Part 1: My 15 year history as an Adviser using Social and Digital Media
Over the last two years I have spoken publicly on the topic of Social Media for Advisers on more than 120 different occasions all over the world. We have also launched our own national event ‘AdviserEdge’, specifically focused on sharing the most cutting edge information around Advice and digital communications.
It should be no surprise that there are all kinds of so called experts ‘cropping up’ repeating variations of the material we have shared. Variations, I might add, that if implemented by you will quite simply fail; because they miss the point and are in essence wrong (all the while appearing on the surface ‘complimentary’ to the lessons we have been sharing).
So I am writing this to give you some perspective on 1) where my knowledge comes from, and 2) how that makes all the world of difference for you in choosing where you get your information from.
In essence this is a summary of my experience in Social Media as an Adviser. In Part 2 of this article I will share with you (how I know) what everyone is telling you to do online won’t work and why.
People often ask me why I very rarely share articles about Social and Digital Media that others have written. The simple answer is that I don’t read them anymore – I have, and most of the time it made me frustrated because it is written based on second hand knowledge that was never right in the first place and I hate the idea of my fellow professionals wasting their time.
Most people think of Social Media as being exclusively platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. To set the scene, I generated my first million dollars in client related professional revenue from Social Media before I had ever heard the term ‘Social Media’, and the search engine I was using was called Lycos because Google didn’t exist outside of Stamford University.
In 1996 I helped build the internet community for the Lotus and Ferrari club in my state, for which I was a member. Over time with the help of the bulletin board and the community I helped to create I had the opportunity to get to know most of the members of the club, to build relationships and to create trust. The online community was the perfect place for me to show my values, passion and to build a reputation as a ‘Go to Guy’ with anything to do with finance.
At the time I was 24 and had just started my own Financial Advice business. During the following years I continued to build and experiment with all kinds of internet communities, and over the 15 years I ran my own Financial Services business I acquired clients, business partners, investors and staff members from little known (at the time) digital media platforms such as Short Story Bulletin Boards, Ebay (yes Ebay is Social Media, and finding and contacting perfect clients there is a piece of cake when you know how), Sporting Forums, Online Games, Discussion Groups, and best of all Email (the most often misunderstood Social Media).
In 2004 I began experimenting with a process to Advise clients around structuring their own success which I called ‘The Fulfilment Philosophy’. It was essentially designed to pinpoint exactly the combination of triggers that motivate and fulfil an individual. I have used this process hundreds of times to radically change the futures of many, not least of all my own (a topic for another time).
In 2005 I began experimenting with filming my own ‘fulfilment philosophy’ as a way to communicate to prospective clients the essence of ‘me’. My first attempts were with a cheap handicam and I gauged interest in these videos by showing them to clients who wanted to learn more about this fulfilment philosophy. An unintended consequence of showing the videos to clients was an increase in referrals (and some clients even requested their own videos).
During the same year I continued experimenting by sending video files to clients (just the ones that wouldn’t think I was crazy); however the technology meant the results, whilst novel, were relatively poor. As a result, our first official videos for clients were either mailed via DVD or were watched by them when they came into our offices.
By 2006, after much experimenting, we had reduced the length of a ‘Fulfilment Video’ from 3-4 minutes to around 1 minute, and had begun calling these ‘My WHY’ videos. Of course back then I had never heard of Simon Sinek or TEDx or any other expression of the concept of ‘why’.
Early on in my digital journey I had worked out that self-promotion wasn’t the objective, the key was connecting with people and letting them experience the ‘real me’ in an online medium. It became my intent to create, through the WHY videos, the most effective and efficient way possible for people to make a decision about whether or not they would actually like me.
As simple as that sounds it is a complete reversal of the very paradigm of professionalism, and it was my persistent experimentation with this idea that led to the next leap forward in my own professional journey with Social Media.
In Part 2 of this article I will finish my story and at the same time point out the fundamental realisations made over more than 17 years of relentless real-world mistakes. My hope is that this in turn, will make all the difference for you in understanding whether you should embark on your own Social Media journey and the perspective to make it a successful one. I will also present some of my biggest problems with the ‘copy cats’ and cheap imitations, in the hope that you avoid, if nothing else, a waste of your precious time.