In this week’s thought leadership roundup, we take a look at being confident about your own expertise, how to fail intelligently, and crowdsourcing customers experts.
How to Become a Confident Expert (and Stop Feeling Like a Fraud)
From BOOST:
“In some fields, recognized qualifications denote the true experts. After all, would you let anyone but a qualified surgeon operate on you?
But in most popular blogging fields, no universally accepted qualifications exist. And yet recognized experts still occupy those fields. So what does being an expert truly mean?
Some argue that it comes down the amount of time you’ve spent studying a topic or learning a skill – 10,000 hours seems to be the magic number. But here’s the thing. Expert status is not absolute – it’s relative. The people you look up to as experts will have people that they look up to as experts too.
And even if one person is considered the most knowledgeable by everyone else in your field, does that mean they’re the only expert on that topic? Of course not. So a better way to define an expert is as follows:
An expert is someone who has enough knowledge to help others confidently.”
Why Read It: The step that people rarely think about when diving into thought leadership is what they’re going to do with all that knowledge and crafty messaging once they’ve figured it out. For some, it might seem easy to just start talking about it — for others, not so much. This piece shows you how to build the confidence necessary to share your hard-earned know-how without feeling phony.
3 Ways to Fail Intelligently to Innovate Yourself
From Innovation Excellence:
“I see failure as a necessary aspect of success. In order to grow and develop, we need to take risks and yes, fail. Without risk there are no mistakes. Without mistakes there is no learning and without learning there is no growth.
[If] you are not failing, it means you are not trying hard enough. Failure in your working life can be immensely helpful to your career trajectory. To be truly successful, every person needs to fail at some point. Facing our fears and failures triggers the most necessary changes in our lives. We need that extra nudge to get things going. Otherwise, we would simply sail along comfortably without making any progress.”
Why Read It: A twist on an old but important adage: learn from your mistakes. This article shows you how to do it on purpose.
Crowdsourcing Customer Support: Consulting Your ‘Customer Experts’ For Help
From Forbes:
“Let your power users be the voice [of your brand]. Customers these days are more willing to do this kind of work for your brand, but they want recognition for doing it—they would like to be given that badge or stamp that says, ‘You’re the power expert in Applegate bacon.’ Giving power users that recognition, a badge, points [or] some sort of title, giving them something they can stamp on their resume or their LinkedIn profile that says they’re an expert or a power user, I think, is really important to customers today. It’s certainly a win for [the] business as well: You’re not having to take on all the burden of support costs because your users are able to do some of that for you—and your customers get closer to the brand at the same time by assisting you.”
Why Read It: Though customer advocacy is not a new approach, it is often a difficult one to get tangible results from. This blog from Forbes digs into how to do it the right way in order to product valuable outcomes and an expandable network of loyal brand champions.
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