Page 100 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

“First, I’m exactly who I am no matter if you talk with me online,
offline, in the lobby of a hotel, or before/during/after my time on stage.
I think that an integrated (and true to life) persona is vital. People can
no longer get away with being someone they’re not. It just doesn’t
work. At least not for long.

“Second, I believe that connecting with others and serving them is one
of the most important parts of personal branding. That’s a mistake
most people make. Your brand isn’t exactly about you. It’s about how
others experience you. So I work hard to connect, to respond, to be
available, and to show people I’m just like them for the most part.

“Finally, personal branding and connecting with people is about
making information portable enough that others can make it their own.
I say two or three things over and over: Give your ideas handles
(meaning, make it easy for others to take the ideas with them).
Everything I do is steal-enabled (as much as I dislike plagiarism, I love
when people take my ideas and run with them—with a little credit).
Brevity and simplicity are gold (most often, people try to convolute
their ideas to make them seem more important than they are). To be
simple is to be more open and honest.”

In the Alpha Audience chapter, Brogan characterizes his core audience as
“allies” instead of fans. Are there principles to building this steadfast allegiance
that anyone can learn and activate? How does a person, company, or brand
inspire fanaticism to the point where it almost doesn’t matter what content you
create? How do you ensure it ignites because of who you are?

The Heroic Brand and the magic of reciprocity1

A common but often ignored driver of both brand-building and social
transmission is reciprocity, or the obligation to return favors. Indeed, whatever
power structure exists on the social web, it’s often built on a foundation of subtle
indebtedness, an ability to create influence through an economy of favors.
Online, as in the real world, if somebody does us a favor, we feel a powerful
obligation to repay the debt. Sociologists such as Alvin Gouldner report that
there is no human society that doesn’t subscribe to this rule.

But a difference between indebtedness in the “real world” and on the Internet