The Taylor Guitar Story: Fine Tuning a Successful Corporate Brand

By: Bob Taylor, Co-founder and President, Taylor Guitars and author of 

Guitar Lessons: A Life's Journey Turning Passion into Business.

Question: Who likes a guitar? Answer: Everyone.

When I made my first guitar as a kid I was pretty proud of it. I was one of those kids you might not have noticed, because I was spending my time in woodshop rather than at dances.

I wasn’t popular; rather, I was a total dork. However, I emerged from that woodshop class with a guitar that I’d made and a desire to go forward with that as a career. There was nobody to guide me in the process. I was alone in that quest, but I jumped in anyway, starting a small shop with my partner, putting my hand to chisel, and soon began turning out a guitar every week or two.

Question: Who wants to buy a guitar from a company they’ve never heard of? Answer: Almost nobody.

I would show people my guitars and they’d like them because everyone likes a guitar! In fact, people were amazed when they saw my guitars. But for them to part with their money required a lot of confidence on their part. More often than not a person would admire our work only to purchase something with a brand name instead.

Building our Company BrandA lot has changed since those days of start-up obscurity and lack of know-how. Today, Taylor Guitars is in the lead-selling position of acoustic guitars in the United States; we produce hundreds of guitars each day. Our company brand is well known beyond the borders of the guitar playing public, enjoying fans of all types. In fact, people know our company for many things: our business practices, environmental work, employee relations, local presence, celebrity players, as well as our guitars.

How does one go from start up to industry leader? In my experience is takes work on all levels. I like to think of it as a three-legged stool, which needs all three legs to be strong. Those legs could be thought of as Production, Sales, and Finance. But to strengthen each leg, you need to pay attention to more.

• Under the Production leg: Employee Relations, Quality Control, Training and R&D.

• Under the Sales leg: Marketing Planning, Company Branding, Public Relations and Customer Service. 

• Under the Finance leg: Fiscal Responsibility, Customer Credit, Vendor Relationships, Employee Benefits and Community Service.

At the start, these numerous details were not on the radar, but certainly the basic three were. Without our focusing on all three areas of sales, production, or finance, we failed. It took dedication to achieve success in each of these areas as we sword-fought our way through the first several years of our company. We scored sales wherever we could, one guitar at a time, and made them one at a time, counting each penny as we went. 

But with each year we strived to add detail to each of these areas to distinguish our corporate brand from other makers of guitars and to slowly build our brand.

Our first order of attention has always been the guitars, which remains true even today. Without a great guitar, sales are nearly impossible to sustain. But without sales, great guitars are never owned by players, and without profit, the whole idea of being in business is meaningless.

Differentiating Product and BrandAs Taylor Guitars matured with each year we began to indentify ways to differentiate our product and our brand from other players in our industry.

It’s important that you understand that your product and your brand play different roles. Your product is more narrowly focused; it’s the “hard” thing you sell. Your brand is the “soft” part; it’s what the company means to people. It’s also what people buy in to, apart from the product, and it is equally valuable. In fact, many people would argue that your company brand is more valuable than the product. Even the Bible says in the book of Proverbs,  “A good name is more desirable than great riches.”

We started with the obvious, which for us was making guitars that played better and sounded different. I use the word “different” for sound, because sound quality is subjective. Soon, recording engineers and players began to use the word “better” when they described our guitar’s sound. We added electric pickups when it was unpopular to do on an acoustic guitar. Eventually the market came our direction, with nearly every guitar player demanding a guitar that played well and that could be amplified.

Today, we are the leader in that market, and it has become the largest segment of the market.

A few years after we learned to cover the basics, we began to build our company branding. We ran advertisements that were completely different than anyone else in the industry; those ads spoke to the feeling that people derive from playing and loving guitars. Those people began to like our company as well as our guitars.

We then extended that branding into our customer’s lives with our magazine, Wood & Steel, and with dealer events, festivals and factory tours. Hospitality became our middle name. Soon the spouses of guitar players understood what their husband or wife loved about their Taylor guitar, because they felt included as well.

From the food server at the restaurant who sees the name on our credit card, to the purchaser of a new guitar, from the wood-cutting families in India, to the printer of our magazine, from the customer to the retailer, to GE Capital who helps the retailer put more guitars in stock, we strive to serve and include everyone in our story and make it fun and rewarding for them. They love it!

