As well as being inspired by the lyrics of that song, this article was also partly inspired by reading this article at ecademy. In it the author writes a lot of statements beginning with “You must…”, all of which are social media “imperatives.”

Yet one of the great opportunities offered by Web 2.0 and 3.0 when it arrives is that is that it’s all about choice. You choose how you want to carve out a presence, if any!

Or to put it another way, to ” embrace it in my own way and own good time and in a way in which I feel comfortable.” Ruth EdwardsStand Out

School, university, work – they all encourage conformity to the point of often stamping out creativity. We’re encouraged to follow the herd, be safe.The flip side of this is that people feel frightened when asked to do something out of the ordinary, or when faced by someone else doing it. They all focus on efficiency, doing things right by conforming. The corporate world depends upon it. Yet we’ve los focus of the more important word, effectiveness, which means doing the right things in the first place. Conformity may have been the right thing to do in the past, but not any more.

In the new decade, conformity and being average won’t cut it any more. There’s a sales and marketing cliche that urges companies to find their Unique Selling Point. This is becoming increasingly important at an individual level. There are millions of blogs; there are tens of millions of networking site profiles. There are often hundreds of people competing for the same jobs. Differentiation is becoming an important word.

How do you Differentiate Yourself?

Look around you – people have been seduced into a “wish a few positive thoughts and you’ll get all you desire” stupor. You will immediately differentiate yourself if you are prepared to:

1. take action to achieve what you want, put in some effort

2. accept  responsibility for your life rather than blame everyone/everything else

3. take time to optimise your social media approach. This means having a clear message, being consistent, being true to yourself and taking time to learn how to get your message heard. It also means connecting, engaging and sharing, three interpersonal skills we all use in our face-to face relationships which are just as relevant on-line.  Possibly out of habit, so many blogs are clones of each other. So many articles say much the same thing, just adding to the social media noise. Be different!

4. be yourself – I’ll write it until my grey hair turns white: sing your song with your voice! If you are not sure how to do this, take time to read  Personal Growth the Benjamin Franklin Way!

5. get a distinctive hair cut and wear clothes that stand out! Sorry Nick, couldn’t resist it, but there is a serious point here. Differentiation comes from within. If Nick didn’t have the congruency, experience and results to back up up his distinctive personal image, it would be meaningless.

What tips would you give people about how to differentiate yourself?

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It’s the People! SM is not about the technology, whether that be hardware or software. It’s about people. This may appear to be self-evident but there is a lot of bandwidth wasted on discussions about the newest tweak to this or that. SM is a set of tools that allow you to communicate, to connect, engage and share and thus to build relationships.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I’ve lost count of the number of different Social Media Sites out there but I recently came across software offering to connect you automatically to the top 250 Social Media sites. You provide a profile and a CSV file of members from an existing network and it does the rest. But then what? The software makes the initial connections but how do you engage and share across all of those sites? Most of us have to work for a living away from SM. If you spread yourself that thinly, where will you find the time to connect, engage and share in a meaningful way? And how does it look if your profile on a site reveals your background, some contacts and perhaps one or two posts, the last of which was written 3 months ago?

Connect, engage and share with “real” people. It’s easy for many of us to spend much of our time communicating geek to geek and forgetting “real” people. It doesn’t matter whether you are one of the well-informed minority or the “What’s this all about” majority. We all know how to communicate – SM merely provides a different set of tools. Connecting with people, engaging them in conversation in a natural way and sharing knowledge will allow you to build a deeper connection, engage on a deeper level, share more information and so on, round and round, building what Thomas Power calls “Connectedness”.

Only automate when necessary. Whilst technology helps us to be more efficient, it should never replace human interaction.  It’s a fine line – auto-responders to advise someone who has emailed you that you are out of the office makes sense. But remember, even Gary Vaynerchuk commits himself to answering every e-mail he receives! There are people in leadership positions in the SM world who never reply to e-mails or personal messages. There’s a real risk of them appearing to be incongruent.

Similarly, I’m amazed at the number of people who post articles on their own blogs and on sites like ecademy and never reply to comments. To me, this has nothing to do with social media or networking: it’s plain, old-fashioned courtesy!

