Go Ahead, Be Human

How to be Human?

Adding more of the “real you” into your business is the ultimate upleveling strategy

In these trying times brought to us by the pandemic, we all long for actual engagements. We want connections and open communication to feel valued, heard, and understood. There are so many people that are trying to be gurus and influencers. We don’t need more gurus, thought leaders and authority figures, who aren’t even earning what they’re selling as a coaching package. We need more engagers, real transparency, and connection.

Engaged First, Creator Second

Rob Napoli is an accomplished trainer, speaker, entrepreneur, business and career coach based in Brooklyn, New York. Rob’s journey has taken him from the Midwest to New York City by way of Milan, Italy, where he spent two years in Master’s scaling a global startup and coaching professional American football.

For every pivot in his life and his career, Rob noticed the same trend: his network helped him rise with each fresh start. And that's what I want to talk to you about. Rob’s book, The Social Soul, details this finding and lays out how engagement is the key to long-term loyalty and support from your audience. Without the engagement on both sides, it doesn’t matter what - or how much -?you create.

The Social Soul is all about mastering personal and professional brands with authenticity and intentionality. The reason that it is a really big passion of mine is back in 2018, I was working for a company. I was a recruiter and I spent two years in New York after my two years in Italy. I started realizing that my network was stronger than I thought. I moved to New York because I’ve got a job here and I got an opportunity to go through an accelerator program, but I’d never been here. I needed to leverage the power of that.

Social Selling is Sleazy

When influencer culture started taking over every social media platform, and everybody was “giving away”?their “secrets of earning 7-figures” or “so excited to share” a product they’d never actually used… it became clear that we were headed in the wrong direction. Experts get to that status level by putting in the hours, by figuring “it” out and by doing this so many times that they develop a new understanding of their market or niche.?

Influencers on the other hand, drop in oftentimes selling numbers they've never actually reached for themselves, hoping to play on your desires of getting rich overnight. Or by suggesting you buy something they don’t believe in and are only promoting because they're getting paid to do so.

“One of the things I found about social media, and some of the people I worked with who wanted to be influencers, was that they weren’t really making the money they said they were because they weren’t getting that engagement. The smaller people that were engaging, networkers, and relationship builders were the people that had strong businesses.” -Rob Napoli, The Social Soul

Why Are So Many People Afraid to Engage?

A lot of times, it comes down to being afraid to be human. It’s okay to talk about real things and the lessons you've learned, places you might have screwed up and how you grew from that. We can’t be successful when we always exist in a place where we’re afraid to be real. This also applies to asking for things. We are so afraid to make the ask - whether it's for support, or if it's from people we want to learn from… this is how we foster real growth in relationships. There has to be meaningful connections and interactions.

A Click is Not A Relationship

The thing about likes is that they don’t always transfer to anything. Just because an influencer has a million followers does not mean they have a million customers. If 150 people like your post about your book presale, but not one of them actually clicks the link to order, the likes don’t matter. The missing piece, in the middle of all this is the actual engagement, where you've talked to those people hitting like - even if it's never been in person - and they know you and want to actually support you.

Real, actionable content creates space for real, actionable interactions. Period. There is no flashy marketing funnel big enough or broad enough to change this truth.

Get In the Trenches

Ask what they want. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. And don’t be so attached to the end result in your mind, that you can't hear the feedback you receive. When you're serving an audience, understanding what they need from you will always trump what you want to give them. Ask, listen, build, repeat.

The idea is to really leverage that power and bring them along into showing how your brand stands out. You then create content for your brand that connects with your consumers because you’re talking to them more, you know them better because they’re in your personal network, and you can find that content that’s going to tie the loops together, not just be a click of engagement but go to the heart of what your customer is looking for. Go ahead, be human.