With everyone on your side, it’s easier to succeed. 

Online Brand Management: How to Protect your Company’s Online Identity

By: David Thompson and Michael Fertik

Whether you’re a mom-and-pop business looking for seasonal help or a large retailer, your online brand management is more important than ever, particularly as you recruit candidates.

The best and most savvy candidates for any position now spend time researching online before sending a resume, scheduling an interview or accepting an offer. They often look for reviews from current employees, search for information about the employer’s culture and values and research competitive salary information. Even if a candidate doesn’t go online, they are likely to hear echoes of online content from their friends and the media. 

At the same time, many of your current employees are probablysearching online for news and gossip about the company. What they find can shape watercooler talk and either boost or sap your office morale. 

How False Information Can Spread Online
The online culture of anonymity has changed how businesses’ reputations are made and broken. Sites like GlassDoor, JobBite, and JobVent allow anyone to leave an anonymous review of any company in the world, often with little or no effective validation that the author is even a real employee. 

These sites allow reviews of everything from law firms to retail to restaurants. Other sites like Vault create lists of the “best” and “worst” companies to work for, while countless other web forums feature debates about the best and worst local and regional employers. These sites are designed to rank highly in a Google search for the name of your company and often appear in the first few positions for searches that include your company name and terms like “reviews,” “careers,” or “employees.”

Just one false, misleading, incomplete, or outdated review can impact how potential employees see your company. Additionally, web searchers often look at the first three search results that appear in Google and may form their initial impressions about your company based entirely on those results.  

What’s worse, false information in these sites can create an “echo chamber” effect: tidbits of false information that appear high in your search results are often copied from one site to another until they are taken as truth. Once you get a reputation as a bad employer, it is often self-sustaining.

Taking Control of your Company’s Online Reputation
It is possible to take back control of your company’s online brand management and your hiring process. The first step is finding what is out there about your company. Run a Google search for your own company’s name, plus common search phrases like “reviews,” “careers,” “salary,” and “employees.”  Repeat the search in other search engines like Bing. 

Next, check the major employer review sites mentioned above for reviews of your company; if you find inappropriate content, you can sometimes ask for it to be removed as a violation of the site’s Terms of Service.

Finally, search on your own personal name, as well as the name of senior management and hiring personnel. Many candidates will use Google to research the people they will be interviewing with, as well as senior management. Other candidates will also check Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.  Run a search for the name of each person who is listed as management or might be interviewing candidates and note what you find. 

No matter what you discover (and especially if you find false, misleading, outdated, or negative information), you need to take control of your search results. One of the easiest first steps is to simply encourage happy employees to post truthful reviews on job review sites. Most employers find that a simple reminder is enough to get many content employees to share their experiences; anything further (such as a monetary reward) creates complex issues surrounding disclosure and reliability. Stick with the basics.  

Next, build your company’s online presence. If you have not already done so, building a social media presence through sites like Facebook and Twitter can help provide positive search results to allow you to spread your side of the story and block falsehoods from entering the top 10 Google results.  

Facebook for Employers: Make Friends, Not Fans

By: Matt Charney, Monster Social Media Engagement Manager

Most direct sourcing and candidate development activities seem predicated around the adage: “Go where the talent is.” That’s why it’s not surprising that talent acquisition has been an early adopter of social networks. As noted search expert Glen Cathey recently wrote: “Recruiting has always been social -- interactions have primarily taken place in person and over the phone. Social media simply enables a third way to communicate: online.”

It’s a wonder, then, that Facebook remains somewhat underutilized in social recruiting. According to a recent industry survey, only 6% of recruiters active in social media found Facebook to be an effective recruiting tool.

Perhaps this is because Facebook makes it more difficult than many other platforms to source and engage with passive candidates and communities. In HR parlance, Facebook seems widely perceived as the “life” in “work-life balance,” a place to share with friends, not network with connections.

The Facebook Paradox

So far, employers have largely stayed on sidelines on Facebook, consigned to career-oriented “Fan Pages” that offer much in the way of extending employment brands and advertising new positions, but little in terms of the kind of meaningful interactions required to develop and engage top talent. 

