Episode 386: What do you NOT want to be known for?
In this episode, Fiona discovers practical strategies to effectively shape your brand's message. She also shares the aspect of brand awareness. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Importance of knowing who you are
Challenges faced by small business owners
The need for boundaries in discussing personal topics
Creating a Response Registry for media interviews
Establishing a "Ring of No" for topics you won't discuss
Reflecting on personal experiences
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Connect and get in touch with My Daily Business:
“Sometimes you can only know who you are by knowing who you are not. When we are in a romantic relationship or a relationship even with a friend when it becomes clear that we are not values aligned or we are not on the same page, and only by seeing what you don't want to be or don't want to have you realise those things about yourself, what you do have and what you do want to be.”
Welcome to episode 386 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today it is a coaching episode and I'm going to go deep on something that I think people don't consider when it comes to raising their brand awareness, getting themselves out there, particularly if they're trying to do more personal brand or building the figurehead profile. I think that once you focus on this, it can become a lot easier to get yourself out there in a way that is aligned with your goals and your values and kind of their whole mission and vision for your business. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I record this podcast and have all of these great conversations. That is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.
I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. The other thing I wanted to mention is that we are down to the final parts of interviewing people for group coaching. If you are keen to get started, this kicks off in early March. If you're reading in real time, that's March 2024. However, we do open this twice a year, if you're not quite ready you can get on the wait list after March and join us in September. But if you're keen to get on it now, then please get on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching and apply. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
I'm a massive reader. I read probably a book a week and maybe if it's been a week where I've particularly had a lot of laundry to do or cleaning or commuting, then I will also probably get through an audiobook. Now that's not to boast, but just to say I read a lot of books and have always read a million books. I grew up in a family where my parents were always like, “You can't be bored. There are books around,” and we had hundreds of books. My dad helped set up a secondhand bookshop in his retirement and my mom and dad were always going to the library and they're those people that would borrow the entire catalog and have 10 books each and just come back. They were always reading, I've read thousands of books over my lifetime and when you remember a book and you remember exactly what was in that book and the lessons that it taught you, then it goes to show that it has stood out for some particular reason.
Now, one of these books that stood out for me, and I probably read it when I was 19 and I think it had come out maybe five years before, that was Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. Now this is back in the day. I mean there's always been sort of self-help books around, but I was 19 and I was not familiar with these sorts of books. I read this book and it was eye-opening. My good friend at the time Nikki, also read this book and we would just conversate all around it. For those who don't know, it's this book and it's written as nonfiction, but it's up to you whether you believe it or not.
This guy just starts talking to God and then he starts scribbling down everything that God says. Now, regardless of what your beliefs are, it's an interesting book because it talks about human relationships, society, and all sorts of things. I haven't read it for a long time, so I'm not sure. I was 19 when I read it first, but I think I read it again when I was in my early twenties. One of the things that I always remember from that book is that he said, “Sometimes you can only know who you are by knowing who you are not.” I think when we are in say a romantic relationship or a relationship even with a friend it becomes clear that we are not values aligned or we are not on the same page. Only by seeing what you don't want to be or don't want to have you realise those things about yourself, what you do have and what you do want to be.
I've always remembered how he talked so much about you sometimes can only figure out who you are by knowing who you are, not. Now how does that relate to business? Well, it's the start of a new year and I know a lot of people have these ideas of getting themselves out here a bit more. It's the start of like new year and a new you. We have this idea quite often in business that somehow things reset on January 1st and we can come up with new goals and new things and that can give you a lot of momentum. I've heard from people already this year, that a lot of people are looking at 2024 or maybe it'll be the same regardless of when you're reading this, but if you're reading in real-time, a lot of people that I've been talking to are talking about financial struggles or other things they're going through in their business and they're looking at what they can do now.
One of those things is to get themselves out there a bit more in particular out there in terms of raising brand awareness, building their figurehead profile, and increasing their brand. A lot of that then comes back to conversations around media and PR and podcasts and all sorts of different ways, collaborations, and other things that you can do to get yourself out there. Today I wanted to talk about an element of this that I don't think is discussed enough, and whenever I bring it up in group coaching or talks or one-on-one coaching with people, I always sort of see this like recognition of, “I haven't thought about it like that.” I will talk about it in today's coaching session. Also, to give you some context, I have been on the receiving end of thousands of pictures.
