Humans are social creatures. To survive & thrive, we seek interactions with other people. More crucially, we seek genuine connections.

How do you identify these kinds of people? The easiest way is to hold a mirror up towards oneself. Our social nature lends us towards attracting like-minded people who have similar values & aspirations. You need to find your tribe. As a business owner, it can be difficult to see the wood from the trees, with a myriad of people vying for your time, your attention & trying to sell at you. So how do you shake the wheat from the chaff? 

While the immediacy & ease of virtual communication can be useful, how does our means of communication effect our connections & the way we are perceived? Do you feel you can get to know people & trust them when you’ve only interacted with them virtually? Are the non-verbal cues we get from face-to-face communication crucial to how we understand & collaborate? 

In this blog, I’m going to talk about authenticity: the quality of being ‘real’ or ‘true’, & how staying true to who you are, what you do & who you serve can benefit your business. With 90% of consumers saying authenticity is important when deciding which brands, they like & support¹, authenticity is what can give you the competitive edge. Words & connections are at the core of authenticity; our vehicle for capturing who we are & what we do, our means of communicating our story & what makes us unique & sincere.

Opportunities For Authenticity 

With virtual communications bombarding us & smartphones lodged in most people’s hands & pockets, instant messaging, emails & video calls really are at our fingertips. We are inundated with communications that lead to overflowing mailboxes, excessive notifications & requests to connect. It’s true that not all the communications we receive are balanced or actually authentic. 

Authenticity can be hard to qualify. What makes a person or opportunity authentic to me might not elicit the same response from you. However, there are basic principles to consider. Put simply, authenticity means being true to your own personality, values, & spirit, regardless of the pressure that you're under to act otherwise. You're honest with yourself, with others, & you take responsibility for your mistakes. Your values, ideals, & actions align. As I have said many times before, small business owners collaborate & buy from other small business owners they know like & trust.

Let’s look at LinkedIn. As we know, it is a powerful business marketing tool. You can connect with your tribe & beyond, share information about your business & opportunities, but you have to still be authentic & genuine. The best way to be authentic is to establish the right approach by creating & having thoughtful, genuine conversations, whether, by text, video or via posts. In fact, part of the LinkedIn ethos is to start a conversation when you connect with someone for the first time. Messaging your new connections on LinkedIn has become so easy, the platform even prompts you to take this action. 

What a great opportunity to be authentic. Do you take the initiative to start talking to your latest new connection or are you just a collector of people, because lots of connections make you look well connected? With the latter, if you haven’t at least tried to start a conversation then the persona you are presenting is not a genuine one, because you aren’t really trying to connected. What value to these unengaged connections add to your business & your network & in turn what value are you add to theirs? It’s like hoovering up a whole load of business cards whilst you are out networking & then just bunging them in a drawer when you get back to the office.

I always ask why my cold connections (that being someone I have never met or heard of before) have been “inspired to connect”. So often I get either an answer like “we have friends in common” or “we are in the same group” or no response at all. In my opinion, neither of these replies is a good reason to connect, it simply tells me that they have not considered why they are connecting with me, except which is so often the case so sell. The next message is a sales message! 

Connecting on LinkedIn, the subsequent conversations & posting is akin to networking. These types of connectors I have described are probably being authentic to themselves because they are a Business Development Exec, a Sales Person with a focus on return on investment, or a Lead Generation specialist with a client to whom they have to justify their value or as I have already mentioned connect because 500 plus LinkedIn connections presents an image of be a super-connector, when in fact it is not the case & this lead to questions about their authenticity. 

As a result, using LinkedIn becomes a quantity over quality exercise. it is very hard to quantify a quality connection prior to connecting & starting your conversation. However, there is a gap in understanding about how to make the most of LinkedIn & about how to position an opportunity.

An astute person would look at my profile, work out what I do for a living, & realise that as a professional networker, I am likely to already have a person in their sector that I trust. In order for me to be keen to connect with them, depends on how they approach the connection request. As there is lots of really interesting content on my LinkedIn profile, it gives people an opportunity to create an ice-breaker. Being asked about something personal to me inevitably piques my interest, shows me someone is making an effort to know more about me, makes me more likely to accept a request to connect & to start a genuine conversation.

Creating Genuine Understanding Through Respect

I hate nothing more than being sold at. I am being true to myself & my values, but I am not uncommon amongst small business owners in this respect. For some business people it is all too easy to sell on the negative, where they find fault with a piece of your business without having the knowledge or interest about your decision-making process. They can also sow the seeds of fear because the person they are talking too does not really understand the product or service being offered & whether there is a genuine context to their business. Finally, to bamboozle someone with a technical aspect, so it goes over their head. For whatever reason there is no authenticity in these approaches. Many business owners don’t want to lose face, so when presented with something you don’t understand it is easier to nod & go along with what is being said.

The real issue here is that there is a lack of the personal element, as the person selling is not trying to find out more about you & your challenges. They are not trying to establish how they can support you to move past this point or whether their offering is of actually value to you & your business. They are adopting a ‘one size fits all’ approach where in reality, one size does not fit all, their tactic simply makes us feel like another number, rather than a respected individual. 

When you are being sold at, be true to yourself. If something is not of interest or maybe, but you do not have the cash flow to but now, then it is OK to say “no”. I have covered this in another blog, but saying “no” today means you can say “yes” tomorrow when the time is right for you. It can be hard to say no, but remember we are talking about being authentic, so saying “yes” because it the path of least resistance isn’t genuine & most likely the relationship that you build with that supplier or advertiser hasn’t been established on a sound foundation. It will be rocky from the start 

To Be Continued…

Today, I have talked about being genuine to create an authentic persona on social media & in respect of your marketing, pipeline & sales. The more you consider your customer’s stand-point the better you will be able to have the conversations that create your desired outcomes. There is more that I am keen to tell you about the power of authenticity & so with this in mind I shall be publishing a second instalment to this blog. As all the best TV programmes state “To Be Continued…”

1.  https://stackla.com/resources/reports/bridging-the-gap-consumer-marketing-perspectives-on-content-in-the-digital-age/