If you read yesterday’s blog, you may have noticed that I used LinkedIn to figure out how many people in my network were interested in Strategic Planning versus Strategy Execution. In doing that little piece of analysis I think I may have stumbled onto an interesting way to figure out: Does anyone care what you have to say?

In addition to those word, I searched on a whole bunch of other words. What I found was that virtually no one cares about the things I talk about. Terms like Evidence Based Management (1,149 hits), Metrics Based Management (329 hits) and Operational Effectiveness (31,248 hits) are terms that I’ve used that virtually no one else uses. (In addition to Strategy Execution.)

You can compare those results with other terms such as Training (13,678,108 hits), Leadership Development (1,991,253 hits) or Management Training (536,978 hits.)

Another indicator of interests is in the term Management which gets 50,378,655 hits versus Leadership which gets 13,244,224.

This does go back to leadership. If you want to be an effective leader, you have to have a tribe of people who care about something as much as you do. LinkedIn is a good way of figuring out how big your tribe is. Maybe this is why Seth Godin has such a big tribe as Marketing gets 21,290,982 hits.

You also have to use the same language as other people do. It’s no use talking about Social Impact (28,184 hits) if no one else uses the term and thus won’t know what you’re talking about.

Thus it’s back to the drawing board for me. I must start using the same language as everyone else or no one will be listening. (Except you of course.)