We get a lot of pictures for this podcast, which is not to say that we are not welcoming anymore. Please, always send them through if you are reading this and potentially if you've also been a bit of a reader and you understand how this program works and you understand the type of guests we have, then we would love to hear from you because we do get a lot of spam podcast requests that are just somebody who has never read this podcast and that can be frustrating. But we do get from time to time, great requests and pictures. I've seen hundreds or thousands of those over these couple of years that I've been running this podcast. But also I had been a journalist for 20-something years before that. I wrote for magazines like Monocle, Nylon, and Rush, I had a column in the newspaper here in Australia that got syndicated in Melbourne and Sydney.
I would write the Sunday feature lift-outs in magazines that went into newspapers in the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and the UK. I wrote for Cool Hunting for a long time. I wrote for Refinery29 in the US, and I wrote for all sorts of publications and places. I was on a lot of databases. I think I'm still on them because often I'll get requests for, “Hey, we want to talk to you about insert magazine that I used to write for five years ago.” I have seen many pictures that people or PR people or directly from the person themselves would be sending. What you'll always see is people kind of rehash the same information or they tell you who they are. They'll say, “I am an award-winning,” and I'm putting my hand up.
I do very similar stuff. This is what we are all kind of taught to do is that we have these kinds of show reels about ourselves and we think about, when I'm pitching I need to tell them who I am and what I want to talk about. That's great for sure, absolutely you should tell them. But I think sometimes in that brainstorming and coming up with these conversations and coming up with these pitch ideas, whether it's you directly or with a PR agency, we sometimes forget to think about the boundaries around what we will talk about and what we won't talk about. In particular with small business owners, the things we don't want to be known for. We all have elements in our lives that are sort of private to us, or not even necessarily private, but just are not something that you want to be the spokesperson for.
I know because I have been on both sides of this, that sometimes small business owners can get so excited about getting into a podcast or getting into a particular media publication that they start talking about stuff that is not what they want to be known for. This can especially happen when you haven't received the questions or an outline ahead of time. You don't know what you're going to be asked. A lot of publications won't send you the questions ahead of time. They will just schedule the interview with you with a journalist and the journalist turns up, and they can ask whatever questions they want. Sort of the bigger you get, almost the less that they will tell you exactly what they're going to say because they want to catch an original thought or a snippet or a sound bite that you haven't said previously.
But if you are in that situation, what can happen is that you're so excited to be there that you start talking about stuff that actually when you reflect is not what you want to be known for. Now this is not to say that you shouldn't be just normal and human and casual and having normal conversation that you should script everything. But it is saying that you want to think about, especially if you're trying to get yourself out there more as a business, what are the topics you don't want to talk about? The topics that you do not want to become a spokesperson for and also in particular in aligned with your business, are not something that you want either associated with your business or that you want to be like the headline around your business. For example, let's say you are a parent in business, your business may have zero to do with parenting or pregnancy or anything like that.
You may have decided that your family is not something that you're talking about, you can mention that you have a family, but you're not going to talk about your children in detail. You're not going to talk about how old they are, or where they go to school. I mean, you shouldn't be talking about that anyway. I mean there are so many strange people out there in the world, but you are not going to talk about issues that those children are going through or something else like that. Whereas somebody who has decided that their family is part of their overall brand, then they might decide, yes, I'm happy to talk about my children up to this point. I'm not going to talk about XYZ about my children. I'm happy to talk about them to this point. Then you might have another business owner who's like, “I am going to share everything about my children, my family, what they're going through, every single thing that's affecting us as a family and having an impact because that's part of what I want to share and what I will be known for.”
That perfectly aligns with my business. I think these are the conversations that people don't have. They have a lot of conversations about what publication they want to get on, what podcast they want to get on, and maybe a couple of key bullet points on what they're going to talk about or the angles or the hooks. They don't spend enough time thinking about where's the boundary with these particular topics or what are the topics that I absolutely will not talk about at all. If you're reading this thinking, “This all sounds good, but how do I even start doing this?” You don't want to be caught unaware on anything like a podcast or particularly live media, so a radio morning TV, that sort of thing because that can be amazing for your brand, but you also want to have a great experience.
