Who Owns Your Coolness? Your Right People Do.

This is Part 2 in a three-part series about tooting your own business’s horn in a way that makes your right people love you and become more addicted to what your business is all about, as opposed to just thinking you’re a self-important big mouth, which is what you’re afraid of, anyway.

Check out Part 1 of the series, “Brightening Your Business’s Star Factor,” here.

Newsflash: your business’s accolades are not all about you.

This is true even if you’re a solopreneur. That award you won? That glowing testimonial from a prominent client? You think you got those all by yourself? Pshaw!

As much as you might like to think that you’re divinely gifted or that you create your art in a vacuum, the truth is that behind every talented person is a whole host of teachers, mentors, peers, and influencers who have sparked, awakened, and activated your gifts. Your awards are about them, too.

And what about those customers who keep you in business? Those clients who allowed you to invest in the fancy new website or who paid your plane fare to that conference where you spoke? There are traces of them in your successes, too.

The great news here is that once you realize how many people have contributed to your success, you’re no longer just talking about yourself when you’re tooting your horn.

You’re talking about your right people, too.

And I mean this in a very concrete and obvious way, not in a spiritual sense. Here are some examples {note the bolded bits}:

“Thank you for supporting this locally owned business, honored to be named one of 50 Retail Stars Nationwide in 2008.” This was posted on a sign on the back of the front door of my shop, so that customers could see it when leaving. Without customers to keep our doors open and allow us to keep the inventory changing, we wouldn’t have looked as impressive to the award committee.

“Because of our customers, we broke our own sales records in 2010 and achieved the status of Diamond Level in our industry.” You can’t sell without buyers!

“The fact that you read my blog regularly really helped in getting me on the panel at Blog World.” Every set of eyeballs counts, and many of those readers are energetic brand evangelists.

Essentially, what you’re doing when you publicly thank your customers while tooting your own horn is calling on social proof to substantiate the rightness of the accolade.

You’re saying, those committee members were right in granting us that honor, and you saw how cool we were first!

You’re saying, I grew my business to six figures within two years because these mentors taught me how.

You’re saying, I’m now booking out three months in advance thanks to you sharing my new business with your readership.

I promised at the end of the last post to tell you why doing my own PR for my now-closed shop worked so powerfully to spread our influence. It’s because every time I announced another award or honor, I framed it in a “you did it again” context for our customers. As in, you spotted us before the press knew our name, you locals discovered us before our internet customers did, you voted for us to win Best Place to Shop and Most Unique Shop in our county {and we became finalists — not even the top winner, which went to a local shopping center, but I leveraged this honor anyway}.

All of this accolades-sharing and emphasis on co-ownership of the coolness created a barometric pressure of impressiveness and utter shareability. People liked to talk about us, and they did. We gave people stuff to share {our awards and honors and accolades and press mentions} and a reason to share it {co-ownership of the coolness} and they took it from there!

Keep in mind this is not about flattery, which by definition is excessive and insincere. You’d better be totally sincere when you pull this off! Remember that you wouldn’t have a business, a creative practice, or a reputation were it not for other people — your right people. And people like to hear about themselves. So keep looking for ways to connect your accomplishments to your right people and let them feel the pride of co-ownership with you.

In the third post of this three-part series, we’ll uncover the latent greatness in your own business that’s ready to be shared with the world and co-owned by you and your right people.