Rise of the Tech Influencer

I'll be speaking at GCAP again this year, during Melbourne International Games Week. My topic is Rise of the Tech Influencer - small steps you can take to extend your reach. It's a really interesting topic because there are two popular assumptions around social media and these are wrong, and they are holding people back.

One is that social media is a toy or has limited use in business, and the other is that it is a time suck.

A friend of mine from the mother ship reached out to me this morning (Read: someone from Corp HQ in Redmond). He said he had an invite in his calendar to 'Meet the Masters' and that included me.

"Yep, that's me, #1 in the World", I said smugly.

"I guess I always just thought of LinkedIn as a tool for recruiters to view online CV's" he replied.

Not anymore. The world has changed. There are a whole bunch of free tools that can do so much more than it says on the box. I won't have time to unpack them all here, but I'll start with Why it's important.

#1 - Establish credibility from a distance:

At the WAITTA Gala Dinner a couple of months ago. I was early and wandering around the bar looking for anyone interesting. I saw a guy who used to sit on a board with me and went over to say hello, he introduced me to his friend who was a CTO in one of the Government Departments. I don't know that many people in Government anymore, I've been dealing with Commercial Customers for the past 3 years. But after a minute or so, he stopped me and said "Wait, what did you say your name was?", when I told him he said delightedly, "I thought you seemed familiar, I follow you on LinkedIn. I read your articles".

Instant credibility - I no-longer needed to worry about saying something smart or memorable. He knew me and my ideas. I was much relieved, as I get a little anxious talking to strangers and trying to appear brilliant to important people. But now I could relax and have fun talking to him.

#2 - Influence by volume:

When I started looking at this, I was only #1 regionally, not across the world. So I studied Fabio Moioli who was the most influential before me. He has almost 40K Followers and he writes articles around CIO Thought Leadership. Can you imagine the tremendous potential for any business when you are the one influencing leaders in your field? 40 thousand people are following what he says and listening to his voice. Who could possibly speak to 40,000 people in one day, even going to conferences? And it isn't just 40,000 that will see his articles. People within that following will share his articles and comment on them - and then those articles will hit those feeds too. That is how I, with my 2.5K followers am having more influence than Fabio right now - because I am more engaged, and so are my followers. And our words are spreading outwards like ripples on an enormous pond.

#3 - Access all areas:

A couple of years ago they started telling all of us in Microsoft that we needed to get out of the operational level discussions and into the C-Suite. Easier said than done! The people that most directly need our help are in Operations. And the C-Level Execs are talking to Account Managers. We don't want to be tripping over each other and showing up where we have not proven our value... but what could we do?

They were right, of course. All of us working in Tech need to broaden our horizons, get out of the basement and into the boardroom. Decisions are being made about technology by people in the business without relevant advice. We understand how organisations can be transformed, how to leave technical debt behind and how to leverage the power of cloud - but if we are still talking to the same people we always have been - none of us will be able to move forward.

But LinkedIn is a tremendous democratiser of ideas. I now have many friends in the C-suite who I meet with regularly for coffee or breakfast, to share ideas and reading lists before the day starts. It has opened up access to all sorts of people, and all I had to open up were my thoughts - which I shared on LinkedIn...

#WAITTA #GCAP17 #MIGW17

If you liked this article and would like the next step tips, do read LinkedIn 101

This is the recording of the actual session I delivered at GCAP.com.au

Michelle Sandford works for Microsoft. She is the Vice Chair of the Australian Computer Society in WA, a Tedx Speaker, a Tech Girl Superhero and one of MCV's 30 Most Influential Women in Games. You can follow Michelle on LinkedIn for her articles; on Twitter for events, interesting shares and occasional commentary in 140 characters, Facebook to see where she is presenting next, YouTube for Video's and Instagram for the life of a Microsoftie in photographs.