5

REMAINING CONSISTENT AND BOOSTING FAMILIARITY

A TALE OF two executives:

On November 12, 2013, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga published his debut post as a LinkedIn Influencer. Within hours of being published, Financial Inclusion by 2020: Our Generation’s Equivalent of Putting a Man on the Moon had generated tens of thousands of views, thousands of shares, and hundreds of LinkedIn comments.¹ Ajay had started a compelling conversation, and people around the world were highly engaged.

Nearly three and a half years later, Mr. Banga has not responded to a single reader comment. Far more frustrating, however, is that after generating so much momentum with this first post, he never wrote a second.

Compare Mr. Banga’s output to that of Dharmesh Shah, cofounder of HubSpot. Dharmesh became a LinkedIn Influencer in 2012, and within his first nine months alone, he had already published 30 articles. Each generated an average of 123,000 views—with his most popular one hitting 1.2 million, along with 4,200 comments.

Today more than 620,000 people follow Dharmesh’s Influencer profile, a readership twice as large as Ajay Banga’s. Dharmesh has shown the same commitment to consistent publishing through Twitter, the HubSpot blog, and his other website, OnStartups.com. Not only have these resources become some of the most trusted, beloved sources of knowledge in online marketing, Dharmesh now is regarded as one of the most influential thought leaders in the business.

Maybe it isn’t a big deal that Ajay Banga has only ever published one piece. After all, he’s the CEO of one of the world’s largest, most powerful multinational corporations; will his lack of consistency on LinkedIn really make a difference to MasterCard’s bottom line? Compared with MasterCard, HubSpot is minuscule; therefore, Dharmesh has to scramble to make his voice consistently heard in order to survive. Because the stakes are lower for Ajay, he can afford to remain idle.

That’s a cynical assessment, and there’s certainly some truth to it. However, it’s also true that MasterCard’s size doesn’t guarantee a competitive advantage. The company’s success depends on the strength of its relationships with its customers, investors, and partners. To pass up any opportunity to enhance and expand on those relationships is a big deal.

If the thought of taking HubSpot and Dharmesh Shah’s lead and publishing a consistent stream of content makes you cringe, you’re not alone. How many times have you visited a company’s blog only to find that it hasn’t been updated for the last six months? Or looked up some Fortune 100 CEO on Twitter to discover that her last tweet was in 2012? Clicking through neglected content streams feels a bit like tiptoeing through an old graveyard. It’s almost as if you’re trespassing in a place you’re not supposed to be—not exactly the feeling you want to inspire in your clients.

The concept of thought leadership is one loaded with nuance and complexity. There are no hard-and-fast rules except for one: if you are not consistent, you are not a thought leader.

The Relationship Between Consistency, Memory, and Top-of-Mind Status

I want to revisit a metaphor. In Chapter 2, I compared building trust to making a campfire. But you can’t simply start a bright, beautiful fire and then walk off. A fire needs a constant supply of oxygen and fuel to survive, so it’s up to you to fan the flames, rearrange the wood, and add new logs as needed. If you turn your back on it for too long, your fire burns out.

The same is true for thought leadership. You could publish the perfect piece of content—one that sparks millions of views, shares, and comments—and you’d skyrocket to top-of-mind status very quickly. But getting to the top doesn’t guarantee you’ll stay there; thanks to our ever-shrinking attention spans, it’s a precarious position to occupy. If you wait too long to publish your next piece, the audience that once hung on your every word will soon forget you.

An industry leader is someone who bridges the gap between her audience’s short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory is seriously short: on average, we have the capacity to simultaneously retain seven pieces of information, but only for about 20 seconds.² In light of the staggering amount of information we process on a second-to-second basis, short-term memory is like quicksand.

For short-term memory to enter the long term, a neurological process called consolidation has to occur, during which neurons in the brain rearrange themselves. According to Alison Preston, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin Center for Learning and Memory, consolidation doesn’t happen instantaneously; it requires the passage of time. It can take minutes, hours, or even years to develop long-term memories.³

Allow me to illustrate this with an embarrassing case study from my own life.

When I was six, my older sister taught me the Cabbage Patch Kids song, and she’d make me perform it anytime her friends were around. (Go ahead, imagine it.)

I’m not exactly sure how long it took for the words to sear themselves into my long-term memory, but by the time I was about seven, I knew every single word by heart. And she and her friends just loved it.

Like a lot of kids, I was a bit of a ham; I knew that they’d laugh and cheer if I performed it, and I took advantage of that. I learned what would be valuable to them, and I did my best to deliver. My sister got married this year, and leading up to it, she and her friends told me how they still remember those moments.

Things really haven’t changed all that much. I still know every word of the Cabbage Patch Kids song, which is why every karaoke night ends with me howling, “There will be laughter in the cabbage patch againnnn!” And I still do my best to deliver what my audience finds valuable.

Though strange, this demonstrates the vital role that consistency plays in creating long-term memories. When I explained this example to Paul Spiegelman, an expert in company culture, he said, “John, I want to be for my audience what this Cabbage Patch Kids song has been for you. I want to stick with them for life and be so memorable that I pop up in their minds when they think of anything company culture–related.”

His goal is one that all leaders should share. You want your brand and your company to be what your audience thinks of when they hear news, information, stories, or anything else related to what you do. That’s valuable real estate. Consider the benefits someone like Elon Musk has reaped because people think of him and his companies when they think of business, technology, and innovation. When you are exposed consistently to something over a long period, it becomes familiar and easy to recall. When that something is someone’s face, voice, or personality, the familiarity you feel goes a long way toward becoming top of mind. But achieving familiarity is not the same as becoming a thought leader; it’s only a first step.

