Friend and blog community member Ed Shaz asked me why I thought my post about the magazine designers all using the plus (+) symbol was worth a digg request. I responded back that he certainly didn’t have to Digg it if he didn’t like it, and that led Ed to ask me why I bothered wasting a Digg request (which is sometimes viewed as offensive by a community) on such a post (which means that I presume Ed found my 24 pictures of magazines to be less developed than my typical post).

All this to tell you that finding new and engaging community members doesn’t come from sitting on your blog and writing great posts. It takes outreach, and it takes attempts to find disparate audiences that wouldn’t normally slip in to see what you’re doing.

Put another way, I know most of the social media types. I’ve had beer or coffee with most of them. They know I’m here. But maybe with that post, I might find a designer or two, or I’ll find someone who was intrigued by the observation at all (did YOU know all those plus signs were everywhere before my post?).

5 Ways to Find Community Members From Outside Your Fishbowl

1. Go to Alltop and search some categories not related to yours. Read three to five blog posts on someone new’s blog, and then leave a pertinent comment or two. Subscribe to their blog via RSS feed and get to know them. Over time, your comments (if pertinent and left without spammy promotion of your site) will encourage a reciprocal visit or two or three. (I never said this was a quick fix).
2. Go to Delicious and search for topics that are just outside your blog’s main subject, or that are at perhaps tangential. Do the same thing as step 1.
3. Write posts about an industry vertical using your blog’s perspective instead of just writing about your main focus. If you’re writing a running blog, write a post like “Top 5 Runner-Friendly Companies in Seattle” or if you’re a food videoblogger, shoot an episode called “Election Day Dinners.” In these cases, make sure you’re using tagging and that you’ve claimed your blog in a search site like Technorati.
4. Make the occasional dip into social bookmarking promotion. For my magazine design post, I actually dared to be a bit over-the-top and dugg, stumbled, reddit-ed (?), and put it up on Facebook. That’s the first time I’ve done that kind of thing in several months. Why bother (as Ed asked me)? Because I wanted outside-of-the-fishbowlers to come and see if what I was doing here stuck.
5. Encourage the occasional guest post. Partly because I’m on deadline to finish a book, and partly because I feel that guest posts are a great way to raise awareness of other great bloggers (hat tip Louis Gray for that idea), I like to encourage guest posts. The side effect of doing this, however, is that THEIR audience will come and see their post, provided the guest author points them to it. Voila, instant new friends (potentially).

One key warning is that you have to try hard not to come off as spammy in these efforts. If you burn social capital to get a few more people into your community, what good is that? Ask yourself seriously whether you’re being humble and honest about your requess, and make extra effort to promote others unbidden during this same time. (I call this karma.)

It’s nice to grow organically, and your community deserves that. Dropping off a few hundred new RSS subscribers who haven’t been around, and aren’t regulars like Sue Murphy, Ginakay Landis, Ed Shaz, Steve Garfield, Zena Weist, etc, might be a bit jarring to the community.

One last thing: if you’re going to bother to try and build community, do ask them to stick around.

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Did That Explain Things Better, Ed?

And everyone else?

Photo Credit Phille Casablanca

Since then, I’ve learned that there are many challenges tied to choosing to live your life like a leader. There are plenty of times where I’ve fallen down on the job, and several more where I’ve come out okay, but maybe at a different point than I’d originally intended. In the song “Nobody Told Me,” John Lennon sings, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans,” and boy, that describes lots of moments in my professional life. I set goals, and life helps me accomplish totally different ones.

Because of all this, I have a few thoughts from along the path. I hope these are useful to you in your own journey.

Start with Yourself

I could recommend the book Self-Esteem, by Dr. Matthew McKay every day of the week, and it wouldn’t be enough times. Of all the many books I’ve read and all the various ways I’ve worked towards developing myself, this one book gave me the most payoff for the effort I put into it. Basically, the book teaches you how to look to yourself for validation, look to yourself for responsibility, and look to yourself for a center of power. I feel that without this base, most everything else will eventually crumble.

