photo by Richard What & Tom Ryder

Since 2006, my team and I have searched high and low for examples of digital leadership from people like Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales, Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk, and even studied President Barack Obama’s use of digital technology to win the election, and then the Nobel Peace Prize. From there, we turned to companies as far ranging as Cirque du Soleil, BT (formerly British Telecom), the TED conference and Best Buy. After lengthy interviews and in-depth analysis, a few simple patterns emerged. Here are some of the top rules for positioning yourself as a leader in the digital age. See if any of them surprise you:

Your Influence Is Greatest When You Are At The Center Of The Action.
Just being online isn’t enough. You need to get out there and start building bridges with several communities (professional organizations, industry organizations, minority-run organizations, woman’s organizations, tech meet-ups, innovation meet-ups, emerging market meet-ups etc.) Follow up with all new contacts via social networks. It is the easiest way to keep your new contacts abreast of your new developments, without having to constantly pester them with newsletters and emails. The more connected you are and are perceived to be, the more visibility you have- that’s a given.

What might not be as obvious is that being in the center of your network also gives you access to more information, sooner - a competitive edge with which to make better business decisions.

Your Online & Offline Presences Reinforce One Another.
Leverage your social capital (the power of those amazing friends who want to help you succeed! Just ask a question to your facebook/twitter and linkedin friends and see how many great responses you get- that’s your social capital at work). When your social capital starts affecting people outside of your networks, I refer to that in my first book, 33 Million People in The Room, as ‘cultural capital’ (you are now influencing the culture at large). Why? Most likely because you are perceived to be adding value to the lives of the people in your community. The next step is to translate your social connections into real-world influence.

Keep Strengthening Social Ties As Your Influence Spreads.

Photo by Richard Vandentillart

When your influence spreads beyond immediate social circles, your social capital turns into cultural capital, which has the power to attract financial success. Why? People and companies are attracted to ‘leaders’ and digital leadership is no different. The more you are perceived as an authentic leader within the culture, the more you become a magnet, an attractor. Offers come to you by the thousands. The old quandary changes from ‘how will I pay rent this month’ to ‘how do I decide which opportunities to pursue’.

Social Capital + Cultural Capital Attracts Financial Capital

Are you a future Digital Leader?

Just think of the issues digital leaders like Gary Vaynerchuk must face daily for example. With about 1 million Twitter followers (depending on the day), Vaynerchuk’s success is astonishing, yet the pattern to his success is quite simple: social capital + cultural capital attracts financial capital. The proof in in the pudding so to speak- this year Vaynerchuk signed a 7 figure book deal and released his best selling book, ‘Crush It‘.

If the words “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” come to mind:  wouldn’t you like to have those problems too?

Taking cues straight from the President, this headline caught my eye: “Obama To Appoint Panel For Auto Recovery“. The story, in which writer Steven R. Hurst’s reports that the Obama administration “is establishing a presidential task force to direct the restructuring of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC” is a great reminder of a basic life lesson:

You don’t have to be the leader of the free world to appoint an effective task force to reinvent yourself.

With record job losses and a flailing economy, how can a mere mortal survive these fickle tempests and reinvent himself? Chances are, if the car companies can’t go it alone, you probably can’t either, and you don’t have to. Just follow these easy steps:

33 Million People book party and SMW Executive Committee Members: Stella Deville, Toby Daniels & yours truly

1. Convene Your Own Advisory Board

“We are all stupid” wrote Mark Twain, “just on different subjects.” So with that little nugget of wisdom to get you started, begin by asking yourself who the top 10 influencers in your life are and list them. Next reach out to each one individually in their medium of choice. Using easy networking tools like facebook, twitter, linkedin etc. can save time and energy as you rally your troops. Whatever the means used, ask each person on your list to be on your personal advisory board then schedule a meeting.

Take notes because the network knows what you don’t know.

Social Media Week NY (SMW) is a great example of this process in action. The idea, born of a group of friends in the digital media space went from concept to implementation in just 3 weeks, under the leadership of one man, Toby Daniels. Daniels, 32, had just left a high profile job at MintDigital, an online digital platform and was looking to reinvent himself as a digital strategist.

Reinventing your career path at a time when most are fighting to save theirs might seem incredibly naive but where others remain paralyzed by the fear of change and uncertainty, Daniels began to connect the dots of his life and sow the seeds of opportunity. His first step was to convene an executive committee which consisted of academics like Jeremy Kagan- Strategy Consultant and Professor, Internet Marketing, Columbia Business School, as well as a bevy of forward thinking digital entrepreneurs like NUE: Agency’s Jesse Kirshbaum, Mashable’s Adam Hirsch and Tumblr’s David Karp. (In full disclosure, Daniels even asked me to join his executive committee to celebrate the community behind “33 Million People in the Room“, a book about leveraging social media to build social and cultural capital.)

2. Create a Vision and a Strategy Together

Remember that your preliminary advisory board meeting will set the tone for all other proceedings and needs to be more than just a meet and greet. It is the moment when you state your case about what you hope to accomplish and how each invited person fits into your vision. Share your goal and ask your advisory board to help you come up with a strategy complete with actionable items and time lines. Follow up online with a synopsis of your plan. Solicit invaluable feedback and implement tactical suggestions. If you don’t know how, ask. That is what your personal advisory board is there for.

Getting back to the Social Media Week example, Daniels created a mission statement that we could all buy-in to: “SMW aims to create an open and inclusive environment offering a series of free events, including workshops and panel discussions, and a platform for individuals, group and companies to organize their own activities.” Next, he suggested that our events would get far more press as part of a self-organized Social Media Week strategy than if we individually held stand alone events. Finally, he enlisted Tumblr to build the SMW website. With all of the week’s events listed in one place, a unified vision for SMW and how it might benefit the social media community, Daniels’ idea had became far more concrete.

3. Aggregate Your Networks and Spread The Word

People are generally willing to be of assistance when they have a clear idea of what might be required of them to do so. Delegate one specific task for each person in the group to deliver by a defined date, based on their individual resources. As we saw with the SMW example, you can’t know everything so get the most impact in terms of your time, influence and dollars by joining networks. These can be small networks of a few friends working together, or can even be the basis for new startups.

What started with Daniels’ idea, an Executive Committee and a clearly communicated vision of what could be accomplished if we pooled our resources, grew within a matter of weeks into dozens of original and free community events supported by partnerships with NY based companies like Razorfish, Fleishman Hillard, Deep Focus, For Your Imagination and Brooklyn based Drop.io. These in turn attracted higher profile alliances with media outlets such as the New York Times and Wired Magazine hosting Social Media Week events in their offices.

Adapt or Fail

In building his own personal brand through the birth of Social Media Week NY, Daniels understood a fundamental truth in life as in business: In order to survive within a social context, we must adapt or fail.

Daniel’s story could easily have been summarized as follows: He came, he lost and if novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is to be believed, the story ends there. “There are no second acts in American lives.” In Fitzgerald’s era, if something went wrong in a person’s chosen career, there was no second chance to start it over again. These days, second acts can and do happen. After all, just ask Britney Spears, the US auto industry and Toby Daniels. (Special thanks to Marie-Chantale Turgeon for the ‘Reinvent Yourself Often” image.)