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Social Media and Collaboration.

Social Media offers a huge opportunity for collaboration, for synergy, for output that is far greater than might be suggested by an examination of the individual components. Let’s look at an example from an era before Social Media and examine the lessons we can learn from it. Read more…

Smile at someone - do it now!

How often have you said “I wish I had done that, but I didn’t have the time?” I’ve certainly done it and wrote at length about some of the lessons I’d learned about this in the article 10 Things I Wish I Had Known And Stuck To From Early On. Here are 14 tips to help you to put an end to procrastination. Read more…

How do you respond to criticism? Are you aware how important an issue it is for businesses? Traditionally, businesses have been accustomed to communicating business to business and business to customer.  But the Social Media tools have opened up a third communication channel for businesses – customer to customer, which means that criticism is bound to be voiced. This presents companies and individuals with dynamite – it can be used positively or it can blow up in your face!

Let’s look at a recent of someone getting it badly wrong and the consequences. Many people have heard of and read copyblogger.com; it’s a site containing lots of helpful advice and articles about writing. I always read the posts there and particularly enjoy the ones written by it’s owner, Brian Clark. Recently, Brian developed a WordPress plug-in called Scribe SEO. It’s a monthly-fee based subscription service that analyses blog articles against keywords and offers advice for optimising those articles for SEO purposes. Because of Brian’s reputation and the authority of copyblogger.com, it’s bound to be successful.

A review of Scribe SEO appeared on Lis Sowerbutts’ site where Lis questioned the usefulness of the service and the price. Unfortunately, although the article concluded that the service is not a scam, the meta-description suggested otherwise. Brian Clark appeared on the site and was very heavy handed in the way he dealt with the situation, and with Lis, ultimately threatening to sue!

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the review, what is interesting is to read the comments that were posted after Brian’s intervention. It is clear that he has lost the support of a number of people, not because of his product, but because of his mis-handling of the situation. In addition, because of his links with some other high-profile bloggers through another on-line venture, some posters wanted to distance themselves from those bloggers, tarnishing them with guilt by association.

I’m not taking sides – I read Lis’s blog and I’m also a subscriber to Brian’s plug-in and the service it offers. I felt it only fair to try it so that I have an informed opinion.

But there’s an important lesson to be learned: no matter how fair or otherwise you feel criticism to be, you have to be so careful how you deal with it. Word travels very quickly on the internet amd it’s extremely difficult to take back words once they’ve been written. It also hardly ever pays to threaten to sue someone, which Brian threatened to do; presumably a knee-jerk reaction from his training as a lawyer

It will be very interesting to see how Brian Clark deals with this! One thing is clear – he will have to work very hard to rescue the situation.

Are you living life or surviving it? Are you growing, becoming the person you want to be or are you following the herd? The title of this article comes from a Garth Brooks song in which he sings “Life is not tried it is merely survived if you’re standing outside the fire.”

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 Edwards Read more…

How would you feel if, as soon as they met you at a social networking event, or online, someone opened a conversation with you as follows:

“Hi, my name is Robin and I want to tell you about this great product I’m selling on my website!” What would your reaction be? Most people would be put off and discouraged from continuing the conversation.

To take this a stage further: you go into a restaurant. After you’ve sat down, the waiter approaches you with a glass of wine and tells you your meal will arrive shortly. When you ask to see the menu, the waiter just smiles and says “We don’t have menus. We’ve been in the industry long enough that we know what you need. Trust us!” How long would you stay at that restaurant? A few people might stay, out of curiosity but most people will get up and leave immediately.

The challenge for on-line marketing and networking is that this ‘one size fits all’ approach may have succeeded in the past. However, the internet means that customers are more aware of the choices available to them, making the generic approach redundant. Equally redundant is the approach that revolves around having a “bag full of solutions and looking for a problem that fits”.

And this is the dichotomy presented by social media and social networking. You may be under pressure from your boss, the bank manager or whoever holds your mortgage to get quick results. But one thing that Connect, Engage, Share tells us is that while forming relationships and building trust with people is vital, it’s a slow process.

One way to speed up the process is to have a strategy that allows for this gradual build-up. You might want to start with a blog, then give away a free report then perhaps build a membership site. You might also want to post videos or podcasts where you discuss key issues and give out key messages in your field.

Or you may choose to build up a presence on a network site or two, link with lots of people and when the time is tight, introduce them to your product(s) and/or service(s).

Whichever approach you use, and there are many more, the common thread is that you are building a perception of your authority, your right to sell. Repeated loops of connect, engage, share help you to build trust. It’s also the essence of what Penny Power’s book, Know Me Like Me Follow Me is all about.

Timing is important but when the time is right, don’t be afraid to advertise your products and/or services. It’s just as silly to never pitch as it is to pitch when first meeting people. It’s also unfortunate that “marketing” and “selling” have almost become dirty words in the Social Networking world. Altruism only goes so far, it doesn’t pay the bills!

