Sharing best practices

- As you're pulling together your sharing strategy, you may be asking questions like, which channel should I be using? How often should I be posting on places like Twitter or LinkedIn? I want you to take a deep breathe, because those are not necessarily the right questions to be asking. Instead here are some best practices to keep in mind as you're pulling together how you're going to share as a digital leader. The first one is the rule of record, the eye of the beholder. You are writing for the people you are leading, what can you share that will help them achieve their goals? Again this is a relationship that you have. You want to be able to make sure that you're developing that relationship with the things that you are sharing. Think about the content, the stories that you will share that will help them get things done. The second thing is to create a plan. Have that plan of what you're trying to accomplish, that relationship of how you think you want to shape it and change it, and then where are the places where these people are going to aggregating, collecting, so that you can reach them in a very efficient way, and be able to think about what are those topics. A plan simply just says, this is what I'm going to do and just as importantly what you're not going to do. A third best practice is starting with the curation of what you have been listening to already. Now being a digital leader you have to listen to what people are saying before you can say things, and you can use all those things that you're listening to and repost them, retweet them. This is the adding your own point of view. That's the key. It's not just simply repeating what somebody else has said, why do you think that this is important and the reason why people should be listening to it is your point of view that really makes it powerful and shapes that relationship. Another thing you can be doing is to switch it up. What I mean by this is you can take the same idea, the same piece of content, that single point of view and change it for different channels. The way you say it on 140 characters might be with just a few comments, you may say the same thing with a picture or a board that you maybe writing on. Having that anchor of a point of view becomes something that you can spread across many different channels. Another good practice to think about is to schedule it. Now one of the key reasons why Richard Edelman, the CEO of Edelman PR has been able to blog every single week for the past 12 years, he said he has time set aside on his calendar. In fact, his blog is called 6:00 AM because he typically writes on Tuesday mornings at 6:00 AM. The other thing you can do on scheduling is to use a tool like Buffer that allows you to write the post in advance. This is a great technique that I use all the time because I do what I call bench writing, so I'll write a whole bunch of posts all at the same time on a morning and then be able to schedule them for the next couple of days so they come out on a regular timing. The last best practice to think about is that you don't have to do this alone. You can leverage routine. Bill Marriott, the Vice Chairman for Marriott, is in his 80s and he doesn’t type and yet he blogs on a regular basis by writing out the post in long hand or dictating it to an assistant. Then his team makes sure that it gets up and put on all the different social and digital channels that are appropriate. David Thodey, the CEO of Telstra often times works with his communications person to write the posts that he will be putting up online. He absolutely insists on pressing the send button because he wants to be sure that it's him who's actually posting. He may not do every single bit of the writing but in the end it's his point of view, his ideas, his tone that's being reflected by other people but he wants to own that final pressing of the button. If you think about all of these best practices together, they all add up to ways that can make sharing something that becomes easier, a part of your regular routine and the practice of your digital leadership. I encourage you to take a step at it even though it may be hard at the first time but I think the guiding post here is that relationship that you're trying to form. This is an opportunity for you to deepen that relationship, and if you think about who that person is that you're writing for, that will be your guiding light to becoming that digital leader.