Yesterday the fabulous Lisa Johnson was featured in Forbes. This in itself was a fantastic achievement, and in the 18 hours since the article went live I’ve been lucky to witness the power of a group of motivated individuals coming together to support someone that they more than admire. I’ve learned so much and I’d like to share that with you.
Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash
First a little background info. For those that don’t know, Lisa Johnson is a UK-based, multi-six figure business coach. When Lisa knew that she would be featured in Forbes she asked her clients to help get the article trending. Lisa set up a closed Facebook group to communicate with everyone who wanted to help, and generously offered some great prizes in return. She gave out key messages from the article for those that wanted to prepare their content in advance, so that they could simply add the link when it was available.
Come Sunday afternoon at 4pm everyone was primed to post. Lisa shared the link, and it was go, go, go. Bear in mind that she was in Italy on a copy-writing workshop at the time, talk about multi-tasking! Comments flew into the Facebook group as everyone posted their screen shots to prove that they had shared the article, and excitedly monitored the number of views as they steadily increased. This morning the article has been viewed over 130,000 times.
So what have I learnt from this?
· The most effective communities consist of like-minded people. When you start to build an audience, as I am, go all out to attract people that will want to work with you and will support you whenever an opportunity crops up. A group that has each others' backs is strong, supportive and as I've seen over the weekend can come together to really make a difference.
· There is no luck! It takes working smart and being consistent to grow an engaged group. The groundwork for yesterday started months, maybe years ago. If you have an audience and don't engage with them don't expect them to be around to help you when you need it.
· People will do things you ask because they like you. The possibility of winning prizes undoubtedly spurred some people on, but many shared the article just because they love being part of what Lisa has created, and what she stands for. In a world where the words honesty and authenticity are over-used to the point of exhaustion it's refreshing to be able to support someone who truly is those things.
· It doesn’t matter how small your contribution to a group is, it’s about synergy. I'm sure that I wasn't alone in knowing that my tiny audience wasn't going to bag me a big prize, but I joined in nonetheless, I was just happy to do my (very) little bit.
· It doesn’t matter how successful you are you, can’t do everything on your own. If you need help, ask for it.
I doubt I'll ever be in Forbes, but that doesn't mean that I can't take away these points and apply them to my own business. I’m just starting to build my own community, pop over to Facebook to see what I'm up to, I'd love to welcome new members into my group. See, I'm putting my learning of asking for help into practice already!
If you’d like to read the Forbes article you can do so here. It’s truly inspirational.
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