Practical companion to the WOP video.
Build reputation around work people can recognise.
The archive conversation with Dana Small explores reputation and professional content. A practical starting point is to choose a problem you understand well enough to explain clearly. Share the decision, the reasoning and the lesson, with confidential details removed. That gives colleagues a way to understand what you can contribute.
Keep the claim proportionate to your involvement. Explain which part you owned and which depended on others. A specific account of improving a handover is more credible than a broad claim to have transformed the organisation. Give the reader enough context to assess whether the lesson applies to their work.
Use responses as a learning opportunity. Ask how the problem appears in another category or organisation. If someone challenges an assumption, examine it and update your explanation when needed. Professional reputation develops through how you handle those exchanges as well as through the original post.
Measure progress through useful relationships and opportunities to contribute. Attention can help people discover your work, but the durable asset is a body of explanations they can trust. Keep publishing at a cadence you can sustain while maintaining the quality of the underlying work.
Watch the original WOP video
Part 1 is here.
If you don't have a social media presence, you're at a huge disadvantage. I would even say that you don't exist in a professional capacity to some people. Some of the best procurement professionals I've worked with have zero online presence, and I would never say they don't exist. I personally recommend these people for roles whenever I see something that might work for them and check in with them first.
But imagine you have some level of expertise you can share with the world (everyone has this), and by doing so, your name is in front of every procurement leader active on LinkedIn (there are a lot of them, daily). Why wouldn't you consider this?
And the platform I'd recommend for starting out is LinkedIn because it's a place to test ideas and engage with others. You have a massive advantage too. There aren't many people who create procurement content consistently. And many of the people who are currently doing it or looking to do it are peddling rubbish written in Chat GPT.
How do I know?
Because every first sentence has a colon, there's an aggressive use of emojis, and every story is upbeat. Also, it defaults to American English, and that's a big takeaway when I see my fellow Brits doing it. By the way, I use AI to help with my content creation, and I've almost been using it for an entire year now. But this piece isn't about AI; I'll write more on that soon.
LinkedIn's New Algorithm
Jason Feifer is a guy I like to listen to. He's the Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. He asked Dan Roth, the Editor in Chief at LinkedIn, and Alice Xiong, the Director of Product Management at LinkedIn, about how to navigate the platform as a creator given some recent changes that were evident. Here are the key things you need to know:
LinkedIn's algorithm now prioritises posts that share "knowledge and advice" from people users know and care about, resulting in an 80% reduction in complaints about irrelevant content.
Posts that share "knowledge and advice" are now prioritised throughout the platform, and LinkedIn's system evaluates whether a post contains knowledge and advice, and then shows it to other users who are likely to find the information relevant and useful.
LinkedIn saw a 42% YoY increase in content shared from 2021 to 2023, a 27% increase in content viewed, and now has three professionals joining every second.
Users find it most valuable when content is grounded in knowledge and advice and when it is from people they know and care about.
LinkedIn is looking for creators who build a community around content and knowledge-sharing that is uniquely qualified to talk about.
In the past, LinkedIn would amplify posts that got a lot of comments, leading to users banding together in "engagement groups" to boost posts. These were known as pods.
In short, LinkedIn doesn't want content of a viral nature. It wants actionable insights from people who are trusted. And each and every one of you can be that trusted person. You just need to make a start.
If you want to take this seriously, start posting content daily with one focus.
My focus is always:
I want to teach you 1 thing about X.
I’ll do this in a multitude of ways, usually with a focus on how digital procurement and contract management is a powerful enabler.
And this helps me build authority globally with people I’ve never met. I value that more than building authority in any organisation, which you lose if you leave.
This stays with you.