Digital Mentors

It’s never been easier to be mentored on a specific subject, from experts, for free. There are even live feedback mechanisms from other interested experts. It’s called blogging and you may think this is a ridiculous entry giving you’re reading one right now.

It’s only ridiculous if we fail to leverage the blogosphere to it’s full potential. Many of us don’t. We’ve got to get involved. Not be passive, ask questions, link, re-post and share with our crew.

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The real power of such social media is dialogue. My favourite blog has 25,000+ readers a day. The publisher has his email address listed on it. When I email him a question he gets back to me within a day or two with an answer, a link, a blog entry or if I’m really lucky a free PDF copy of his latest book.

In fact some of my most valued mentors are colleagues I know in a similar space, or mind frame who write excellent blogs in their own right. I trust and value their opinion and so they are mentors to me also – even though – better that, they are half my age. Like Ross, Steve and Ben. Who are all as good or better than any celebrity business blogger you follow.

Go on, ask me a question!

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Zero Cost Advertising & Social Media

I’ve blogged before many times about how to generate brand awareness with limited or zero budget. The list of tools available is pretty long actually. No need to list them here – you know what they are. But to use them effectively takes two important ingredients:

Ingredient No 1: Frequency
If we think are are going to start a brand blog, a youtube channel, twitter account and all our communication problems will be solved over night, then we have really not understood what has happened with social media. If I was to summarize it it succinctly. I’d say – we’ve gone from a ‘produced’ world to an ‘organic’ world. The produced world took large capital investments. The organic world is free, but not everything grows, and those that do take time. It’s a lot like nature, free but time & frequency of events is the asset.

The more often we return to our crop and nurture it, the healthier the return we’ll get. Occasionally something will just click. We only have to do something ‘once’ and it will grow astoundingly with little input other than the raw ingredients. The market will take get hold of the communication and we’ll crack it – it’ll go viral. This is the anomaly – it happens so rarely, that we know about it every time. Best advice is to assume it wont happen to us.

Ingredient No 2: Patience
We don’t have to buy the communication asset. They’re here, we have been given them, but we have to work them. We need to allow time for our compound effort to accumulate. Be patient and trust that our continual effort and focus on frequency, will work in the long run.

Patience has something on its side that the old media world didn’t – digital foot prints. Our stuff stays on line forever. So when a passionate web surfer finds one of our things they like – they can do a back catalog on our stuff. This is when things can work, even months after launch date. A TV ad on the other hand has one shot at the eyeballs. If it’s missed by the target market, it’s all too late.

No doubt, we need to build great stuff for people to care, but in the new world of zero cost communications, Startups can can get it wrong and learn as we go.

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Free advice – from the world greatest thinkers

It’s never been easier to be mentored on a specific subject, from experts, for free. There are even live feedback mechanisms from other interested experts. And most of the amazingly cool and informative stuff comes from blogs – just like this one.

But are you really taking advantage of this mentoring revolution?

Do you have a digital mentor?

Have you emailed the writer of your favourite blog?

Asked for advice / help, given them advice or help?

Are you passing on your skills by blogging for others?

My favourite blog has 25,000 readers a day. The publisher has his email address listed on it. When I email him a question he gets back to me within a day or two with an answer, a link, a blog entry or if I’m really lucky a free PDF copy of his latest book. The real value comes from the interactions, not the reading.

Smart entrepreneurs get involved in the conversation, they don’t just listen to the lecture.