A different approach to becoming seen as an authority this week.

Your status as an authority is based on your audience's perception of your expertise relative to other experts they know.

So one shortcut to being seen as an authority that we've discussed before is to focus on a very tight niche or specialist area where there's less competition and so it's easier for you to stand out.

Another approach that works in a similar way is to master a new media. Over the years we've seen an acceleration in the pace of new media appearing: from blogs to Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, to Youtube, Pinterest and Instagram. Today's hot new media is live video with Hangouts, Periscopes and Blabs.

Each new media brings with it a new audience, and a chance for early adopters of the new media to position themselves as authorities to that new audience. This week's video explains how.
 

 
Find this video helpful? Subscribe to the More Clients TV channel on youtube to get more of them:

Video Transcript

Hi. It's Ian here. Welcome to another 5-minute marketing tip. In this week's tip, I'm going to talk about how you can position yourself as an authority in your field by mastering a new media. As ever, I'll explain how after the break.

Hi. Welcome back. I'm sure it hasn't escaped to your attention that over the last few years, there have been a large number of new media channels appearing right from the days of blogs, through the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram. Many even some that have risen and fallen like MySpace or Google Plus.

Now, for me, the interesting thing about new media is that new media almost always bring with them a new audience, and a new audience means new opportunities for some of the early adopters of that particular media channel. What I mean by that for example is if you think back to the early days of business blogging, for example, prior to business blogs, most material available, most educational material available about business was in books, in printed journals, or perhaps email newsletters. Now, when business blogs came along, that brought with it a whole new audience. People started reading blogs who are not … didn't buy a lot of business books, did not read or subscribe to business journals, printed journals, and weren't big email newsletter subscribers, so it brought its own audience.

Now, of course, many of the people who were reading the books also read the blogs as well, but it brought its own new audience, and that meant that the people who were the earlier adopters in terms of writing business blogs, they were able to establish themselves as authorities in their particular field be that leadership, or marketing, or sales, or whatever it was simply because they were one of the few people using the media, so the new entrance, the people, the new audience for that media, they were the ones they were tuning into and looking at because some of the traditional authorities were written business books, regular writers to journals weren't using blogs. It was a way of overcoming or overtaking some of the established authorities by focusing on that new media.

If you think of YouTube, Gary Vaynerchuk, for example. When he started publishing his wine reviews on his YouTube channel, that brought a whole bunch of new people to the world of wine reviews who never read a printed wine review, never read one in a website, never subscribed to a wine newsletter, but were watching Gary's video wine reviews. Now, of course, Gary would admit. I don't think his wine reviews that are on video were any more in-depth or better than the printed wine reviews that have gone before. It's just that for the people who focused on YouTube like video. They weren't reading those, the wine reviews, so again, it established Gary as an authority in his field because he was the primary, the first, the first mover to do wine reviews on that particular channel, and I think you can continue to do that sort of thing these days.

A hot new media right now is live video, and that could be Hangout. It could be Periscope. It could be Blabs. There are people beginning to adopt that. It's beginning to develop its own new audience. Of course, some people are moving over using those and watching those who consume traditional media as well, but there are also a lot of people looking at Blabs, for example, who are not reading a lot of blogs, who are not subscribing to a lot of email newsletters, who are not reading a lot of printed material, or even watching YouTube videos, or interacting with people on LinkedIn.

Now, there is a temptation I know to look at new media like Periscope, for example, and say, “Well, my clients don't use Periscope. My clients are business-to-business. They're all on LinkedIn.” That may be true in the majority, but there will surely be some of your potential clients on Periscope. That number will surely grow, and the important point is that if you're competitors are not using Periscope and you do, you'll be the only person they're listening too or one of the few people they're listening to. Whereas with the traditional media like LinkedIn, for example, of course, all your competitors are on there. It's a much more crowded marketplace. It's much more difficult to stand out.

By adopting a new media early, particularly if you're well-suited to that, so if you're the kind of person who enjoys fiddling with technology a bit, who feels comfortable appearing on video, then something like a Blab, or a Periscope, or a Hangout will probably work really well for you. Now, there's no guarantee that this new media isn't going to go the way of MySpace or Facebook. You don't know which way it's going to go whether it will really grow to prominence or whether it will rise only to fall again, so I wouldn't advocate putting all your eggs in the new media basket.

I'd say out of all the marketing things you're doing, keep 80% of your time, and energy, and investment into traditional media that you know work for you, but maybe put about 10% to 20% into a new media, especially if it's suited to you, and to see whether that media takes off, to see whether you can develop some traction on that particular media, and whether you can pull in a new audience that isn't consuming material via more traditional media.

If you do that, you can become seen as an authority in your field. Primarily, obviously, your materials got to be great. No question about that. You really have to know your stuff, but if you're one of the few people on that new media, you got a chance to circumvent, to go around, to leapfrog above the people who are concentrating on the traditional media, so it could well work for you. Definitely worth giving a go.

That's it for this week. Speak to you again soon.