The Art of Giving it Away

Altruism or self-interest? The Art of Giving it Away. 36 professional communicators from around the world tell Glasgow-based PR agency owner, David Sawyer, why they’re give-a-holics.

When it comes to doing favours all of us has one of three styles: backscratcher; one-way-streeter; or give-a-holic.

Backscratchers

These are the most common. Backscratchers will scratch your back – like offering you assistance or making valuable introductions – just as long as you scratch their back, too.  They’ll help you out only on the understanding they’ll get something from you in return. They’re tally keepers: I helped out Steve, now he’s on the hook to me.

One-way-streeters

One-way-streeters try to get other people to serve their ends while carefully guarding their own expertise and time. The traffic is all one way with this style of person. It’s best for our mental well-being to give these people as wide a berth as possible. They take without giving. They’re sometimes cynical, often bitter and always self-serving.

Give-a-holics

The give-a-holics offer assistance, they share knowledge and make valuable introductions. They do it to be helpful and don’t keep a tally. Often being around give-a-holics makes us better sharers inspiring backscratchers to become give-a-holics, too.

I’ve been thinking about back scratchers, one-way-streeters and give-a-holics for a while. This post started life as a short thought. But it was David Sawyer who introduced me to the term enlightened self-interest.

David is a fellow contributor to My PRstack: A practical guide to modern PR tools and workflow. He produced a chapter: Using a personal #PRstack for SEO, headlines, writing and images. Whilst I wrote about Using Circloscope to build relationships on Google+.

Through several emails we compared notes on the #PRstack community and why we’d contributed to its first ebook. David, who owns Glasgow-based Zude PR, has since taken this note-swapping idea to a whole new level and asked colleagues he describes as “36 of the world’s leading communications experts” why they give stuff away.

In a new 9,000-word article: ‘How to Get On in New Communications: Be Nice’ David poses the same three questions to each contributor with the guide of asking everyone to write 50 words and choose to answer one, two or all three questions:

1. Why do you “give it all away for free”? Was there a specific lightbulb moment when your mindset shifted?
2. What are the benefits and disbenefits to you of enlightened self-interest? How long did it take before it started paying off for you?
3. Where, if anywhere, do you draw the full disclosure line?

I tackled the first question. Here’s my take on why I share so much and when it started:

“Why do I ‘give it all away for free’? I’m guided by a line from the US motivational speaker Tony Robbins: ‘What you know doesn’t mean shit. What you do means everything’. The purpose of communication is action: to influence; to form or change opinions; to alter behaviours. So I decided to put my expertise into action and share what I know.

“Knowledge is power, runs the cliché. But in the industrial age of command and control hierarchy this line meant: guard knowledge; hoard it. Be a knowledge miser. Having a head full of knowledge made you indispensable to your organisation. In today’s social age knowledge is still power. But now power comes from getting things done by sharing that knowledge within your network and beyond. Today we realise that knowledge is that rarest of assets. One that increases the more it’s used and shared.”

I’m honoured David has allowed me to rub shoulders alongside such communications luminaries – here’s the full list and links to their Twitter handles:

Richard Bailey, Ryan Biddulph, Deirdre Breakenridge, Michael Brenner, Philippe Borremans, Stuart Bruce, Mike Carhart-Harris, Adam Connell, Andy Crestodina, Gini Dietrich, Jeff Domansky, Judy Gombita, Scott Guthrie, Sarah Hall, Ann Handley, Arik Hanson, Derek Howie, Doug Kessler, Larry Kim, Glenn Leibowitz, Rich Leigh, Julia McCoy, Mike McGrail, Rachel Miller, Sarah Moreton, Neil Patel, Sarah Pinch, Ted Rubin, David Meerman Scott, Cyrus Shepard, Dan Slee, Andrew Bruce Smith, Paul Sutton, Stephen Waddington, Angharad Welsh and Alex Yong.

Read why they give it all away for free here.