For example, from my observation of those who are successful at using social mediato network and build on-line relationships, I’ve distilled the following list.

Social Media is 2 Way Communication

Successful relationship-builders make themselves easy to find and to communicate with and happily engage in two-way communication. They recognise that social media is not about broadcasting. They are often very good at asking the right question at the right time to move things on. They believe that it is important to understand a situation or a person before stating their own needs. Gary V, for example, still tries to answer every e-mail he gets, a wonderful example from one of the social media greats!

Social Media is About Giving

Successful relationship-builders are givers first, takers second.  They understand that the key to success in social media is no different from anywhere else; it’s about helping others to meet their needs. In the words of BNI, “Givers Gain”.

Be Positive

Successful relationship-builders know that they will get criticised, that sometimes others just wont accept the truth in what they are saying. They refuse to let other people’s negativity become their own. They know that what they post on the various social media platforms is pretty much there for all time and choose most of the time to accentuate the positive.

Inspirational

Successful relationship-builders have something important to say, believe in their message and can back it up. Their inspiration is contagious, leaving other people highly-inspired and motivated.

Social Media is Not a Sprint

Successful relationship-builders know where they are heading and what it takes to get there – they don’t allow themselves to be distracted from their purpose. They know that building relationships is a process that takes a while, as Gary V is forever saying, social media is a marathon, not a sprint.

No Fast Fixes in Social Media

Successful relationship-builders are not afraid of hard work; they refuse to buy into the concept of a fast fix or a quick buck. There are a lot of scams in social media but most of them will only, at best, give a short term benefit. Long term, Google and the other authorities will find you out. Fast fixes fly in the face of what the social media rockstars know – you can’t scam someone and be a trust agent.

Resourceful

Successful relationship-builders are highly-skilled reframers, capable of looking at challenges from a number of different angles until they find the solution. They will accept responsibility for their actions and will work hard to make something work whilst at the same time refusing to engage in games of blaming others.

Connector

Successful relationship-builders are happy to connect someone with just the right person in their network who has the knowledge, skills or experience to be able to help.

Social Media’s Naked Emperor

If you are looking at the above and think that this is nothing new, that the relationship building skills are the same as they have always been, you are absolutely right. The emperor is naked! Social media may offer new platforms but the skills of networking remain as they have always been.

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?

As a starting point, I took the blogs of 8 of the top Social Media Bloggers and looked at their percentage use of “I”, “We”, “You” and “They”. In each case, I collected at least 5,000 words, which for most equates to between 6 and 8 articles.I know it’s not a very large sample of writers or words, but I wanted to see if any patterns emerged. And they did!

Louis Gray blogs more about developments in SM and emerging technologies, so I had thought that perhaps he would have used “me” more often, as he is often giving his opinion. But he still managed to use “you” more often than “I” and “We” combined

Chris Brogan uses the first person singular a lot in the sample tested but there’s a good reason for it – among the posts that I sampled were several explaining how he uses mind mapping, how he doesn’t use LinkedIn as he feels he should etc.. I’m going to go back and examine his more general articles to see the pattern there.

As can be seen from the table, all of the others use “you” almost twice as often as they use “I”, the exceptions being Seth Godin who uses “you” 3.5 times as often as he uses the word “I” and Karen Skidmore who uses it a whopping 8 times as much!. This is entirely consistent with SM articles being about engaging with other people and drawing them in. With the exception of self -disclosure articles of the type Chris Brogan has been writing recently, most of us would soon get bored with, and probably stop reading, writers who used “I” twice as much as they use “you”.

There’s a lot more I’m going to be analyzing, such as percentage of past, present and future orientated words, the percentage of nouns vs verbs etc

The conclusion? These people are some of the top in their field – anyone wanting to be up there with them needs to be looking at their writing style. The small words matter. You will find another article here that examines the subject in more detail, and announces a new service for writers.