“Greg, you are everywhere!”. I am often told this by business people here in Tokyo. What they mean is that I am prolific on social media, video and audio. Well, if you are in sales today and you are not prolific in promoting yourself, then what are you doing with your time? It is an old saw in sales that “it doesn’t matter how many people you know, it is more important how many people want to know you”. Fine, but how do you get that to work? Afterall, there are only so many people we can meet in a month and naturally, we want all of them to want to know us. The democratisation of social media and the free nature of the medium has changed many things in getting our reputation in front of many more people than we could ever physically meet in a month.
I was always wary of social media. I didn’t trust the platforms, so I avoided them until December 2011. That year I made my first visit to San Diego in California to attend the Dale Carnegie International Convention. One of the speakers was Jeffrey Gitomer, published author and sales training guru. He was quite a character. He was wearing a bright red shirt that from memory had his name” Jeffrey” and “Sales Dept” embroidered on it. He was dressed like some guy who would be working at a gas stand pumping petrol. Dale Carnegie is a pretty conservative organisation, so he had been told to tone down the profanity, but what he said was shocking to me.
He asked the one thousand plus attendees “how many twitter followers do you have?”. At that point he had over 30,000 and I had none. On the plane back to Tokyo, I was thinking about what he said, so I made my first sceptical foray into the social media platforms. I found Twitter didn’t suit me as much as Facebook and Linkedin, so I tended to concentrate there. I don’t post any personal stuff on these platforms. It is all business and I make sure none of it is controversial or embarrassing.
Around 2012 I started publishing blogs on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and I am still doing that. I was also publishing articles in the American Chamber Journal and the Acumen magazine every month. The American Chamber Journal editor Roberto de Vido suggested to me that I should do a podcast. I asked him “what is a podcast? I can’t remember how, but I discovered this other American guy, Gary Vaynerchuk, popularly known as Gary Vee. Another character and this time plenty of profanity from Gary. He was interesting because he was combining reality TV, education and motivation together and was pumping out massive amounts of content. He taught me to multi-purpose my content. I could use the content for my blogs for the magazines to become the content for my podcasts.
The first blog was published as a podcast called The Japan Leadership Series on August 2nd, 2014 on the topic “Flexible Japan-Stop Dreaming”. I was covering leadership, sales and presentations content in that one podcast. I started hearing that going deeper into niches was important, so I created two more podcasts called The Presentations Japan Series and The Sales Japan Series and started publishing podcasts on those specialities from November 3, 2016.
In mid-2018 I read that Google would start using audio for search in addition to text. In the text world I was competing with millions, maybe billions of blogs. The audio podcast world was a bit less competitive. I already had three podcasts by that time, but I decided to strip out the audio from two of my YouTube TVs shows, The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show and the Japan Business Mastery Show and create podcasts. The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show first episode was on “Not Meeting the Leadership Challenge Is Quietly Killing Us” on August 18, 2019. The Japan Business Mastery Show came out on October 4th, 2019 on “Five Deadly and Dastardly Leader Misperceptions”. The next year I launched a new show called Japan’s Top Business Interviews where I interview CEOs and we talk about one topic – leading in Japan. The first episode was on June 6th, 2020 with Yasuaki Mori then CEO of Infinion Technologies Japan.
What has been the upshot of all this effort and time? My personal branding has skyrocketed and I have a core of true fans who regularly follow the content. Because I am posting fresh and different content Monday to Saturday on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook I get people contacting me about training in Japan. I don’t do any paid promotion and just rely on organic search to find me. Yes, I get a lot of people trying to sell me sex, dodgy investments, various products and services too, but I just ignore those. For those who are genuinely interested in business in Japan, then they can judge the quality of what I offer by accessing my oeuvre. They can try before they buy.
So are you having a Jeffrey Gitomer moment like I had in 2011? By the way, Jeffrey has 67,000 followers on LinkedIn and I have 26,000, so I am only 40% as good as he is, but for my niche, how many people have more than I do? How many people are accessing audio search on Google as well as I am? I have no idea, but what I do know is if you are in sales, your biggest problem is getting found. The text blog world is competitive and that means you are competing with seven million blogs a day. Podcasts are said to be over two million in number. I publish my podcasts using LibSyn and their numbers show the biggest group of podcasts are published on Apple Podcasts and that Japan originated podcasts are only about 1% of their total. If you broke that down to English language podcasts, the numbers could get very interesting. My point is I am punching way above my weight here and it is working. If you are in sales, what are you doing about being found?
