Have you heard of a confluence?
A confluence is two rivers, flowing and growing separately, that merge to form a third river of greater power, strength and potential. When you see cities and towns created from a confluence, the areas of commerce (and income) are found at the point of that confluence and where that third river flows.
Successful businesses are confluences, in many ways. The successful merging of time and money is an important confluence. The confluence in businesses like Apple, merging the minds of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The Reeses Peanut Butter Cup, the best selling Halloween candy, blends chocolate and peanut butter. Each of them is infinitely better as a confluence of two rivers than a river on its own.
I have a confluence that we created that has been the cornerstone of so much of our success. This is the concept that I teach.
The confluence of connection and content. It’s a simple but very deep concept when studied. It’s simple because it’s easy to define and understand. It puts everything in its correct place, eliminates overwhelm and allows us to focus on only the work that matters and say no to all of the distractions that we think matter, but really don’t. It’s deep because so many areas fall under content and connection, that if you don’t have a plan and a strategy, you will wind up like most business owners who flail away chasing the next thing and never having peace, calm and a steady flow to create their work.
The balance between creating your content and developing those connections has to be intentional. And it has to be looked at with self awareness.
I was approached recently by someone who is struggling mightily with their platform. They are doing everything they were told to do. She writes blog posts. She creates social media content. In fact, she told me her strength is that she is a prolific content creator. There was a time when that was enough. If you were a prolific content creator ten years ago, you would rule the internet. Back then, few people had podcasts. Social media was still finding its way. Blogs were clunky, books were hard to get published and AI couldn’t write your content for you.
Now, it seems like every person who is trying to get out of their job and build a business for freedom posts daily on their favorite social media platform. And there is nothing wrong with doing that- in many ways, it can be essential. But we have to understand something. Because it’s so easy to share content now, it’s so easy for everyone else to share content as well. There are few hurdles or boundaries. So, for every creator who gets hundreds of comments and thousands of likes per post, there are thousands who post consistently who hardly get any attention. So how do you stand out in an endless sea of noise that is only growing larger?
You need to understand that for 99.9%, creating content is not enough. It’s not even close to enough. It’s one river, flowing on its own with little momentum, with millions of other rivers doing exactly the same thing. Each day, you add a few drops into the river, but months go by and nothing really changes.
Last month, a guy reached out to me out of the blue to see if I needed help with my business. It was an obvious soft pitch for some type of coaching. I don’t know him, or of him. I had a little fun asking him if this was always how he introduced himself to people he doesn’t know. He assertively told me that he is a no-nonsense person and gets right to the point. I told him I work with people I trust and I don’t know or trust him.
I was so curious. Was this real? Was it another automated pitch? I checked out his social media feed, and I looked on in amazement. Multiple posts a day with inspirational quotes. Sharing his thoughts. Posting articles and podcasts to read or listen to. All of this content and close to no engagement. Like, really, really close. I scrolled down more because I was just so intrigued. How long can you do this and not see the problem? So I scrolled down. And down. And down even further. This guy wasn’t just doing this for days. Or weeks. It’s been months.
I had to stop somewhere around Easter. I had seen enough.
It was an extreme example of creating content- proficiently- with little to no connection. And when there was a connection (at least in my example) it was to pitch something.
On the other hand, there are people like my friend Julie McVey. She found my book, The Wealth of Connection, and we have become friends in the past few months. It’s obvious, just from observing, that she cares about people. When she described her past career in nursing, it was easy to see where that heart came from. Julie isn’t a self-described internet “influencer” but I see her posts on LinkedIn and I’m astonished by how much engagement she gets. Each post seemed to garner a tremendous amount of comments, conversation and even compassion. You could tell that this wasn’t bought or boosted but I was still amazed that someone that didn’t seem to have a following has such a huge following.
The first time we chatted, I asked her about it. She laughed sheepishly.
“I just feel that if someone takes the time to comment on something I wrote, I’m going to respond,” McVey told me.
That was it! Maybe there is more to it, but as I thought about it, maybe there wasn’t. Her content might have been crickets- no matter how good it was. But it is her care- her compassion and connection- that makes her content get seen by so many more people. I had to think back on all of the posts that I made where I didn’t respond. Where I didn’t want to be a slave to the internet. But as I thought more about Julie’s example, I went back to a few posts and responded to all of the comments. It took less than ten minutes. Not only did it feel good, but it created much more engagement and I was asked to be a guest on two podcasts because of it.
This is just one example of so many between the confluence of content and connection. But there is no doubt that they work together like peanut butter and jelly. But in a day and age where 720,000 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube daily, you better not count on your content and platform alone.
It’s been said that content is king. Maybe. But if it is, connection is queen. And if you play chess, you know who really holds the power.
Have an AMAZING day!
Vincent
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