Of course, with 45% of employers performing social media background checks as part of the hiring process, many candidates don’t exactly want to be found, either. In fact, in recent source of hire data, the amount of hires attributable to Facebook seems dwarfed by candidates whose profile information revealed incriminating information that prevented an offer extension. 

Until the benefits of visibility on Facebook outweigh the potential repercussions in the employment process, there’s little incentive for top talent to engage with employment professionals or brands.

In January 2010, users spent an average of 431 minutes on Facebook, or upwards of 14 minutes a day. With over 400 million users worldwide, it isn’t hard to see that there’s a potential goldmine of widely untapped, largely passive talent that makes Facebook too powerful a recruitment tool to ignore. 

Yet effective best practices utilized on relationship building platforms such as blogs, Twitter and streaming video seem to fall flat on Facebook. To increase efficacy, employers need to stop making “fans,” and start making “friends” (and, ultimately, new hires).  

Knowing the difference between fan and friend is essential. 

Volume Versus Quality of Connection

While many businesses already have a fan site on Facebook, many approach these pages as a simple extension of an employment brand or career site. Maintaining a branded presence on Facebook generally suffices to attract “fans.” While many companies adjudicate quantity within the context of metrics analysis, attracting fans falls flat without dedicated content and a platform-specific engagement strategy.

According to Facebook’s own internal statistics, business related sites constitute just over half of the approximately 3 million fan pages within Facebook, generating an astounding 20 million fans per day; the site estimates pages have created 5.3 billion fans with users joining three fan pages a month. 

The sheer volume of these statistics reinforces the notion that there’s little inherent meaning in having “fans” to the recruiting process, essentially undeveloped candidates unlikely to match just-in-time hiring requirements for open positions that constitute the majority of most career-related fan site postings. 

Fans do, however, have significant value as active seekers; like all applicants, it’s incumbent on employers to qualify and develop those applicants into a slate of potential candidates worth additional due diligence. In Facebook parlance, these constitute “friends.”

Remember: “fishing where the fish are” only works if the “fish” are the loyal audience necessary to spread the word you want about your employment brand, corporate culture and job openings.

Recruiting College Graduates: Hire for Attitude and Train for Skills

By: Donald Asher  

Are you taking shortcuts in hiring that cost you the best candidates with your college recruitment? As an observer of the intersection between college and career, I see way too many highly talented job candidates being overlooked for minor and even trivial reasons. One of the bigger errors in attracting young talent is setting narrow restrictions on who you will interview.

You may not want to talk to a student with a 2.3 GPA and a couple of DUIs, sure, but watch out for filtering out bright, creative, motivated students by requiring unnecessarily specific job skills. 
It is easy to assume that students who major in accounting and finance have quantitative reasoning skills, but so do students who major in chemistry, physics, math, statistics, engineering, and even music, as well as students who minor in all these topics.

Focus your College Grad Recruitment ProcessThere is a creeping consumerism invading universities today, and part of that phenomenon is that both recruiters and students are focusing on majors instead of passions. For every student who chooses marketing when they would have been more interested in English, we all lose a more engaged student. That student could easily have been taught business writing once he or she had mastered poetics.

My thesis is that the jingle writer who has studied poetics may be a better marketing writer than one who has studied psychographics. Some of them certainly will be.

“Many students in non-mainstream majors don’t know that they are still valuable in the more traditional business workplace,” says Russ Coughenour, director of career services for the University of Tennessee. “They think that business and industry are not interested in them because of their major.” By shifting your search focus from majors to basic skills, such as writing, analyzing, and thinking, you will pick up candidates who would have shunned your interview lists.

Personal versus Academic Discipline
In fact, it may pay to have a broad idea of which job skills you are after in a new college hire, beyond your internship program. The old saying for college hiring was simple and straightforward: “You hire for attitude; train for skills.” Herb Kelleher built Southwest Airlines into a competitive powerhouse based on this simple adage.

“We recruit students based on their attitude and drive to be successful, regardless of their academic discipline,” says Ralph Brigham, global director of campus relations for Southwestern Co. “If they study hard, work hard and are coachable, generally they will be successful. For us, their personal discipline is much more important than their academic discipline.”

Chris W. Fitzpatrick, New Jersey regional recruiting supervisor for Enterprise Rent-a-Car thinks it is important to look beyond the major -- whatever it is -- to look at how the student has engaged with the other opportunities that make up the college experience. “Our top candidates were not only students in the classroom sense, but took the initiative to learn and develop skills outside of the classroom, during ‘personal time.’

