Be the Resource

By on May 31, 2007 in Blog Coach with 3 Comments

Tom Peters says (paraphrase), "Leadership isn’t about transforming others, but captaining the voyage of mutual discovery."

Want to captain the ship of discovery in your field or profession?  Be the Resource.

In the late 90s, I worked for a small, spunky startup called Real Fans Sports Network. Having private community and community-generated content areas for each professional and college team, we also collected and provided every link we could find on the web for each team – no matter the content provider.

We knew that raving fans would find (and hunt) for those links anyway – so we just gave them up.  Be the Resource.

Realfans

When AOL bought us, we were asked to stop providing links that weren’t internal or partner content (AOL’s call). We stopped being THE resource. We lost traffic and loyalty. The community formerly known as Team Clubs was sold to Sportsline, then GeoCities (with each sale, outbound links became more sparse).

Lesson learned?  Fans are fans. Shoppers will shop. Searchers will find. Be the Resource.

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Find Your Social Media ROI

I hear it from a lot of business owners: “Where is the ROI with all this Social Media?“ If this is a question you ask yourself, maybe we should work together a bit more. We can work together solo, or via a professional learning community. Find and increase your ROI. There is a “there” there.

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  • http://www.unitedlinen.com Scott Townsend

    Great Post. And I believe it. I like the transparency that can be created by being an Open resource. If you have something to hide, people can tell. If you have your customer’s interest at heart, you’ll help lead them to the right answer…and more times than not, they will remember you for the help.

  • http://www.StoriesByREL.com Cory Garrison

    Mike, I just read something that said…and I paraphrase…”give away more in use value than you take in cash value and you’ll be adding real value to the world”. I think it meant BE THE RESOURCE! This from a book that was written 100 years ago. You do it better than anyone I know! Great post!
    Cory

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