Be an intelligence agent : Get information outside the conversation silo
Serving as intelligence agent is an excellent way of establishing yourself as a reliable and trusted authority in a niche area of the law. Let me share some context on what I mean.
Before social media in the form of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more, we had blogs.
Blogs to share information and insight, and blogs to converse with others by ‘listening’ to what they were saying. We listened through something called trackbacks (pinged our blog when our blog was cited) and rudimentary RSS readers. Google Reader, which is going away soon, had not yet arrived.
My blog was my way of sharing information everyone else had not seen — or wasn’t looking for (blogs were viewed as unseemly by lawyers then). Lawyers and others serving them began to follow my blog to pick up tips, ideas, and insight on how to network through the Internet (via blogging) to grow their practices.
My friend, Buzz Bruggeman (@buzzmodo), a fellow lawyer and founder of ActiveWords, told me I was acting as an intelligent agent. I was seeing information and intelligently sharing it with my target audience — I was serving as my audience’s agent.
With everyone ‘listening’ to what everyone else was blogging, the key was to listen to things others were not listening to. Otherwise I’d just be repeating what everyone else was saying. I wouldn’t be adding much in my role as an intelligence agent.
My key was Google News. I could ‘listen’ for subjects and phrases to pick up news and insight from not only the U.S., but from around the world, and have stories fed to my RSS Reader. I was picking up and sharing items no one else was seeing.
My friend, Steve Rubel, (@steverubel), Chief Content Strategist for Edelman, described what he and I were doing by using Google News as getting outside the conversation silo. Rather than just re-hash what others were talking about, bring outside information to the conversation.
Almost 10 years later, I continue to do the same old thing. I monitor words and phrases from Google News/Alerts. I listen to words such as ‘Facebook,’ ‘LinkedIn,’ ‘networking,’ and ‘blogging.’ Google sends me only stories from the most influential sources so I am not overwhelmed.
There are shortcuts today to Google News/Alterts. Zite, a personalized news aggregator brings you news stories and blog posts you may be interested in. Twitter, if you nail the right people to follow and use lists effectively, can also be a good source.
Go slow on the shortcuts though. Many people use the same shortcuts so the information you share on your blog and via other social media may be a rehash of what’s already out there.
Serving as intelligence agent is an excellent way of establishing yourself as a reliable and trusted authority in a niche area of the law. Just make sure you get outside the conversation silo to make it happen.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Tom Kelly.