Matt Britton argues that to succeed you must create value, build trust, and avoid always taking from others. He emphasizes deriving personal satisfaction from inspiring people, using events (Social Media Week) and social media (Twitter, content production) to deliver value and gather feedback, and growing a recognizable personal brand—characterized as knowledgeable, trustworthy, energetic, and authentic—so future outreach is more likely to get responses.
You need to create value, to build trust and to get people to listen to you. In this world, if you're all about taking, taking, taking, you're going to be much less successful, period. Whether you're always asking people for money or favors and you never give back. For me, I actually get tremendous personal value out of inspiring people and out of making them think about the world in a different way, regardless of if it translates to business or not. It's I love to do. And you always get such a diverse audience at Social Media Week events. You're going to be able to get on stage and just get the feedback that I've been able to get via Twitter or via people coming up to me after the fact. I mean, that to me, makes me feel so good. Regardless of if I ever get business out of it and if I continue to be able to deliver value on stage and extend that value into putting out a ton of content on social media, which I've invested heavily in the last couple years, I become a brand that people know, and then when I reach out to them and I call them a year later, six months later, whenever, they are much more likely to return my call because they've heard of me before, I'm not just another person that's reaching out to them. So ultimately, that's how it pays off. I'm building myself as a personal brand. And behind that personal brand is somebody that's knowledgeable, trustworthy, energetic, authentic. And if I continue to be known as that and more and more people know me, then I'm going to be able to get in front of the people that I need to when I need to get in front of them. And that's exactly why I do it.