“Involvement in sports breeds competitiveness. Membership in fraternities, sororities, and other clubs and organization helps develop leadership skills. Although a communications major may not have learned case studies about risk management, the ability to communicate verbally, nonverbally, and crossculturally is vastly more critical. Soft skills such as communication, work ethic, flexibility, and leadership transcend the college majors and are better identified when an entire picture of a candidate’s college experience is seen.”

Hire for an Ability to Gain the Skill
The argument for flexibility may be a little more difficult to win in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). A computer science major is going to bring a different set of abilities to the job than a biologist. Even here, however, a narrow focus on majors may be an unnecessary shortcut for some of your hiring.

Tom Tarantelli, director of the career development center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says that “many of the mainstream employers still desire the hard core science and engineering degrees.” Nevertheless, he points out that dual majors are becoming more common in STEM programs, and interdisciplinary teams are becoming more common in industry. “Many employers will hire a materials or mechanical engineer and teach the bio or whatever other skill aspects they need.”

So it may be that the ability to gain the skill -- the ability to be coachable -- that matters more than anything else. In fact, according to a study conducted by Leadership IQ, Why New Hires Fail,  (a study summary is available) 89% of the time a new hire fails it is for attitudinal reasons, not for technical competence reasons. According to Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, “You can give people skills, but it’s a lot tougher to give them a new attitude.” So hire for attitude, train for skills, and save restrictions on the major to those very few searches when it really matters, like nursing recruiting.

Social Media Marketing: the Six Defining Elements of Online Content

By: Ann Handley

In this multi-part series, content expert Ann Handley explains how to rethink your site content to make it more engaging to enhance your small business marketing, company branding and small business social media strategy. This article is excerpted, in part, from her book, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (Wiley, 2011).

What is your audience genuinely interested in reading, seeing, or knowing about? Your job is to generate new ideas and pull compelling stories out of your own organization. And by “stories,” we don’t mean yarns or fairytales; we mean how your business (or its products or services) exist in the real world.

Here are six characteristics of a good content idea or story that can enhance your small business marketing and social media strategy:

1. True. Make truth the cornerstone of anything you create. Your web content should feature real people, real situations, genuine emotions, and facts. As much as possible, it should show, not tell. It should show your product as it exists in the world, through customer stories, case studies, or client narratives. It should explain, in terms that people can relate to, how it adds value to the lives of your customers, eases their troubles, meets their needs. Your content is not about storytelling; it’s about telling a true story well.

2. Relevant. What’s the purpose of your content? What is its key message? Why are you telling it and what do you hope to accomplish? One trick from journalism school: Try to express the gist of a piece of content in a single sentence. Doing so will help you focus what it’s about and what your reader will take away from it.

3. Human. Good content must have a human element to it. Why? Because your readers are people, and so will better relate to the story if you relate to them on their level, rather than talking above their heads. This is true of B2B companies, too: Even if you are a company that sells to other companies, focus on how your products or services touch the lives of people. By the way, when you are writing about people, here’s a good rule of thumb: Be specific enough to be believable and universal enough to be relevant. (That’s another journalism school gem.)

4. Passionate. This one is simple: You have to care. If you don’t care about what you are writing about, neither will your audience. To quote blogger Johanna Hill of The Mercurial Wife, “Nobody cares until you start caring.” In other words, passion is contagious. Encourage your customers who are most passionate about your business to share your story in their own unique and genuine ways. In their voice!

5. Original. Your content should give a new and fresh perspective on your topic. What’s new about it? Why is it important? As my former journalism teacher, Charlie Ball, would say (quoting veteran New York Sun journalist John B. Bogart), “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

6. Surprising. Good stories have an element of the unexpected. They arouse curiosity or surprise your readers. Your story must engage before it can be expected to do anything else.

Online content that has all or most of those six elements will attract your audience and appeal to them on a fundamental, emotional level. In essence, creating stories that have these elements allows your audience to connect with you as one person to another, and view your business as what it is: a living, breathing entity run by real people.

