Is your software investment/community/engagement strategy going to drive revenue?  That’s a very important question, so let’s treat it that way.

Here’s a conversation going on between some of the most influential thinkers in the world today about how business is changing.

Consider this question with two things in mind: buying committees and non-linear “customer journeys,” where prospective customers don’t just avoid straight lines, they don’t event spend most of their time thinking about a company with that company.  They spend most of their time talking about or reading about that company with other people entirely.

Gartner says that only 20-30% of IT investments have a *direct* business impact. The other 70-80% have an *indirect* impact – and that’s often where the *biggest* impact is made.

Superior strategy, since at least the days of the Roman empire, takes into account strategic sequences of events, not simply single cause-and-effect moves on the chessboard.

(Below, a great Gartner graphic via Bob Apollo via Gartner’s Hank Barnes.)

Nexus causality is a concept that says almost everything is caused not by one single thing, but by a whole nexus of contributing factors, many of which may be necessary but not sufficient.  This is hard for the human mind to comprehend, so we tend to look for a single factor to attribute all causality to.  The factor we feel like we might have the most control over – often feels like the convenient one to point to.

Asking whether something will have a direct and immediate business impact is not the right question.  Asking whether something is a strong leading indicator of success, whether there’s high or increasingly high correlation between a thing and success, those are better questions.  Asking whether a thing can provide substantial competitive differentiation, and then basic competence can take care of the last mile, that’s an interesting question.

When it comes to cultivating long-term relevance and quality relationships with industry thought leaders, showing up is key.  Here’s my advice on how to make that easier to do.

I’ve been engaging with influential people online, building relationships, learning from them, and collaborating when it makes sense, for more than a decade. The number one tactic I always recommend is this: set up a really easy way for you to see the updates that your people of interest are publishing throughout the course of your day.  Not all of them, just some of them, regularly.

This should be something you can’t help but trip on as you’re looking at your email inbox, or you’re visiting Twitter, or when you’re opening a new tab in your browser. I have a VIP Twitter list I’ve organized and I’ve dragged the link to that list’s tweets down to my browser toolbar. Whenever I want to visit Twitter, that’s where I start. That’s pretty casual, for my heavyweight business needs I use enterprise software from Sprinklr of course, and it is the best interface for influencer monitoring I’ve ever seen. But the point is, you’ve got to have the opportunity to engage right in front of you.

Now once you’ve walked past your email folder full of influencer newsletters, or your Facebook Group you use as your Facebook landing page, or your awesome social media listening dashboard, don’t just rush past that point to get to where you intended to go. Linger a little. Make a habit of slowing down to look at a few recent updates from the influential people you’re monitoring. You don’t have to read everything, but you won’t engage with anything you don’t read. There are probably 1 or 2 opportunities to reply, reshare, or otherwise engage with something in the first 3 to 5 items you’ll scan over at the top of your list.

Wash, rinse, and repeat. Regular engagement with influencer content isn’t sufficient to build a relationship, but I’d argue that it is one essential part if you’re really focused on building long-term relationships and learning from these top thinkers in your industry.

A fun advanced tactic: sometimes I like to pretend I’m at a party offline and someone walked up to me and said the first thing I see on a list of tweets, right to me personally. What would I say if they said that to me? I think about that a little, and then I say it on Twitter.

I have been on one side or the other of thousands of tech company announcements – from making tiny feature announcements at a startup that doesn’t exist anymore to reporting under embargo on many, many other peoples’ startup launches and keeping it a secret that Neil Young was going to make a big announcement at Sun’s user conference that I was consulting for. (I got to interview him after the announcement too! It was awesome.)

Here’s what I recommend in order to make your announcement the biggest success it can be. I keep telling people about this, so I decided to just blog it real quickly. I must confess, sometimes I’m good about following these steps and sometimes I’m not. For our most recent feature announcement, I did not – but for many other announcements by my company Little Bird, we did and we got huge results (scroll back on that page to see). It’s all about taking the time to build the social capital and connections.

1. Start planning as early as possible, weeks or months in advance.
2. Make a list of who you’d like to talk to about your announcement in advance, in hopes they’ll talk about it with their communities come announcement time. Make special note of people you already have relationships with. (We can automate a lot of this with Little Bird, we just worked with Little Bird investor Jay Baer to do this, for example, which is what made me think I should write this post real quick. Advanced tip: I believe that the people you’ve been connected to the longest, and that you’ve connected to most recently are your most powerful opportunities – as your strongest and freshest connections. We automate discovery of that too btw.)
3. Don’t have relationships with big voices online yet? Get ready to start investing time, brain power, emotion and communication skills in building those relationships.

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