Practical Genius (28 page)

Don’t just talk the talk; create a movement around the message with your audience leading the way.

You’re attracting the audience you care about; now how can you involve them in your life and work the way you want to? When it comes to engagement, it’s about relationships not marketing. There’s no push, no pull, just the establishment of a real and permanent connection with your audience through the relationship. One of the most effective ways to make that connection is to engage over a cause.

Throughout my life I’ve discovered that the value of community work, volunteerism, and civic involvement goes way beyond do good/feel good. Cause-related alignment can produce life-changing relationships, rewards, and outcomes that will astonish and surprise you, as well as opportunities to engage your audience in a uniquely intimate way. Smart companies have figured out the power behind cause-related marketing, but what interests and inspires me is how it plays out one relationship at a time. Some of the most influential and emotionally rewarding relationships in my network have come out of my volunteer work, as was the case in putting on TEDxMIA. It’s the passion behind the work that creates the bond; it’s how well you engage and ignite the genius in each other that makes the bond work for you.

I like Heide Gardner’s story. Heide is the highest ranking and first African-American officer at the Interpublic Group, a global leader of advertising and marketing services with more than forty thousand employees in all major world markets. Heide, a true service leader, built her genius brand as an African-American marketing and media pioneer, first as a volunteer for a midnight basketball league effort in Glen Arden, Maryland, which a family friend, G. Van Standifer, founded in the hopes of getting young African-American men off the streets at night. In the effort to support his vision, Heide capitalized on the obvious marketing and educational opportunity for the league. Instead of just opening a recreation center for African-American males to play basketball at night, which she doubted corporations
would support, she designed a program where young men could take classes at a few local trade schools on some nights and play ball on the other nights. That turned the fledgling program into a cause around which a myriad team of talented and motivated individuals engaged. Smart publicity campaigns and celebrity coach efforts drew national attention to the program, which was awarded President George H. W. Bush’s Daily Point of Light Award.

It was Heide’s passion as a volunteer leading this charge that inspired one of her sponsors, Coca-Cola Enterprises, to offer her her next career opportunity working on marketing and community relations promotional campaigns. Her unique ability to synthesize and apply learning across a variety of disciplines and her “court sense” catapulted her success, which was first seeded with service and volunteerism.

Doors continued to fly open for Heide, including a leadership role with the American Advertising Federation, where she helped create the Mosaic Center, whose mission is to leverage multicultural talent and ideas. Within this role she realized, for the first time, that her career was making sense to her. I consider that moment to be Heide’s practical genius revelation. When she finally brought both her soft and hard assets into play, she found herself working side by side with advertising industry icons such as Tom Burrell, Caroline Jones, Byron Lewis, Bob Wehling, Andrea Alstrup, David Bell, and Vince Cullers to create principles and best practices on diversity and multicultural marketing for the ad industry. Recognized by the White House once again, this time she found herself standing in the Oval Office while President Bill Clinton signed an executive order on contracting for minority-owned businesses and cited in support of the Mosaic Principles.

Eventually Heide joined the Interpublic Group and was the first African-American officer at IPG. When you are serving the higher good, it always leads to personal reward and fulfillment. “Service
leadership is what landed me where I am today,” says Heide. “It was through my passion, creativity, and service work that I came upon a synthesis of rich life experiences and opportunities. And my greatest opportunities have often started out as unpaid roles from the heart.”

What I learned from Heide about engaging over a cause:

Pick your cause the way you pick your underwear; it must fit comfortably.

Select organizations and causes that are in alignment with both your soft and hard assets.

Partner and collaborate with like-minded folks.

Remember, there is important work to be done through genius engagement at all times, in all places. It can be right on your own doorstep or halfway around the world.

Here’s where I really split off from the mainstream marketers. They want numbers; I want a singular, personal, expandable genius experience. Your own mental, emotional, or spiritual growth must be your marketing imperative as you set out to grow your tribe. If you focus on expanding your multidimensional life experiences, you will grow a tribe and audience of teachers, inspirers, and contributors who share your values and will help to establish and grow your value in the marketplace.

Develop your visibility and mind share with the particular audience you seek by investing all of your genius assets in the relationships that stimulate your own growth. You don’t want an audience that reaches far and wide; you want the one that is narrow but deep.

Never before has it been so easy and inexpensive to share your genius and grow your tribe in such a short amount of time. Today technology is your revolutionary marketing partner. Before long, we will all be communicating simultaneously within three worlds—the face-to-face, real-time world; the online virtual world; and the omniverse, which is the merged real-and virtual-world experience where your real and online identities mesh.

When I try to inspire some of my clients to consider their identities in relation to these growing trends, some still dismiss them out of fear of transparency or by copping the too-busy excuse. “Gina, I don’t have the time for social media,” one client said. Guess what? This is no longer just an option you can choose from a menu of possible tools. Modernism has spoken, and this multidimensional reality influences your potential impact. If you use the tools well, you will explode your impact. If you ignore the tools, you will be a genius tree falling in the forest. Sounds sad, doesn’t it?

Here are the three reasons why you must master social media: (1) Together, they are the most cost-effective, efficient platform with which to build and distribute your insights, messages, and stories. (2) You really can’t grow and spread your genius without social interaction, and social media are now a full-blown feature of contemporary social interaction. (3) They will become your teacher. Every practical genius needs teachers, trailblazers, and innovators to expose him or her to what is happening at the fringes.

Ask yourself right now: are you engaged, are you watching with curiosity from the sidelines, or are you ignoring the reality out of fear? The camp in which you sit will determine your relevance in the marketplace. If you’re already in the swim, ramp it up with more exploration, more communication, more engagement. If you’re sidelining, please dive in
right now.
Find someone in your genius universe who
is fluent in this world to teach you the simple strokes that will get you started. And if you’re ignoring it, you had better get used to the world ignoring you.

Broadcasting your genius without the help of the social media is not an option for the practical genius because it’s a one-dimensional, dispassionate, disinterested, impractical way to approach your experience. I genuinely believe that it’s your obligation to be representing your genius in the social media in order to fully engage with your audience.

One rule for online engagement: share your genius. Building relationships and leveraging your assets online should always be about sharing new knowledge with your tribe. I make a point of sharing what I learn from my experience and personal explorations—especially insights from my early-morning genius “breakfasts.” I know that the people who are already in my tribe or whom I want to attract to my tribe are hungry for the same kinds of unexpected insights that I am, whether from a video interview, a link to an article, a quote from another blogger, or just an interesting piece of information that surprises or excites me. I refer to those as my “catch of the day.” I fish for something to wow me in my RSS feeds and elsewhere. If nothing excites or inspires me, I don’t share that day.

This leads to my second rule for geniuses in the online universe: don’t post messages or comments or tweet just because. Meaningless chitchat is a two-way time suck that depletes genius. Broadcast value-add information or insight or nothing at all. If what you are sharing isn’t a genuine “lightbulb” for you, it won’t be for your audience either. Remember, social media engagement is all about sharing new information, having authentic conversations, and attracting other ideas to dance with yours. That’s how you grow both yourself and your audience.