Promote Others

The Basic Idea: Promoting others is a much better way to spread your influence than to directly promote yourself. The more you support others, the more credibility you will enjoy. This credibility will come in handy when you most need it.

Explanation: This an extremely difficult lesson to learn.

Go to a company’s web site. Pick one at random. The odds are overwhelming that 95% of what they are doing is to promote their own products and services.

Now, look at their Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook feeds. You’ll probably see a similar stream of self-promotion. After a short time, such companies train readers to ignore what they say.

Countless consultants and authors make the same mistake. They tweet incessantly about their new book or article. They blab about that magazine that just wrote about them.

As a social media ghostwriter, I know that people do not go online to read ads.

The alternative is to always be on the lookout for valuable news that others will find useful. In doing so, you can demonstrate your mastery of certain subject areas. The quality of your reputation becomes associated more with what you do and less with how much you self-promote.

As your following grows, your efforts to help others will carry more weight. It won’t be any harder to help others – a tweet to 10,000 followers is no harder to send than one to 10 followers – but your impact will increase dramatically. As it does, people will show you more gratitude and respect.

Practice Collaborative Promotion

Executive career coach and New York Times bestselling author, Bonita Thompson, developed a solution to the gender norm that causes women to be viewed negatively for self-promotion. She observes that men are expected to self-promote—and leaders are required to promote—but women are seen as selfish and abrasive for promoting themselves.

Her hack for this came when she was reading research about making computers friendly. Cliff Nass and Corina Yen discovered that we don’t like anyone—even a computer—when they compliment themselves.

The good news is that we think highly of anyone who compliments others. So Bonita’s hack is called collaborative promotion.

To do this, partner with other individuals whose work complements your own. You can promote their project and they will promote yours. Find out from them three things:

1) What did they do that they would like to promote?
2) What greater good came from their actions?
3) What value or quality contributed to their success?

Tie their actions to the benefits and qualities that made them feel successful. Both parties will be seen as capable and likeable – two characteristics for a great leader.

One caveat… collaborative promotion requires that you trust the other individual who will be promoting you.

Example: Molly Tschang is a great friend and incredible human being. When her latest TEDx Talk debuted, I was delighted to share it: