Frank Sennett

If you and your mentor have developed a friendly ongoing relationship, giving referrals and sharing career updates are great, but try to regularly have non-transactional communications with them as well. In other words, call them up, shoot them an email, or meet up for lunch just to find out how their lives are going. Show interest. Listen. If this comes from a genuine place, it will strengthen your bond and make them feel like a part of your life instead of someone to use as needed. The most enjoyable meetings with mentors take stock of where you both are, include conversations on topics of mutual interest, and come without expectations or a hidden "ask."

A big stumbling block in the content approval process comes when a senior leader exhibits these behaviors: + They make huge last-minute changes to content already approved by multiple stakeholders + They make suggestions at odds with the program goals, audience and/or platform + They are too busy to sign off and say go ahead, but get upset when they see the final content. What to do? + Seek their genuine buy-in to a clearly defined content strategy. +Say, I know you weren't happy with that content. What steps can we take to avoid that next time? Here are a couple of ideas (deadlines, etc.). + Do all of that as early as possible, and without rancor. These folks often become great partners if they feel listened to and see a clear process.

Way back in 1993, the New Yorker ran a now-iconic cartoon that said, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Three decades later, thanks to tracking cookies and Google searching and social profiles, everyone may be able to easily find out you're a dog. But they still won't know if you're an introvert based on your online presence. If you do great quality work consistently over time, it doesn't matter how much you may or may not like to engage socially. That's especially true in the era of remote work. This actually is a golden age for introverts. They often can work remotely and they are judged primarily on their work product. Whether you're a role player or a strategic star, you win by hitting or exceeding the mark for your job.

Test by getting feedback from diverse audience members, culturally, generationally and geographically. The tone and voice probably won’t score with every audience, but if it resonates with your target group, you’re on the right path. Use the feedback from the diverse focus or survey group to get feedback on how you can improve the content and expand the audience for it. It will also help you to hear if the content is inadvertently offensive to some portion of the audience so you can avoid a communications debacle.

A thorough content audit is a key first step in the process of creating a calendar and cadence for your content. Why? + Without an audit, you risk pumping out content that is redundant to what you have in the library. + If you are looking to increase content frequency, an audit can be your best friend by helping you identify gaps in the topics you have covered. Fresh topics will help you boost both frequency and engagement. + An audit that includes a look at engagement metrics also will help guide you by showing you the most popular and least popular content topics with your audiences. Increase the frequency of content that covers the former topics and decrease the frequency of the latter.

Here's perhaps a counterintuitive idea: Look for collaborators who are on the rise, but may not be able to offer you as much value right now as you can offer them. They likely will be grateful for the assist from a more established player and when they get fully established themselves and find greater success, they will remember how you gave them a hand early on and probably will be glad to work on more high-value collaborations from there. Plus, you'll learn something from the scrappy up-and-comers, and you'll feel good about helping someone up the ladder.