IMC Member Profile: Yadin Porter de León

We’ll be profiling the individual members of the Influence Marketing Council from time to time. Our members are marketing professionals who work with influencer, advocacy, community, and other kinds of relationship-based marketing. Our first profile is of Yadin Porter de León, an IMC Founding Member. Yadin is the head of content marketing at Druva and a board member at Outburst Mobile.

Find out what matters, then do something about it.

Who has inspired and/or influenced your career?

Steven Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

David Allen, huge fan of his book and practice of Getting Things Done

Clayton Christensen, a fan for many reasons, especially his book How Will You Measure Your Life? He had a stroke and wrote a book about, “What’s this all about? Why am I here?” And people have done that before, but I felt Clayton did it in a really fantastic way. He said that most people implement a strategy in life to make their kids hate their guts and get divorced. They don’t do it on purpose, but that’s the life strategy they put in place. So, part of it is putting a life strategy in place so that your kids love you, you have a great relationship with them, you don’t get divorced, and you still move forward in your career.

But, you know what that means? You’re not working 20-hour days, you actually see your kids, and you make time for relationships with people.

What do you want to learn from the IMC, a community of your peers?

What I really, really want from the IMC and also from the greater community is to know how to engage in an authentic, real way, and I want to know how I, as an individual, with the Druva platform that I have right now, can engage with the community and give back in a meaningful way. Who are the influencers? I want to get connected, I want to find out what the real issues are, and figure things out.

I want to deliver value to the community, in an effective, real, and authentic way where everyone gets value out of that.

I want to learn how to build a real relationship to the greater community through podcasting, blogging, meeting at events. How do you leverage those different channels, to find out what matters, then do something about it?

How do you define success?

Success for me is when I see the work that I’m doing making others successful. And that’s really at the core, because that’s the direct product.

I define personal success with “What memories did I create and what relationships have I fostered?” That’s ultimately all you have at the end. And to create those memories and relationships, you have to do a whole lot of work.

What do you do to keep yourself present and focused in the face of a busy career and life?

I love the way that David Allen describes inputs vs interruptions. An interruption is just a mismanaged input. Things are going to come at you. Emails. Texts. Phone calls. Those aren’t interruptions; they’re inputs. And if you feel like they’re disruptive, that means you’re not managing them well.

To be present, truly present, and focused, you have to have a way to manage those inputs, a trusted system.

What do you think is the most important trait or quality needed in your current role and your career?

Empathy. There’s no substitute for actually caring.

We have a lot of problems in companies right now, because people don’t hire people that care. They look for a set of skills. I want someone who’s passionate, who cares, who’s already connected to the community, and has relationships, and who either understands the pain points of people already, or cares what they are and wants to go find out.

Some of the people who are the top influencers are there because they don’t get paid to blog for anybody. That’s why they’re influencers, because people trust them. And, you know why they’re trusted? Because they care. They’re passionate about it.

What’s been your greatest challenge in your career?

Finding good mentors has been, beyond anything else, the number one challenge. I had a great mentor who taught me how to empathize with a client, and to really care about them, get in their shoes, and then engage with them in that way.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job or your career?

The relationships that I’ve built, beyond anything else, have been the most rewarding and the most intrinsically valuable of anything.

How did you land in your career and your current role?

I have never had the same job title twice. I was building computers and coding when I was eight years old. So I was a little hacker kid. I like to build things, too, and I like to be artistic. I have this sort of convolution of interests that made it difficult for me to choose a career path.

I just started to listen to podcasts: thecloudcast.net, Geek Whisperers, Speaking In Tech, Packet Pushers, Datanauts.

I just started getting really excited about what they were doing. All of that was social media, and it was community-based. And so, when I had this opportunity to be head of content, I said, “You know? This is a great opportunity to give back and do what I love.” I was blogging, and I was doing podcasting, and I was doing all this stuff that I loved, because that’s what the people were doing in the podcasts that I was listening to. I joined Druva in their professional services, because I wanted to work with a lot of big companies and work on technology problems.

The tech community is so unique, in some really phenomenal ways. That was so incredibly seductive, incredibly beautiful. And I got nothing but welcome. It’s the community. You’re doing something, you’re trying to give back, whatever crazy thing you’re trying to do — more power to you. Count me in.

• Yadin on LinkedIn: Articles and Profile
• Yadin on Twitter: @porterdeleon and on Medium: Y. Porter de León
• Yadin on the Druva Blog
• Podcasts: Tech Village, In Tech We Trust, SOCK(net) podcast (on hiatus)