Reputation

To be sure, the reputation that matters most for all of us is character reputation – the reputation we have for integrity, for work ethic, for kindness, and for all the other attributes which the world needs more than ever. But for today we’re talking about another reputation, although the two kinds necessarily overlap.
We’ve established that for those of us who are not in the commodity business, our secret sauce is our professional reputation. In simple terms, the very clients for each of us are those we are best enabled to serve, and they will come to us because the word is out that we have the exact solution they need. Isn’t that a nice fit?
Building a professional reputation doesn’t happen randomly or by accident– it must be very intentional. Yet at the same time, it can’t be seen as calculating, because that would dump you right back into the advertising rat race.
Building a professional reputation is hard, unrelenting, disciplined work, carried on over a lifetime, and it has two components: the walk, and the talk.
Clearly, you can’t build a reputation on talk alone – you’d soon be exposed as a fake. In Canadian French, there is a great expression of derision, Grosse enseigne, petit magasin: “Big sign, little store”. You don’t want that to be you.
Once you actually have some meat in the sandwich, it’s time to grow that reputation, and you can’t be shy about it. There are cases where a few lucky news stories will build some reputation for you, but for most of us, most of the time, we need to do the work, steadily and persistently.
At first sight, most reputation building would appear to be communicating, and that’s close to correct, but not entirely so. Writing, speaking, posting, blogging, webcasting– these are the mechanisms of getting it out there. But like the proverbial iceberg, there’s a lot more below the surface.
Before you even begin packaging your reputational messaging, there are two key prerequisites. First, you need to be sure that what you have to say actually has value. Second, it all has to hang together in a coherent fashion. Let me explain.
In our fast-paced world of instant information, readers are impatient. If your blog or website, or even your talk at a national convention, doesn’t quickly tell the reader or listener that this is what they really need, they will move on. You’d do the same.
Next week we wrap our heads around how to develop your reputational message, and how to deliver it. In the meantime, if this resonates and you’d like to kick around some ideas, just drop me a line.