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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?