Are you sticky?

I was delighted that the sun was shining on my Amovita Netwalk yesterday and our small band of eager networkers took to the luscious paths of Richmond Park with vigour.
After an opening icebreaker and giving the participants a chance to circulate and share histories and interests I broached the subject of stickiness with them. It’s something that I’ve long been fascinated with from my time in sales, marketing and PR and it crosses over into everyday networking.

Stickiness is a phrase I borrowed from Malcolm Gladwell, I read his book “The Tipping Point” some years ago on a flight to Lisbon (I’m a quick reader). I was travelling to facilitate at a conference for a large organisation, more specifically their global sales and marketing teams. What Gladwell writes pulled together a few years worth of musings and reading into one of those delightful "a-ha" moments for me, so much so that I made it the content of my keynote speech at the end of that conference.

Stickiness refers not only to how memorable your message is but how effective it is at spurring people to action. For those of us who network regularly both virtually and in reality, perhaps you wonder, as I do, what people actually remember about your conversations.
How would you like to influence more often what parts of your message get across and which parts stick?!

In our netwalking session yesterday some of us were surprised when given feedback at which bits of the message stuck out and stuck in the most. What people remembered I noticed was governed mainly by two things, they are what I like to call The Passion Bug and the WIIFT rating.

The passion bug is simply your congruence and the passion while delivering your message and how infectious that is. If we are outwardly passionate and enthusiastic about our message and it comes from the heart then it has a level of congruence and integrity that exudes and becomes sticky. That state is readily infectious. Gladwell uses the term “senders” coined by psychologists in the past, to describe those people with special personalities. He notes that those of us who are good at expressing our emotions and feelings are far more emotionally contagious than others. How would it be if your passion and enthusiasm and love of what you do could be “caught” by others? How much more powerful would that make your business, if you had all those extra sales people walking around?
I experienced catching someone else’s passion bug on Thursday. I was on a call with Karen Skidmore of CanDoCanBe and she was talking about the virtues of auto-responders, not something I would normally think to get excited about. She’s mad about them (in a good way) and was eager to share her enthusiasm and I’ve got to admit I can see, and feel, what she means. I’m now hooked on the virtues of them for my business. Thanks Karen!

The WIIFT rating is something I’m sure you’ve all come across in one guise or another. Simply put it’s What’s In It For Them, your customers? People connect with a message at the point of value for them. In the context of our walk we were talking about our lives up until that point, now that’s a whole lot to cover and remember. We all noticed that those points that stuck in people’s hearts and minds were those elements that they could relate to, or were interested in from personal experience or had some additional value to them.

Just think of the phenomenal effect if the WIIFT part of your message is passionate and highly contagious.

Now I consider myself to be hugely blessed, being passionate about what I do comes easily to me because I LOVE IT and I’ve noticed how powerful being able to say that is to people. I love the process and most of all I love the benefits it brings and the way it touches people I work with. If you cannot say passionately and congruently I LOVE WHAT I DO then you might like to consider what needs to change so that you can.

Wishing you a wonderfully passionate day!