physician.

If your business is worth building, it’s worth your own investment, and to at least be the one person that can describe it with confidence. There’s a reason you do what you do. Don’t hide it. Own it.

And watch the difference it makes.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
How False Humility Hurts Your Business

It has nothing to do with working a pitch into your talk. We all know that guy or girl. The first five minutes is their personal resume, there’s a few slides that look like a presentation but are really blinding, cramped marketing materials, and the last 10 minutes is a sales pitch for their company or product.

Hopefully they’re reading. (If that’s you, we won’t ask you to out yourself, but please keep reading. You don’t have to keep doing it that way.)

Want the secret sauce? It’s as simple – and not so easy – as this.

1. Make the speech relevant to your audience.

It’s fine if you have a framework you use for a standard speech. But for heaven’s sake, pay attention to who you’re talking to. If it’s a small business conference, find examples that reflect the challenges of small business. If it’s women, accountants, dinosaurs, you best have your well-practiced, stock presentation reflective of your understanding of their unique point of view. You should present as though you’re one of them sharing your best secrets, rather than an outsider telling them what they ought to be doing.

If you’re not familiar with the nature of the audience, do some research. Ask the organizers why they chose this session/topic for this group and what they know or believe they’re hoping to learn. Tap your online networks in advance and ask people in that industry or category to help you understand what about your topic is interesting to them.

2. Fill it full of valuable information. (Don’t worry, you aren’t going to give it all away).

Bring the best of your knowledge. Share the good stuff. Share successes, details, mistakes, shortcuts, whatever *you* would find useful if you were sitting in the audience. Most standard talks are 30-60 minutes long, which is about enough time to get across a few high level concepts to illustrate the “why” and some sketches about the what and how of execution, if your session is intended to be instructive like that. I promise you there’s no way someone’s going to steal your secret sauce from a slide deck.

If your talk is nothing more than a thinly veiled “hire me to get the good stuff” thing, it’s going to turn people off. They likely paid to come hear you and learn something. Besides, if your entire value as a professional is wrapped up in a single conference session presentation, you’ve got bigger issues to address.

3. Prepare. Relentlessly. And leave time for Q&A.

It’s so obvious when someone has their presentation nailed. You can tell that they’re prepared and fluid. That they did their homework and their research, and that they understand the audience. The real secret though? Anyone on earth can learn to recite the script behind a carefully architected presentation. The outstanding pros show their stuff during Q&A. Unless you’re doing a keynote, Q&A is something that most organizers and attendees alike will welcome, and it’s often where the best stuff happens.

Someone who has only memorized a deck won’t be able to provide a ton of value in response to questions that are impromptu. But if you *really* know your stuff, you’ll shine when you’re contributing your expertise to the questions and challenges that are on the minds of the audience. If you can, always leave 15 minutes give or take at the end of a talk to answer questions.

4. Make yourself accessible afterward.

After most conference sessions, there’s a stack of people that will immediately come up to the stage and ask follow up questions, ask for your business card, or give you theirs. If you have to follow up on something, be sure you scribble a note on the back of the card to remind yourself. And follow up.

Have your contact information on at least the first slide and the last, and if you can do it tastefully, stick your Twitter handle or your email address on other slides, too. Come with plenty of business cards. And if you can, be present at the event before and after your speech. Some folks won’t approach you in the midst of the post-speech rush, but will say hi later if you’re around and not surrounded.

How do I know it works?

If after the speech, people come and talk to me, ask for my card, give me theirs, and want to continue a dialogue. The goal is not an immediate “hire me” instantly. The goal is to move that person one step closer to being interested in my expertise and capabilities. The business might pay off in a week or a year. Sometimes it won’t go anywhere at all, but many times, it does. Many folks don’t connect immediately, but later remember your speech, and drop you an email because when they needed something that you do, you were the first person that came to mind.

I’m sure one of my analytics friends will tell me that I should be relentlessly tracking funnel stages and lead close rates so that I can properly quantify ROI of my speaking engagements. They might be right, and if that’s something that’s incredibly important to you, by all means do that.

But you know what? I’m not that rigorous, personally, because I’m comfortable with my anecdotal experience confirming my hypothesis enough to keep doing it.  My company can probably tell you how many I send them directly after an event or a speech, as I usually gather up a bunch of those business cards and get them to the right person. And I’m sure there’s many more that end up there but that I don’t know about.

I do know, however, that these connections are valuable to me on levels beyond just the lead, simply in the quality of my network, the diversity of the connections, the experience of learning from and with other people, and the joy I get when someone tells me that I actually helped them think about something in a new way.