The first thing is to think about the topics that are just no-go zones. Then the topics that are kind of in the middle and you could talk about but you don't necessarily want to go into detail about them. Then you've got the topics that are absolutely what we want to be known for. What are we going to talk about? Now if you think about it in terms of a politician, I'm not saying God forbid that we all sound like politicians. Politicians are incredible at keeping the message in a place that they can control and that they feel comfortable with. You can hear it nonstop. I listen to talkback radio a lot and you hear when an interviewer is asking a particular question that is definitely outside the scope of what that politician wanted to talk about, they have an incredible knack most of the time of bringing it back to whatever their message is.
Politicians work with media advisors and they have a lot of media training and PR and all these other specialists around them to help them craft that. A lot of small business owners do not have access to all of that. However, you might decide that you want to go into a bit of media training, particularly if you are thinking about really putting yourself out there more. There's lots of media training out there that will help you hone your message, talk confidently and stay on message. But if you are like, “No, I'm not at that level yet,” one of the things that you can do, which is pretty simple, is to create a Response Registry. We used to do this all the time at lots of big companies that I worked at, especially in head of marketing roles or senior marketing roles.
I've helped many clients that are a bit bigger with whole marketing teams behind them draft their response registry. Response Registry is really like a frequently asked questions document. What you want to do in there is have all the tricky questions. Now this can work well regardless of what size of business you are, but if you have somebody like different who's managing your social media, who's somebody who's managing your customer service to somebody who's managing your email inbox, having a response registry can ensure that you're all on the same page and that you've all got a similar response. It doesn't have to be word for word, but a similar response for tricky questions. An example of this is one of the places where I used to work had a collaboration. They were collaborating with the United Nations Ethical Fashion Initiative and we were making sure that we had sort of thought about all the questions that might come up on social media when we did this.
We were looking at things like if people start slamming prices or if people start talking about how ethical is it really, or any kind of question. You're trying to play devil's advocate and come up with these tricky questions. It could be as simple as, Where is this stuff made? How much does it cost to make? Are you being transparent with prices? Whatever the questions are that you think, even if no one ever asks this, it's good to do the exercise because you can start seeing what kind of fears and anxieties you have around. In this case, we have this collaboration happening, but you then create a list of those questions and it can be in a Google Doc or some sort of document that everyone can have access to in the business that needs it.
Then you can craft responses to these and then depending on your business, they might need to be approved by certain people in the company. For example, this ethical fashion initiative had to be approved by both the Ethical Fashion initiative and the company that we were working for in the MD. You may have a response registry that has a whole bunch of questions and then a response. Now even if you don't have anyone else working for you, if you are about to go into really playing big or trying to be play big in media or podcasts, you want to have just an idea of kind of questions that people might ask you and an idea of your response. In our podcast, we always try to send people the questions that we'll be asking them ahead of time. And of course, it's a conversation.
Sometimes other questions come up and I will always say to people ahead of the recording that if you want to stop if you want to reword your answer, if you go off on a tangent and you're like, “Oh my gosh, can you ask the question again?” For any reason you want to stop recording, we can do that. I also say this is all being professionally edited, don't worry if you stop, start, or if you're nervous or if you say something and then you want to say it again because I want people to be as comfortable as possible. You are not going to get that every time if you go on a podcast and you're especially not going to get it if you're going on live media, they don't have time to craft the questions that they're going to be asking every single person that comes onto say a radio show.
But what you can do by creating a response registry is to get yourself more comfortable with how you talk about certain things and what your answers are to certain questions. In most interviews there's going to be an element of, “Tell us about your business, tell us how you got started.” Now if you have particular things that you've been aware of that are newsworthy. For example, you might have your business from a particularly great location or you might have a really interesting upbringing, you can put those questions into your response registry and start crafting a response and then you can practice that response. Now again, I'm not saying practice it to be word perfect and that you sound like a robot because that's awful and you never want to be reading when you're on a podcast or a radio interview because people can tell when you're reading.
