Is your marketplace REALLY listening to you?

It’s hard to build a community or a business, when you don’t have a voice.

• If you follow the social media gurus and act like their outsourced retweeting machine, you lose your voice.
• If you go with the flow, seldom seeking to express your own opinions, you lose your voice.
• If you run a small business, which looks a lot like most other small businesses in your niche, you lose your voice.

The solution?

Do the opposite.

• Stop being a cheerleader for the gurus, if you want to be taken seriously.  Look at what happens, when a guru sees one of their sheep disagreeing with them on their blog.  THAT is the comment they tend to reply to.  No one respects cheerleaders or butt-kissers; including those whose butt is being kissed!  Intelligent people cringe when they see grown men and women sucking up like that.
• Go against the flow when it matters.  If you believe that common opinion is wrong, have the confidence to make your point.  Confidently expressing what you believe is essential, if you want to have a voice.  Bleating the same views and opinions as everyone else means you become invisible.  It robs you of your individuality.
• Invest in making your small business uniquely valuable, so it has a story worth sharing.  People will only talk about you if you have something worth talking about.  I wrote about this recently.

Who do you listen to?

Think about the people you listen to.  Do you listen to them because they have nothing new, interesting or inspiring to say?  No, of course not.

You and I do not take advice from sheep.  Guess what?  Nor does anyone else.  We listen to people worthy of our attention; people with something of value to say.  We spread word-of-mouth about businesses and products worth talking about.

The bottom line:  Just as you ignore people who seldom express their own opinions or have nothing of real value to say, so does everyone else.  You place a VERY low ceiling on your potential, if you follow the gurus and inherit their opinions, rather than thinking for yourself and sharing what you have to say.  You deserve better than that.  Much, much better.