How Technology is Changing the Recruiting Landscape

By: John Rossheim, Monster Senior Contributing Writer

While the principles of a well-written job posting remain relatively constant, recruiting technology is rapidly changing their distribution model. With that rapid evolution, recruiters who aren’t paying attention run the risk falling far behind, and quickly.

“The sourcing piece has changed tremendously with online developments,” says Irina Shamaeva, a partner with Brain Gain Recruiting. “Recruiters who understand online sourcing are ahead of the competition.”

What key changes are driving online sourcing and recruiting as we enter the second decade of the 21st century? Here’s a rundown of some key developments and recruiting strategies.

Targeted Advertising Boosts Job PostingsOne recent innovation in online recruitment is the use of syndicated display advertising technologies (on-line media) to put job postings in front of more job candidates. These advertisements are generated dynamically and automatically distributed to a targeted audience across many web sites.

“Behavioral target networks use cookie-based targeting to look at behaviors that demonstrate an interest in a particular career,” says Joran Lawrence, senior product manager for Monster Career Ad Network^® (CAN), which collects this anonymous data.

“Our customers want to address a select audience,” says Lawrence. “If they post a nursing job, they don’t need to get in front of all of the 68 Million Americans that Career Ad Network^® reaches, but just those people in the targeted region who have an interest in nursing. The ad is presented to relevant seekers on whatever website they’re on,” from thematically related sites like Salary.com to geographically-oriented sites like Yellowpages.com.

This targeted advertising extends the reach of the job posting and can lure candidates who aren’t actively looking for an open position on a job board. Rather than investing substantial time and money to plan an advertising campaign, design ads, and buy media, the employer simply signs up to have the targeted ad generated from their job opening.

Behaviorally-targeted ads have proven effective in increasing views of job postings. Monster Career Ad Network^® on average increases views of linked job postings by 40 percent to 100 percent for an ad that runs for 30 days.

What does the future hold for targeted advertising as a recruiting tool? “As we use semantic search to aid job seekers, we will use ontology [categorization] to make career advertising more powerful,” Lawrence says.

Reaching Mobile-Savvy Candidates Another development in job posting distribution is the adoption of mobile phones to access the Internet, including the explosion of Apple and Android devices that now offer reasonably-priced 3G data. These devices are driving behavioral changes in today’s ever-connected workforce. Catering to this mobile audience is another way to extend the reach of job postings for recruiters looking to source candidates in the prime of their careers.

"Job searching is very ‘transactional,’” says Vasu Nagalingam, senior product director for Consumer at Monster. “Job seekers typically visit job boards at frequent intervals for new jobs. The mobile-savvy audience is discovering their mobile phone to be the perfect channel for this type of behavior.” Nagalingam sees Internet-connected mobile devices as changing seeker behavior. “Supporting these changes is critical to maintaining a healthy candidate pipeline.”

Monster created its job-seeking app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch to help employers reach these savvy candidates. “The emerging workforce is a popular group of mobile Internet users,” says Nagalingam. “Employers who want to target this emergent workforce should review their recruitment plans and incorporate mobile recruitment strategies to increase their recruiting efficiency.”

Why Search Engines are often FickleWhile dedicated recruitment tools continue to advance, some recruiters still attempt to harness the ever-advancing power of general-purpose search engines to source candidates from every corner of the Internet. But there’s a catch. The sophistication of these search engines, the enormous knowledge base behind them, as well as the constantly changing rules of ranking among search engines all complicate their use for niche applications such as the recruitment process.

“General search engines remain difficult for recruiters, because they’re afraid of syntax,” says Shamaeva. “Search-engine syntax is kind of like English but you have to understand search-engine software, which uses very complex algorithms. It feels overwhelming for many recruiters.” 

Even as most of the general-purpose search engines of the early 2000s fall by the wayside, the winning survivors all have their limitations for recruiters. “Bing is poorly documented, and Google is now blocking the majority of advanced searches, because it thinks you’re a robot,” says Shamaeva.

Meanwhile, pioneering semantic search technologies like Monster’s Power Resume Search promise to ease sophisticated searches of resume databases. “It’s time for recruiters to start incorporating the new semantic search tools into their strategies,” Shamaeva says.

Meeting Candidates Wherever They Are, OnlineAs professionals spend ever more time with more web resources, many employers are applying a convergence model of online sourcing that brings together many Internet genres, from social media to job boards. Candidates -- especially members of the millennial generation -- expect to find out about opportunities at a given employer, anywhere they happen to be on the web.