Consistency, Quality, and Credibility

How many of you or your family members talk about the good old days when kids could ride their bikes and play all day without the fear of some creep bothering them (or worse)? You probably hear awful news stories all the time, and this bias that humans have, called the availability heuristic,⁴ can make you think that it’s more dangerous than ever because it seems like all you ever hear is terrible news.

When the news regularly focuses more on the risks and dangers around us than on all the good things that actually do happen, a kind of shortcut forms in our brains, and that negative information is what we retrieve most easily. That doesn’t mean kids are necessarily in more danger today than kids a generation or two ago were. It just means that the last thing you probably heard, read, or saw was negative and scary, and you’ve heard it pretty frequently, so that’s the information you draw on to make a decision or judgment.

Psychologists studied this idea decades ago and realized that people use examples they can immediately recall to help form their opinions (as opposed to collecting and analyzing all the data to make rational and entirely fact-based decisions).

I used the news example because I think we’ve all experienced hearing more bad news than good in most media, but this idea manifests itself in so many other ways, too.

For example, close your eyes and think of your least favorite band of all time, the one that reaches new depths of awfulness with every song it releases. It’s easy to envision the lead singer’s smug face as he blurts out those terrible lyrics in that hyperannoying voice, right?

Sorry to evoke such an unpleasant image, but I was only proving a point. The type of familiarity bred by consistency is directly related to the quality of the output. You’re quite familiar with your least favorite band in the world, but your familiarity takes the form of loathing.

Consistent quality, in contrast, generates credibility and helps people form positive opinions and judgments.

This time, I’d like for you to think of an actor or actress who consistently delivers unbelievable performances, someone who is an icon in the industry.

Did you picture Meryl Streep (or even someone like Britney Spears in Crossroads)?

All joking aside, whether you pictured Meryl Streep or someone else, we should strive to be a little more like those who always deliver outstanding work. Meryl, for example, consistently makes a mark in every movie she’s in, and many will probably say that she was great in the last film they saw her in. She’s an authentic, talented actress who enhances lives through her work, and her audience can recall her regular and most recent performances as positive ones. The same goes for being an expert in your industry.

All this to say that if you can regularly engage people and add value to their lives—through your speaking engagements, through your personal communications, and, importantly, through your content—you’ll develop a familiarity that breaks down trust barriers and puts you top of mind. With this kind of familiarity, you can attract a following, connect to your audience, and, ultimately, become an industry authority.

But this authority, this thought leadership, isn’t an end unto itself. It’s a way to forge and maintain thriving relationships, which means that you never stop improving the lives of your audience.

That’s why your content output is so critical—you need to engage your audience consistently, but there’s a physical limit to the number of conferences, networking sessions, and retreats you can attend. You can go to only so many events and meet so many people in any given amount of time.

Content enables you to open up a direct line of communication through which you can engage your audience, and it is by far the most scalable way to do so. With one article, one piece of content online, I can reach a huge audience—people I don’t have the time or physical ability to meet with one on one.

Content, in all its forms, is an effective and scalable way to build your authority and enter into a living, breathing conversation with your audience that doesn’t end.

As Kelsey says, the old adage “it’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon” doesn’t actually apply to industry authority because there’s no real finish line. Rather than thinking of it as a race of any length, Kelsey talks about thought leadership as a fit and healthy lifestyle.⁵ Your long-term health requires daily discipline; so, too, does creating that vibrant, ever-evolving conversation with your audience.

Don’t be intimidated by the phrase “daily discipline.” By setting up process-oriented workflows and creative rituals, you can make consistent content production second nature.

Painless Consistency Through Creative Ritual

The Artist’s Way is Julia Cameron’s classic guide to channeling your creative potential. In the book, Cameron explains that inspiration is fickle; if you wait for it to strike, you’ll create very little in life. Instead, it’s exponentially more productive to build creative rituals into your daily routine (such as writing my “morning pages,” three pages of stream of consciousness every morning). Daily practice nourishes your inner artist and boosts your creative output.

I mention writing here because, all “content” aside, the act of putting your thoughts down in the form of the written word can be an effective way of training your brain to stay sharp and foster creativity. I’ve found that writing a few pages in stream-of-consciousness style in the mornings keeps me on my toes on calls and attentive in my interactions with others throughout the day.

I bring this up because “I don’t know what to write about” is the second most common excuse I hear from would-be industry leaders who are struggling to begin creating content. The first is a complete and utter lack of time—and neither excuse holds up.

Cameron’s emphasis on the power of creative rituals dismantles both of these rationalizations. Not only does routine help you carve out and protect regularly scheduled writing time, it also hones your ability to transform ideas into the written word. The more often you create, the easier—and more enjoyable—the process becomes.

Ultimately, consistency breeds consistency. But don’t let devotion to a routine sap the fun out of everything. If your regular writing sessions feel like a chore, take a look at what you’re doing from a different perspective. Thought leadership is an opportunity to build compelling dialogue and foster enriching conversations about the most interesting aspects of your industry. This is a real privilege—one that can make life better not only for your audience but for you as well.

Consistency Exercise

The biggest factors in achieving consistency are the tools and processes you put in place to help you. You’re only human, and you’ll likely forget things or reorganize your priorities, and consistency can fall easily by the wayside. That’s why your organization is important here.

You do so many things every day that could be scaled or practiced more consistently—but to do that, you have to identify them and connect to the right resources. Make a list of everything you know you and your team could scale or become more consistent practicing. Maybe it’s scaling your content distribution through your employees, or maybe it’s automation software that reaches out to certain contacts once they’ve performed certain actions.

Now that you’ve got a couple of ideas, reference the Resource Library in the back of this book. Do any of these tools offer a solution that will help you become more consistent? If you’re unsure, reach out to me at [email protected] or connect with your network on LinkedIn to see what tools your peers use to address similar issues.