Penny Power of Ecademy Dishes About Rise of Independent Capitalist

Years before anyone bandied about the phrase, “personal brand,” Penny Power, CEO and Founder of Ecademy, was asking herself how independent business people could become better known to each other through online communities.

Says Penny, “At that time, about eleven years ago, I could see that the way large companies were being run was going to implode. I could see the rise of the independent capitalist and the need for these people to create personal brands online.”

Penny and her husband ended up building the first online social network — Ecademy — with $5 million of their own money. “We built Ecademy organically,” says Penny, “because we really wanted a community that filled a specific niche and was high-quality. We wanted business owners to get value from each other.”

According to Penny, individual business owners can build their brands — and by extension, trust and reputation — by building their networks within Ecademy.

Last month Penny used social media tools from within Ecademy to promote a webinar Penny gave at BrightTALK’s Conversation Marketing Summit.

“I saw the email about the Summit from B2B Magazine and thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute! I’ve been talking conversation marketing for the last five years and I’m not on the list of presenters!’ I contacted the magazine, who put me in touch with BrightTALK, and within four hours I had my Webinar, ‘Understanding Social Networks for Your Business,’ online and ready to roll.”

In conjuction with the Summit, BrightTALK held a contest to see which presenter could attract the most attendees to their Webinar through social media tactics. Penny won the contest — despite the fact that she had only one day to promote her Webinar – by emailing her personal network of 4,000 and posting a market place listing on Ecademy.

“I posted only to my network — not the entire 500,000 member community,” reports Penny. “But the results show the power of ‘conversation marketing’ or social media. I did the marketing for my Webinar in a half hour . My webinar received 187 views — 77 of which were live and 110 of which watched the recorded version.”

According to Penny, the number of people who now work for themselves (or independent capitalists, as Penny calls them), is rising dramatically — and for those who hang out a shingle after losing a job, building a brand online can’t be done overnight.

The biggest mistake people make, when building a new network, is to go into an existing community and act as if they’ve been a member for years. “It works the same way offline,” she says. “You can’t move into a new neighborhood, stroll to the corner bar, hand out business cards and say, ‘Drinks on me.’ You have to build familarity and trust.”

Building this trust — and one’s brand — can take 18 – 24 months, says Penny. People need to see that you’re stable, that you’ll stick around and that you’re in the community to help others — not just take from people.

“When you join a new community,” says Penny, “you have to earn your place through good deeds — and this means helping others, offering information, and helping to forge connections. It’s all about building trust. Only then can you move into a business relationship where a transaction or referral can take place.”

Ecademy, which is huge in the UK and Europe, is slowly making inroads in the U.S. Unlike LinkedIn, which is a directory of business people, Ecademy is a social business community of people who forge networks. The platform includes many of the most popular social media tools, including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Skype — all of which are embedded in people’s platforms.