Amplified Influence and Mobile Apps

Businesses, and let's be honest most of us, are interested in amplifying our influence.  I remember reading adventure books as a child about pioneers and woodsman that craved isolation, and that would move whenever neighbors settled close enough to hear, but that's not an effective strategy for influencing people.

I started writing my blog on enterprise mobility, www.MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com in 2006.  At the time I was the CEO of a mobile platform company and intimately involved in dozens of custom mobile software projects at any given time.  Daily I shared experiences, mistakes, lessons learned, strategies, etc.  Over the next few years thousands of people subscribed to my blog (I now have over 5.7 million page views since 2009).

I remember two emails in particular, both arrived on Mondays.  One from a fortune 500 company in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, saying they had read my articles, downloaded my trial software, and were ready to purchase it. Another email came from Christchurch, New Zealand.  Seems the folks in a large engineering and utility firm regularly read my articles, understood the capabilities of our software and wanted to submit an order.  Both of these emails reflected an amplified influence.

These days when I attend conferences on enterprise mobility it is not unusual for people to shake my hand and say they have read my articles, or if less fortunate, watched my videos for many years.  I still find that notion crazy!  I live in Boise, Idaho, which is not exactly main street America!

SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) solutions are giving, aware businesses, capabilities far beyond what was possible only a few years ago.  The two examples I listed above were from countries far from mine.  I was able to generate sales and close deals on the other side of the world with very little investment.

Is your company effectively taking advantage of these influence amplifiers?  Are you using SMAC solutions for this purpose?

In addition to sharing content from thought leaders - you need a strategy.  Mobile content and mobile apps are an important part of that.  I use Google's Blogger platform to blog. It has a mobile app.  It sends out my content optimized to be read on either a mobile device or a bigger screen.  I record interviews with the camera app on my iPhone.  I edit it on the mobile iMovie app.  I upload it to YouTube where it can be viewed on the mobile YouTube app.  I tweet about the video on a mobile app, and upload it to the mobile LinkedIn app.  All of these actions are part of a strategy to amplify influence.  It works.

In the past 36 months, I have taught digital transformation and mobile strategies workshops in 17 different countries.  In the past few months I have received invitations to speak in South Korea, Belgium, New Zealand and Portugal.  I live in Boise, the most isolated state capital in the United States.  The next nearest big town is 300 miles away.  What if your giant multinational company were employing these kinds of strategies hourly?

If you haven't already, I would encourage you to develop a full strategy on how to use these mobile and social media tools to amplify your influence, marketing and sales.  Digital transformation is happening all around us at a breathtaking speed.  It is making the once impossible, possible today and your competition is learning fast.

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Senior Analyst

Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.