But what I am saying is that by spending some time on that response registry, you get to understand, “Oh no, I wouldn't say that. I'd reword that, I'd do that.” It gets you a bit more comfortable when you are asked those questions. One of the activities actually that I have got many clients to do is to imagine that they're being interviewed for their favourite publication and I'll get them to go and research what are the typical questions that the publication asks. For example, if it was the Design Files, you may go and research and read a bunch of different interviews that they've done over the years with different designers or interior designers or architects or whatever it is that you are a business in. Then you can put those questions into your response registry and craft your responses. Now, you may not go on the design files, but at least you've got some ideas there if you were going to go on it.
Likewise, if you listen to Talk-back radio and you have a particular presenter that always has small business owners on, you might listen over time and be like, “Those are the typical questions that they ask? I'm going to put them into my response registry and I'm going to craft a response that I'm happy with.” Now again, you should never read a response, especially on radio or podcast, but this whole exercise is to get you familiar and comfortable with things so that what you don't want to happen is that you get interviewed and you say something that is completely off-brand or just you are uncomfortable with or you weren't happy and you think you sound like an idiot. That is one of the reasons for the response registry. But as I've said, another reason is that you can think about the tricky questions that might come up and decide how much or how little you want to talk about that.
When I mentioned the example of children, you might have questions in there, “How old are your children? What do they think of your business? How do you cope with the struggle of juggling having children? How old are your children?” Then you can craft responses about they're young or something that just tells the interviewer, let's move on from this question. If you have other kinds of trickier questions, let's say you are a business that sells products and the products are made offshore, you may have questions about ethical manufacturing, you might have questions around the price of things, your labour costs, how you look at your supply chain to make sure that it's ethical. Again, if one of the things that you put out there is that you're sustainable, then you'll have a bunch of questions that can come up.
What you want to do is think about the questions and your responses, but also particularly in this case, things that you don't want to be known for and the trickier questions and how you might respond to them. If you were working with a publicist or a PR agent or agency, they would help you in terms of crafting this information. But this is a very starting point of getting out there into the media to understand what you want to say, how you want to say it and what your message is. The next part of this is to make a list of your know list. Natalie Paul from Beatrix Bakes who was on the podcast some time ago, talked about this ring of no, like this fence of no and she was talking about it about her business.
Saying, “We knew that well it was never going to do serving these particular foods.” We have a ring of no and she's like, “Everything inside of that is a yes, but everything outside of that is a no.” What you want to do is kind of create that same thing for your brand messages. Here are some elements that I am not going to talk about at all. For example, you might have gone through something very traumatic and you might have mentioned it once in a podcast or some of your marketing and somebody latches onto that, you might decide that is not a topic that you want to talk about. Likewise, I've talked about children, it might be a lifestyle choice of yours that you don't want to become the spokesperson. For example, I have talked about how I gave up alcohol six years ago and I recently did an episode with Kathryn Elliot, The Alcohol Mindset Coach about that.
We had so much good feedback from that already. If you haven't read it you can go and check that out after this. But I've talked to many people about the fact that I've given up alcohol, but I'm not necessarily out there front and centre being I am the sober spokesperson because it's not something that necessarily I want to be a spokesperson for about my business. Who knows in years to come I might decide to start drinking again. In terms of the brand message that I'm getting across, I'm not necessarily trying to promote myself as this fit super healthy business coach that is all about like what you eat, how much you work out, what you drink. Now that's not to say that might change, who knows?
People change. We are humans. We adopt, evolve, and adapt and everything else, but right now that's not a big message for my business. That's kind of the road that I'm going down when I'm asking you to think about what you don't want to be known for. Other things that might come up are that maybe you had a business partnership and that changed or maybe even you broke up in that business partnership and it wasn't necessarily the most amicable thing. Now some of those things, depending on how large your business is and if it was public or if you had to go through sort of different financial measures to get out of that partnership, some of those things might be public and you never know what is going to be asked of you. You might decide ahead of time, I want to let the interviewer know that I'm not talking about the previous business partner when we are talking about how I started the business, I'm just leaving that out or I may refer to it, but in a very minimal sense and I don't want to harp on about that.
If you were getting podcast questions and there was a question about you starting this business in 2013 with this person as your business partner. You guys since have gone your separate ways and I know that they have started this other business, how do you feel that they're now a competitor or whatever the question might be? The podcast post is going to try and make you feel as comfortable as possible. It probably won't bring up questions like that, but you want to be prepared and you want to know yourself, what you will and won't talk about, and the areas that you're happy to talk about, you're happy not to talk about. This is your no-list. You could just put in business partnership, children, health for example, if it was something that you didn't want to talk about or maybe you had an accident in a car accident at some point and you're like, “I did talk about that once, but I don't want to talk about it now.”
