Back to school with Anita Campbell
A diner I used to eat in had a sign over the cash register: “If you enjoyed your meal, tell your friends. If you didn’t, tell us”.
Of course, we all know that way it really works is if you have a good experience, you probably don’t tell anyone; and if you have a bad experience you tell anyone who will listen.
So it is with personal excellence and personal branding. If you are truly committed to a very high standard of excellence, then you must stay constantly aware of how you are interacting with the world around you. I would go so far as to say that a critical component of personal excellence is hyper-vigilance of your words, your actions and your messages.
I re-learned that lesson last week in a brief Facebook comment exchange with Anita Campbell.
So who is Anita Campbell?
If you’re not familiar with Anita, she runs her own not-so-little online media empire which includes the highly successful SmallBizTrends blog (with over 100K subscribers), Small Business Trends Radio (which I had the pleasure to be featured on), and her newest addition BizSugar, a Digg-like business news site for small and medium businesses.
Anita is pretty active on Facebook, promoting her various outlets and constantly posting useful information, links and questions for small and medium-sized business owners.
As successful as she is, and as active as she keeps herself operating and growing her various businesses, she is also very approachable and has always responded in a timely manner to the few inquiries I’ve sent her way (I got to met Anita several years back when we were briefly on an Advisory Board together). Over the last year I put together a panel discussion on Web 2.0 tools and Anita helped me fill 2 of the 3 slots on the panel.
What took me “back to school”?
Last week Anita posted a RT (re-tweet) on Facebook linking to an article with the title “Ten Tips for Finding Grants for Making Your Business Greener.” This caught me at a good time since I have recently been getting a lot of requests from entreprenuers and small business owners on the very same topic. Clicking through to the article, a community-recommended post on Bizugar, I was initially disappointed to find that most of the tips were fairly basic things like doing online research to find grants and learn how to write a relevant grant proposal. There were a couple good suggestions in the list, but overall I was disappointed in the article.
So, instead of just moving on, I commented on Anita’s Facebook post and broke two essential rules of personal excellence:
- If you don’t have anything positive to say, don’t say anything. The post didn’t have a lot of value for me, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t for lots of other people. To simply comment to say “I didn’t get a lot of value out of this post” doesn’t add anything of value to the conversation and only reflects poorly on yourself.
- If you’re going to point out an issue, offer a solution. Anita handled the comment like a pro (because she is one) and then suggested that I post a “definitive article” on the topic. Instead of taking her up on her offer and saving some face, I instead blew off the opening and said I had the same issue finding good information.
What Anita did right
This may seem like a trite example, but there are some lessons in here to be learned for those of us who are serious about pursuing personal excellence.
First, every single personal interaction you have, whether face to face or virtual, is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity either to build and reinforce your “brand” of personal excellence or show a different face. Just like that sign in the diner, another old cliche that comes to mind is “It can take forever to build a good reputation, but just one comment to destroy it”. By responding positively to a somewhat negative comment, Anita reinforced her professional image.
Second, Anita opened the door for me to postively add to the conversation. While I didn’t take her up on the offer (yet!), by opening that door she created a space for me to enhance my own professional image. Creating opportunities for others in all situations I think is an important business skill, made even more crucial in today’s highly-networked, virtual world.
Parting thoughts
We are all online more and more these days. Virtual communication is immediate and “the Internet never forgets”. Smiley faces notwithstanding, it is very hard to convey emotion, sentiment and conversational nuances in virtual communications. This becomes especially apparent as the communication becomes shorter and shorter – Facebook comments and Twitter tweets being great examples. In a face to face conversation you have an opportunity to more fully explain your comment and your meaning. Online, it is much harder.
I also think the online environment is less forgiving. Since we are all getting smaller and smaller slices of everyone’s attention span, each communication, not matter how slight, becomes more and more important. In some ways I think it is even harder to build a brand or image online, and even easier to negatively impact it. The rise of social media channels has opened up tremendous opportunities for businesses and individuals alike to interact with ever-widening audiences, but their immediacy of contact should not be underestimated.
Finally, and I hope you are reading this Anita, I accept your challenge to come up with some resources for businesses wanting to “go green”. I’ll post something very soon.
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Comments
Simon,
This wasn’t humble pie so much as truly just a lesson that snuck up on me that I wanted to share. Many of us are truly working to improve ourselves and be excellent, and this reminded me that part of that quest is to be constantly vigilant no matter what the venue.
I think what I would add to your list is how many of the social media channels we use can create an air of informality, even as we are interacting in a business manner. It’s easy to “let your guard down” or cross a line you wouldn’t normally in the physical environment.
Hi Dave,
I appreciate this article very much — although I figure you can speak your mind as much as you wish. 
But it would be great to have you come up with the definitive article listing resources for small businesses going green. I for one would love to see it.
Nice to see you being active online so much. It’s a wonderful way to connect and share ideas, through blogs and social media, isn’t it? We can collaborate from our offices and do so on an ad hoc basis with so many people — I love it!
Best,
Anita
Anita, thanks for stopping by. Yes the online channels are great for connecting and sharing with a wide variety of people regardless of their location. I love it to. The only downside, and the point of the article I think, is that it seems like most of the social channels force you into smaller and smaller bites of conversations and it becomes very hard to convey meaning, let alone subtlety. Just something to keep in mind.
I’ve done some poking around and found a great resource for going green. I hope to post it next week.
Dave – whether you consider this as eating humble-pie or not, you have shared a very valuable lesson – one which I am grateful to you.
It’s also a lesson that the physical and virtual environments are very different. In the case of the diner, feedback about what you didn’t enjoy remains private. In the virtual world, as you say, it is indelible.
Last lesson I take from this is that it seems that over the last 5 years, the dichotomies between physical and virtual have been flipped in many ways…
e.g.
* brand-building is tougher in the virtual world than in the physical now
* information is more indelible in the virtual world now than in the physical
* we get less of a slice of attention in the virtual world now
Simon