Joanne Jacobs is a company director and a digital strategist. She’s also a blogger, a trainer, a public speaker, a change manager, an operations and project manager; she does business development, and on occasion, she can even do a bit of programming and fix technology software and hardware.
She is currently involved in four businesses, and is on the board of another two and sits on the advisory board of another organisation. She also writes for a range of sources and is still exploring other business investment and strategic opportunities. Phewww!
So how does Joanne (left) position herself in the marketplace?
While she prefers to explain why she does what she does, if pressed Joanne defaults to her ‘elevator pitch’:
“I help businesses change utterly the way they work,” she explains in this episode of REPUTATION REVOLUTION (listen via SoundCloud below).
I was keen to speak to Joanne because she epitomises the ‘what do you do?’ issue that many professionals and thought leaders face in that they possess an eclectic spread of skills picked up over the journey and it’s this combination of skills that makes them unique.
But having broad knowledge, skills and experience can also play havoc when it comes to positioning oneself in the marketplace.
Aside from that issue, Joanne and I riff on a number of topics, including:
- Joanne’s rule of not saying the same thing twice when presenting or speaking in public;
- how her intellectual property is out of date on the day it’s delivered;
- how content needs to developed in such a way that it addresses the immediate needs of the community (“Content needs to be timely, it needs to be appropriate for the audience at the time they are receiving it … it needs to be specific to people’s needs … we have the capacity to solve people’s problems on-demand”);
- the importance of getting out of the office and meeting people face to face, of being physically and intellectually present at events or in places where you’re going to meet people and can start doing business – “you need to make yourself available”, Joanne says;
- why Twitter is “a fabulous place to do research”;
… and let’s not forget the joys of downloading advertisements for Star Trek back in 1996 that would take all night to download!
I hope you enjoy this episode of REPUTATION REVOLUTION!
CONNECT WITH JOANNE
If you like what you hear, why not subscribe to REPUTATION REVOLUTION on iTunes?
SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNES
JOIN THE LINKEDIN GROUP
Leave a Reply