I'm more media savvy and I don't want to harp on about that because that's not what I want to be known for. I was watching an episode of of Catfish recently, and this woman had not disclosed, I guess to the producers of Catfish something about her past. When it came up, she said, “I don't want to be known for that. I don't want a mistake that I made at 18 to define who I am publicly now.” I think everybody has that right to that. I get that, we've got social media, we've got Google, we've got all the things to find out everything about people, but they don't owe us anything. You have within your rights absolutely to say, “This is what I will talk about, this is what I won't talk about.” I guess today's whole podcast is to think about if you're trying to get yourself out there more this year or any year that you're reading this, really hone in on, “This is my message, this is what I want to talk about.”
By doing that, you also need to understand what you won't talk about. It goes back to those whole conversations with God piece that I started with, that sometimes we only know who we are by who we are not. It's been really interesting particularly in group coaching when we talk about this for people to start saying in their mind, “Oh actually, yeah, because I've always struggled to be a mom or should I talk about this thing that I went down, or should I talk about my divorce?” It's completely up to you what you talk about and what you don't talk about. You might change your mind, you might not talk about your divorce. Maybe your divorce was a catalyst for starting your business and you might not talk about that for the first seven years in your business because maybe that's how long it's taken to kind of work through what happened in that divorce and the lifestyle changes that happened because of that divorce and you're just not happy to talk about it.
Whereas maybe seven years in, you might decide, “Actually that's a big part of my origin story and I am going to talk about it because I think other people will relate to it.” But that is your choice, what you talk about and what you don't talk about. I guess that's it for today, think about when it comes to your brand, what are your messages and key topics that you do not want to be known for? We spend so much time thinking about what we want to be known for as a brand, but it's important to also remember what we don't want to be known for. The two things that I talked about were the Response Registry is a kind of frequently asked questions style document somewhere in the business that is all of the main questions, but also the tricky questions and where your boundaries sit and crafting a response to things where you are all on the same page.
It's also protecting your boundaries and your business in some way. Then the other thing is to create your no-list. You're absolutely, “No, I will not go there on these particular topics.” I think what can happen, especially if you're new in business or you get very excited about the fact that you're getting onto a podcast or you're getting media for the first time, or even the 10th time, whatever it is, you just want to be clear on, “This is what I will talk about, this is what I won't talk about.” Even as somebody in this business who has been very much in the world of media, in terms of journalists and writing many articles, particularly interview articles and feature articles about businesses and brands, I have fallen into this crap before where I've been interviewed for something and later thought, “Why did I say that?”
It was because I didn't visit my no-list before I got onto that. I have to say, these were very early interviews and in one particular, I remember my husband heard it and he was like, “You don't even sound like you.” He was like, “Why'd you talk about that or these personal things?” And I was like, “Yeah, why did I,” and the longer I've been in business, the more comfortable I am with talking about certain things. But at that time I felt so uncomfortable when that came out and I regretted that I hadn't looked at my no-list or my Response Registry before I went on there. Always remember that the interviewer, whether they're on a podcast, whether they're radio, whether they're TV, they want you to have a good time. They want to have a positive most of the time unless you're going on to some sort of controversial thing.
Most of the time they want you to have a positive outlook and a positive experience. Always know even if you are thinking of yourself as this teeny tiny business that you can push back and that you can ask for things to be reworded or you can ask for questions altogether to be removed. That is it for today's coaching episode, really think about as a brand, what do I not want to be known for and how can I create a process, whether it's a response registry or a no-list or something else that reminds me before I get onto a podcast interview or TV or whatever it is. These are the things I'm going to talk about and these are the things I'm not going to talk about.
I did mention Media Training, you can just Google, I'm sure media trainers all over the world will help you in terms of confidence, but also in terms of staying on message. That is it. We'll have a full transcript of this along with any links over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/386. Thank you so much for reading and if you found this useful, I would love it so much if you could leave us a review or just click the stars so that other people can find this podcast as well. Bye.