Looking outside yourself for validation is a weakness that crushes most of your potential for achieving big things. Starting with making yourself your core cheerleader sets you up for success right away. Oh, and the #1 thing I learned from the book: fire your inner critic. This one piece of advice alone was worth the book.

Build a Supportive Network

Beyond yourself, it helps to have intelligent supporters who will both challenge you and lend you strength for those rare moments when you use up your own. This comes after building your own inner self-esteem, but before going out to take on the world. Why? Because having a nice base of friends (and they don’t have to be family) who support you, challenge you, and who believe in you, and give you perspective beyond your own is like having your very own superhero team at your back when you set out to take on the world.

And nurture, nurture, nurture that network. Be friendly, helpful, giving, and forever as interested in their pursuits as you are your own.

Be Responsible

I mean this in two ways. First, assume responsibility for everything that you CAN impact. Meaning, if you have a team working with you and they fail to meet a goal, when the boss asks what happened, assume responsibility. In the details, it’s your job to fix what went wrong and try to ensure it doesn’t happen the next time, but to the boss, just own it. Excuses are lame. Just accept what comes next, and try to make it better next time.

Sometimes, we try to own too much. I do this a lot. When we own too much, we feel like we fail too often. Sometimes, we’re not ready to take on as much as we thought. Other times, we’re overloaded, and practically no one could handle what’s on our plate. Recognizing this and adjusting is just as important, because burying yourself in the weeds doesn’t help anyone, either. Fix this as soon as possible, and do it as cleanly as you can. Try to hand off or delegate or give back the responsibilities that are flooding you, and see if that helps.

Look for Small Victories at First, But Then Think Big

Small victories are a great way to build your self-confidence. Take on little tasks and succeed. Even if their personal challenges, take them on. Every little success helps. For example, one goal I set for myself recently was to lose 10 pounds within a month. I have plenty of weight to lose, and I have a fitness program to rebuild into my life, but by setting this goal, I’ve got something small and tangible to observe. Once I hit this goal, I will feel much better about my efforts, and this will spur me on to bigger goals.

The caution, however, is that sometimes, we stay mired in the small things in life. If you’re on the road to personal leadership, take a bigger swing. Look at the larger story. Look beyond your current job. Look past your role. Ask yourself big questions about what you might be able to do to help a larger chunk of the world. The answer to this question is often startling, and sometimes quite rewarding. But if you don’t ask, you never will know.

At work, thinking a bit bigger than everyone around you, and then working backwards from those ideas to be helpful, is a great way of contributing in a meaningful way.

Be Helpful

Perhaps the most important thing I can tell you about personal leadership is that it’s a much more rewarding path when you focus on being helpful to others. Stay true to your own guiding principles and the goals you’ve set for yourself, but try to view these goals with a community in mind. Can your path to success be complementary to others? Will your victories bring others up to a better path with you? How will you give back to people along the way, and not just when you’re on top of the world?

What’s YOUR Advice?

You’re successful. You’ve done some great things. How have you developed yourself? Give us some ideas to build upon, and to develop our personal leadership along the way. And if you’re extra brave, tell us about some of your shortcomings that you eventually overcame, and maybe what you know about how you did it. I’d love to hear from you.

I want the following to be product features of something cross-platform, and I want it soon-ish:

• Friends list portability.
• Proximity-based social networks.
• Mesh networking widely built into laptops.
• A Network Communicator (that allows for IM, Voice, SMS, Status, Presence, and a platform for commands (like “follow” and “@”). I want this communicator to work the same way on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, my IM client, etc, the way a cell phone just cares about connecting the call, not which network you’re reaching.
• Granular, modular grouping of friend data.

What do YOU want?

Just stop. Stop building the simple stuff. If someone’s done it and it works well, use that part, and add VALUE on TOP of that.

Just a rant as I had to find directions to a place.