Never Mind the Width, Where’s the Depth? I often ask myself whether, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d have joined the auto-connect experiment on ecademy. I would, but only because I believe that soon, we will be given the tools to enable us to create clusters of members within our networks around keyword searches.

Let’s say I want to engage with people in my network who, for example, live in the South West, are healers with an interest in Chinese Medicine and in using modern technology to enhance healing. I should be able to enter those keywords within my network, identify those who fit the description and then send them a message. At the moment, this is not possible on any site of which I’m aware.

Real Time Relationships are Still The Most Important Ones. How many of us have heard comments from loved ones like “Are you on Facebook/ecademy/LinkedIn/that blog again?” or “You spend more time with your on-line networks than you do with me!” Unless you are very disciplined, it’s easy to drift into this habit. I wonder how long it will be before “Too much time on-line” will be seen as a justified reason for a partner’s filing for divorce?

Be Yourself. Have you noticed how many cloned sites there are out there? Sing your song, with your voice and don’t be afraid to be different! People will connect and engage with others with whom they feel comfortable. Fakes are spotted sooner or later and it’s difficult to feel comfortable with someone who’s a fake.

Communicate Rather than Broadcast. This takes me full circle. Membership of too many sites leads to a situation  in which it’s impossible to engage in meaningful 2 way communication with people. You end up either “broadcasting” rather than “communicating” or neglecting people, which is a surefire way to kill relationships.

Nick Tadd made an enigmatic comment on Tuesday suggesting he had learned much about this on  his recent trip to the USA and I hope he jumps in here. Whether he does or not, have I missed anything out? What are the lessons you have learned about Connecting, Engaging and Sharing?

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Connect, Engage, Share (CES)

Connect, Engage, Share (CES) came about by chance when I commented on a blog at ecademy. Thomas Power pointed out that it made a useful, descriptive model of key behaviours involved in networking, contrasted with the general “what’s in it for me” approach so common in society.

It’s a Loop!

CES complements Penny’s model; hers describes a linear process, similar to a journey while CES is a self-reinforcing loop. After first connecting with somebody, if there appears to be a fit it leads to engagement, as a relationships begins to be established. As it grows, it will lead to sharing because, if the ‘giving’ is only one-way, it is doubtful that it will last very long.

As the strength of the connection deepens, it leads in turn to more engagement and so on, round and round the loop. Eventually connection  evolves into what Thomas has described as “connectedness”,  a state characterised by trust and a willingness to help one another as much as is possible.

Social Media is the Tool that Allows Social Networking

Both models highlight an important issue  – many people in the field focus on the social media and describe what it can do for individuals and organizations. It is easy to forget that social media is a tool and that networking, building relationships, is the purpose. I am certain that the next generation of social media applications will focus on helping you create clusters within your networks so as to focus on the quality of relationships.  We’ve had the width (auto-connect for example), now we need the depth!

What social media and on-line networking do offer is the opportunity for those who may find face-to-face interaction difficult, to interact with other people. So it helps those people with their personal development too!

Clusters

Another reason why I believe that we need the software tools to be able to create the clusters I describe above is that having to do it manually takes a long time. In most, if not all, networks, you first have to carry out a search on keywords, then identify those on the lists that are in your network, then find a way to send a message to them. It’s a lengthy, inefficient process. We need to be able to work smarter!

Warning!

And the salutary tale? Over the last year or so I’ve become immersed in  social networking, often spending 8 to 10 hours a day on sites, blogging, posting comments, sending messages to people inviting them to connect with me or thanking them for their invitations and so on. At the end of the week between Christmas and the New Year, my wife pointed out to me that although we had been working in the same room each day, I had become so absorbed in engaging and sharing on-line that I was neglecting our relationship! I’d been at the PC day after day; we hadn’t gone anything together.

We had long conversations about this; fortunately, we have the kind of relationship  where we can discuss issues like this before they turn into a crisis. But the irony of being a strong advocate of  CES whilst at the same time jeopardizing the most important relationship in my life was not lost on me!

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