Learning from Brian Clark's Authority Rules

I downloaded a copy of Brian Clark's free ebook Authority Rules (found out about it from Twitter, of course). Very interesting and definitely worth the little bit of reading time it will take to work through this pithy and to-the-point report. It's written in the style of Seth Godin; i.e., it's short but if you work through everything in it, you've got a lot of studying and work to do.

But I had to laugh, because an experience I had today clearly illustrated one of Brian's key points. On page 7 he says

What other people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

Tomorrow, the Clovis Chamber Seminar Series will be a hands-on session to set up Twitter accounts for our members. We sent an email out to our members reminding them of the event. One of the emails we got back was from someone who definitely does their homework.

I was listed as the presenter. He went to Twitter and did a search on my name. But all the results he got for "Beth Bridges" were for people who had fewer than 11 followers. I'm thinking he was pretty perplexed at this point wondering why the Chamber seminar was being run by someone who either he couldn't find on Twitter or who had only a few followers.

He sent an email to our Communications Director pointing this out. Of course, she sent the email to me. I thought it was funny, but I appreciated his diligence in wanting to know whether or not I had the authority to be presenting the seminar.

Here's where this blog ties in with Brian Clark's report and the specific quote written above. Instead of sending an email back to the inquirer protesting that I was indeed someone with a decent amount of followers, I asked my friends to reassure the gentleman that, indeed, I did know a few things about Twitter and that I was qualified to teach the seminar. Definitely an attempt (successful, I think) to assure him of my authority by asking other people to confirm it, not just me saying it.

It all worked out very well because one friend pointed out the fallability of Twitter's search function and I admitted that I had made an error in my profile which made it harder for a search to find me. And, my new friend is going to help out with the seminar tomorrow, too.