“You have to appeal to all those students who are trying to figure out how to stand out in a competitive market,” says Holly Paul, US recruiting leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Candidates have told us they want us to be on Facebook, and to provide an individual to contact.”

And those candidates have particular expectations about the performance of job-search media, regardless of the platform. They assume information will be kept current, for example. “Firms wanting to reach mobile candidates will have to update them frequently on the status of their job applications, because that’s the persona of the mobile user,” says Nagalingam.

Use Social Media Monitoring to Track the Buzz about your Business

Portions excerpted from Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now by David Meerman Scott. Used with permission. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.

By:  David Meerman Scott

Every second of every day, people around the world are talking online about the companies they do business with and products that they use. Simple and free social media monitoring tools allow you to listen in on these discussions as ordinary people talk about your company.

Big or small, it doesn’t matter: You need to know what’s being said about you and about the issues critical to your business to help protect your company’s online identity. And in order to react in real time, you need to know quickly.

The first priority in your social media marketing strategy is to listen to bloggers, analysts, journalists, and others who talk frequently about you and your business. To find these voices, start by checking the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so on) for all the relevant keywords and phrases you can think of: your company, customers, competitors, prospects, product categories, buzzwords -- whatever you can think of.

Tools for Social Media MonitoringOnce you have identified key sources, the next step is to begin monitoring what they say in real time.

As its name suggests, the really simple way to do this is using RSS, “Really Simple Syndication” -- a tool that allows you to harvest content from hundreds of blogs and news feeds without having to visit each one. RSS feeds update each time a site changes, alerting you to relevant information on topics that you specify. I use Google Reader for this, but there are many RSS readers to choose from.

Twitter is another social media platform to stay on top of breaking news. Many bloggers, journalists, and media outlets now use Twitter to drive traffic to fresh content as it appears. If these sources are active on Twitter, you’ll find a Twitter ID on their sites or blogs. Use TweetDeck or another Twitter-monitoring tool to aggregate your important Twitter feeds (that is, sets of tweets important for your business) so you can easily monitor what’s being said by the people who matter to you.

How to Stay on Top of the Millions of Discussions Going on Right Now

• Create a comprehensive list of search terms relevant to your activities. Include the names of your company, senior executives, competitors, customers, prospects, products; plus any relevant buzzwords or phrases -- every term you can think of!

• Use search engines (e.g., Google News or Yahoo! News) to set up a news alert using those search terms. This will automatically inform you in real time when any of your search terms crop up. Set up alerts on blog search engines, too. Note that if you choose Google Alerts, you can set the alert to let you know when a phrase appears in multiple content types, so one set of alerts can help you monitor blogs, newsfeeds, Web sites, and more.

• As monitoring progresses you will likely need to modify your search terms as some yield a flood of “false hits” and others nothing. Some services offer advanced features that allow you to refine your searches. For instance, Boolean operators like “and,” “but,” and “not” can make your searches more specific. If you need help, look for independent consultants with a background in library science. Add new search terms as you go along (watch for tags that authors apply to items that interest you). It’s an ongoing process, so you can’t just “set” your search terms and forget about them.

• Monitor your search terms on Twitter, too. Some tweets will show up in your news alerts if you use a service that indexes Twitter, like Google. Even so, I find it’s more effective to monitor Twitter directly. Use a Twitter monitoring tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite to catch your key phrases. You can also use Twitter’s own search function for one-off searches.

Drive the Social Media ConversationThe goal here is to know what people say immediately, so you can comment in real time, if appropriate. And that is certainly easier when you have already identified people who are likely to talk about you and your company.

It’s like joining a circle of your friends at a cocktail party: You can anticipate that their conversations will interest you. And because you are accepted by the circle, you can easily jump in with your own thoughts.

So as you monitor the people who talk about you, it is good to get a sense of what each person’s interests are. If someone writes about your industry, get to know their specific interests. Comment occasionally on their posts or articles even if they don’t refer to your company or products. If you’re already a known voice, your opinion will be taken more seriously when you jump in to discuss something directly related to your business.

The benefit of reacting quickly and being among the first to comment is huge. You are seen as someone who cares and is on top of what’s going on.