In Closing…

The truth is this: no one comes to hear you speak so that you can market to them. Period.

Good presentation skills *are* marketing in their own, more indirect way. People say “Gee, she knows her stuff. Maybe I should work with her, and maybe her company is as smart/helpful/useful as she is. I should check them out.”

But the goal of the presentation is not the pitch. You don’t have to do that, I promise. People are smart. They can find your website and if you give them a great talk, they will.

The goal is the information sharing, the knowledge transfer, the contribution to something bigger than you. And I’m in full support of speaking being an outstanding way to develop business, as I’ve done it successfully for many years in several different industries. But the business you earn is the result of the effort you put in, not an entitlement just because someone handed you a stage. Business doesn’t work that way. It never has. And if that’s the way you approach it, you’ll likely burn more connections than you make.

I’m eager to hear if you agree.

What bugs you about seeing blatant pitches on stage? What makes you want to learn more about a speaker or give them your business? What have you learned as a speaker about the correlation between your presentations and earning new business?

image credit: Dave_Murr

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Secret Formula for Getting Business From Speeches

I see so many case studies for social media being presented – in their entirety – as:

• social discounts and coupons
• a video campaign
• a clever Facebook contest

But this drives me crazy insane. Here’s why.

Social media is not just direct marketing parked online.

Ultimate social media success by my definition is far more that whether you took advantage of the latest application craze to market the same stuff you always have.

Part of the trouble is that we rarely distinguish between Social Media, The Tools and Tubes and Social Media, The Business Philosophy. And they’re different.

Social Media as a Tool Set

Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. They’re all technologies and tools. The means, if you will.

Adding a social sharing component to your campaigns and content is a good thing. In technical terms, it means you’re “adding something social” to your communications to give them longer legs, more interactivity even. Adapting some of your existing brand focused efforts for increased social media awareness, sales, or customer loyalty is fine. It’s part of the deal, and it’s certainly something into which you need to evolve.

But it’s only part of it.

Social Media as a Business Philosophy

This where it gets sticky, and where the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when we applaud a company for being awesome at social media when they pull off something cool, innovative, or a contest specific to a social network.

If the proper intent doesn’t live behind the campaign effort and there aren’t more pieces being put in place to make the entire approach to business more socially-minded, it’s just a clever campaign.

Businesses that are supporting their outward facing social media efforts with a true underlying philosophy are the ones that will win in the long run. That means your campaigns need to be representative of broader goals to:

• Listen to the newly amplified and disseminated voices of your customers online, and the feedback they’re sharing
• Respond to that feedback, and take it into consideration when you make decisions related to how you operate
• Provide helpful, useful information to your customers that supports their entire relationship with you, not just their moment of purchase
• Empower every person in your business to be and do all of those things themselves, within agreed upon guidelines, but with the freedom to respond with speed and personality
• Adapt your people and processes to provide more open, fluid networks of communication. That means inside your business, between your business and community (past, present, and future customers), and among and within the community itself.

Campaigns can be fun. Entertainment is a viable goal in itself. So might a click through be to a discount coupon to drive more foot traffic to your store. But these are merely single parts of this revolution, and superficial ones at that. We’ve got to buttress the surface work with deeper re-engineering of how and why we do what we do.

Otherwise, It’s All Window Dressing.

If we continue to celebrate video campaigns alone as the pinnacle of social media success, we’re missing our own boat.

Yes, it’s something to get noticed and talked about. Yes, it’s important to earn more and broader footprints for your brand online. But it can’t stop there, or you’ve negated the rest of the cycle and the subtleties that are what make social media so powerful in the first place. The video campaign ought to be an indicator of a broader system of listening, response, participation, improvement, and back again.

You can be the listener. The observer. The helper, the educator, the business that’s invested and responsive. You can be more than a turbo-charged marketing vehicle, and you should be. Social media marketing is only part of the equation. As Jay Baer would say, it’s not enough just to do social, you have to learn how to be social.

The companies that will stand out as examples worth emulating will show evidence – or at least discussions of their exploration – of weaving all of those pieces together to form a more evolved, more symbiotic whole.

It may be new and we may just be getting our sea legs, but let’s not settle. There’s more to all of this than just a campaign. And if there isn’t, I’m in the wrong business and have made a grave, grave error of judgment because I’ve been believing in – and seeking to create – something much more evolutionary all along.

What say you?

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Successful Social Media is More Than A Campaign