I want to thank Thomas Power for nagging me on several occasions to do something with the Connect, Engage, Share(CES) model. I was, and still am, very wary of just adding more noise into the Social Media (SM) world but he convinced me that the model has something useful to contribute. This article is about the spirit of CES and is made up of a number of things I’ve discovered the hard way.

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?

Are you really happy with things as they were before the economic downturn or are you looking for something different? Do you want to stagnate or are you prepared for a period of personal growth and societal change and even, perhaps,change on an even wider level?

I’m hoping that one of the results of the downturn will be a desire amongst many people to paddle through shift creek,  and come out into the new waters of compassionate capitalism. This requires personal growth, being prepared to let go of old habits, as well as change on a more national and even global scale. And the social media tools could play a big part in mobilising this. It is widely accepted that the Obama’s election marked, amongst many things, the first election where social media tools were used to contact voters. Wouldn’t it be cool if the population were to now use those same tools to inform politicians of what we want! Read more…

Social Media and Social Networking are fun, rewarding and can be very time absorbing. Sooner or later though, you have to ask yourself a fundamental question: why am I doing it?

All you bloggers – why do you blog? All you Social and Business Networking site addicts, why are you members?

Bloggers

Why do you blog? Is it altruistic, happily sharing information with anyone who will read what you have written? Did you get seduced by one of the “You can make a fortune out of blogging” scams but are still waiting for the money? Is it to complement your business, keeping clients, colleagues, prospective clients up to date with your activities and offers? Unless it’s the first reason, how are you doing? Is your blogging helping your business to grow?

Analyse your time – how much time do you spend going from one site to another, seeking that “one missing, vital insight”? As Seth Godin wrote last week, reading is not doing! It’s easy to waste days reading expert after expert and what do you end up with? Paralysis by analysis together with a severe case of information overload! I’ve done it and, as my primary school teacher used to say “it’s not clever and it’s not grown up!”

It was a shock for me to realise that I’d owned some of the most important pdfs about setting up and running successful blogs and static sites for quite a while. But I’d got them when I was in a mad goldrush to get as much info as possible so they stayed on my hard drive, unread.

And I had wasted so much time since, trying to find information I already had! If I think of that wasted time, how much different things could be if I’d used it “doing”, rather than “researching”. You can add to the time wasting, the hours I spent tweaking my site’s design, rather than writing or doing things to draw traffic to the site. Part of a step forward in my personal development has been realising that pursuing Social Media for its own sake is a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes, unless you are a social media commentator or consultant.

How many of you (me included) have products and/or services that are not on your site and that could be earning you money? At the very least, they could be drawing people in.

Social and Business Networking

How many sites have you joined? I came across a software site the other day that sold an app that will register you automatically with the top 150 social networking sites… why? What’s the point? I’m in the process of quitting those few sites I have joined as I can’t keep up with the e-mails and messages. And that makes me look bad!  So, I’m going to cut right back for the time being to LinkedIn, ecademy, Twitter and Facebook (and the latter only because it’s the easiest way to keep in touch with my wife’s family and our friends in South Africa.)

Focus

For me, this year is about focus; Chris Brogan introduced me to the concept of having keywords for the year rather than New Year’s resolutions and focus is one of mine. Focus on clients, on quality networking and on using time profitably – that doesn’t mean that every moment has to be monetised, far from it.

But every working moment has to contribute to success as I have defined it for myself. Yes that includes time for networking, for building supportive relationships; it includes time for acts of altruism too as giving without expectation of a return is an important value. In on-line terms, it’s about identifying those people with whom I would like to connect, engage and share with at a deep level. It’s also about making sure that key off-line relationships are nurtured.

Time Management

It’s going to be tough! I’ve already started reducing the number of feeds from blog sites and making a plan for returning to my roots with my own blogging. I’m not an SM expert, yet I’ve spent far too much time recently writing about SM rather than personal and organisational development. Focus and minimalism is the way forward for me, at least in the number of sites of which I am a member.

I’m also going to cut back to three posts a week at each blog during the working week and the review of the SM week here at the weekend, as people seem to enjoy it and I’ve sorted out an efficient workflow.

Although many of the tools may be free, social networking isn’t. There’s always an opportunity cost, if only for the time spent and sooner or later there has to be a return on the time invested.

Anybody interested in joining me in this exercise?

Penny Power’s 3 step social networking model is powrful because it works on two levels. Know me, Like me, Follow me describes, on the one hand, the maturation process individuals go through as they spend time networking. On the other hand, it also desc ribes the steps through which relationships move.

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!

Just for something completely different, and for a bit of fun, key customer service questions in a 90sec video – 9 key questions that should be at the core of any customer service and customer care strategy.

Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed it!