How do you demonstrate your expertise?

Grant Leboff: One of the points you make in the book is the importance of demonstrating your expertise to your community, to your audience. What are the best ways for you of doing that?

Warren Cass: With so many rich tools at our disposal now to demonstrate expertise, whether whether it’s live and face to face with things like public speaking, whether it’s online using vlogging, or YouTube, or blogging – the words you write on your own web site – the contributions you make to forums, to expert forums like LinkedIn. The key thing is to actually get out there and show people that you know stuff. I’m presuming if somebody is in a profession, or starting a business, they know what they’re doing and that’s important. But actually if you want customers it’s more important that they know, that you know, what you’re doing. So demonstrating expertise is a big subject but we remember the key element we want to inspire in people is trust. We want them to trust that we can actually deliver. We want to manage their expectations and the best way of doing that is sharing knowledge.

Grant Leboff: So is interesting isn’t it, because I think one of the things that digital has accelerated – it’s not exclusively done on its own – but it’s made everybody a sort of media personality today. You talk about public speaking, you talk about vlogging, you talk about sharing ideas on forums but all of those things require, I think at the front end, for someone to be willing to expose themselves, put their head above the parapet in a way that perhaps, 20 or 30 years ago people didn’t have to do in the same way. Would you see that as a trend?

Warren Cass: Absolutely see it as a trend. It’s also a concern. You know the moment you stick your head above the parapet and of course somebody is going to take a shot. And and that happens, you’ve just got to expect it. There’s nothing you can do about it. I can’t remember the exact phrase but I’m used to doing anything of worth unless somebody is having a pop. So don’t be afraid. Get out there and start sharing your knowledge. You don’t want to give away all of the ingredients but you certainly want to create desire for the outcome. So start, sharing writing. That’s absolutely essential if you want people to trust that you know what you’re doing.

Grant Leboff: And for someone who is perhaps watching this and hasn’t gone on that journey yet, where where do they start? Because like you mentioned at the beginning, there’s a plethora of tools out there. They can vlog, they can blog, they can speak, they can go to forums, they can do all of these different things. Where do you start? If you are sitting in your office thinking; well OK… where would be the starting point for you?

Warren Cass: Certainly with your own assets, so your own web site, absolutely – and through your own social social profile. So writing is one, I think people really still under utilise video, which astounds me. YouTube is second biggest search engine on the planet. And you know we’re huge consumers of video content now, as well as huge creators. there has been more original content uploaded to YouTube in the last 48 hours than the top four American TV channels have aired since the 1930s.

This is the environment we live in, and every one of us has got the potential to use video in our message. Whether it’s just a greeting to customers or demonstration of a product or service, testimonials, case studies, whatever it might be. But if you’re going to incorporate things like video remember to utilise them on your Web site too. Just don’t overdo it. Short form is always going to work better and make sure there’s a call to action in there too.

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