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Above All ElseāPeople
Have you had a good conversation lately? What do you remember about it? Who do you enjoy having conversations with?
Conversations require people, and the purpose of social media is to empower and enable conversations digitally. Blogging, podcasting, video blogging, and all the various social networks we use are all geared toward one thing: giving us a way to reach out and connect. With that in mind, letās start this out right and consider people. Letās think about people from their perspective.
What follows are some ideas for engaging, respecting, and appreciating the people who will interact with your social media.
PEOPLE LIKE TO BE ENGAGED
Imagine there is a choice (because there is). You can either speak at people or you can speak with people. One assumes that the other person or persons will have an opportunity to say something back at some point. Which scenario would you prefer: one where youāre sitting idly while someone goes on and on, or one where youāre just as important to things as the person who started the conversation? Iām going to say the latter.
One way to engage people is to ask a question. How did I start this topic? I asked a question that put you back in your head.
Another way is to encourage people to take part in the activities. Donāt let them be the audience. Audience is a passive term. Think of ways to get people into the story. Can you come up with a way that they can contribute? Are there ways you can encourage follow-on activity in their world?
PEOPLE ARE BUSY
Respect peopleās time when creating your media. Donāt ramble in a podcast just because you can. My wife, Katrina, always says, āEditing is good manners.ā She means that by being respectful of peopleās time, you win their appreciation.
One way to do this is to lead with your lead. Tell the best stuff up front in your blog post or your podcast. Give people a rundown of where youāre going as early as you can. Lots of great media makers script their productions, outline their blog posts, and otherwise use systems to stay on point.
Make sure you provide many ways to subscribe to your media. Posting an RSS link isnāt really going far enough unless you show people how to subscribe in the way they want it. If itās a blog, show them how to get it by e-mail, if thatās their reading choice. If itās a video blog, show your audience how they can stay up-to-date with your media. Ask whether you can notify them of special shows you donāt want them to miss, perhaps by sending an e-mail. If they agree, use that method sparingly Donāt make every show a must-see show. Make the best ones a must-see.
PEOPLE LIKE TO BE APPRECIATED
Youāre not doing this for yourself (unless you are). The notion is that youāre out there trying to build a relationship with an audience. If youāre in business, youāre establishing brand, or talking about a product, or pitching something in a more human, two-way method. If youāre an individual, youāre building reputation, sharing information with like-minded sources. In all these cases, itās two-way, and the people on the other side want to know you respect that.
Stop by other peopleās sites now and again. Leave comments. Point the occasional blog post or podcast out toward the folks who spend their time with you. Go further than a blogroll. Drive awareness. Build traffic.
A while back, I promoted musician Matthew Ebelās project, www.virtualhotwings.com, which allowed fans of his music to buy some very special tracks that werenāt otherwise collected or available. But further, the project sent out updates for new tracks that purchasers of the original project received free for having paid for the project the first time. That kind of follow-on appreciation makes lifelong fans from people interested in your media.
As a producer of a blog or a podcast or other media, consider ways to give people something more for the attention theyāre spending on you. Think of ways to make special offers for free things to acknowledge that someoneās a fan of your work, or better still, find ways to promote the people in your audience as the true stars in your social media system. Make it every bit as much about them as it is about your relationship with them.
MAKE PEOPLE THE EXPERTS
Finally, seek ways to tap into peopleās expertise. The point behind unconferences like PodCamp1 is that the intelligence and brainpower in the audience is almost always going to be greater than what would normally be up on a stage at a traditional conference. To that end, seek ways to tap your audience for their expertise. Ask them to tell you about things. Find out what they know. (You already know what you know.)
Thatās why I end every post with a question. Itās a way to prompt for interaction, but itās also a way to learn from the people who spend time with me. I learned a long time ago that the folks spending time with me know more than me in the aggregate. I can start a great conversation, but they always have the better ideas in sum. So ask for it. Seek information. Learn from them.
Besides, people love giving their opinions. Itās a great way to give them the chance to do so.
Have you tried this before? How did it work for you?
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What Social Media Does Best
If youāre still looking for the best ways to explain to senior management or your team or your coworkers or your spouse what social media does, why itās different than the old way people used computers and the Web, and why people are giving two hoots about it, here are some thoughts to start the conversation. I look at this mostly from a business perspective, but I suspect youāll find these apply to nonprofits and other organizations as well. Further, as Iām fond of saying, social media isnāt relegated to the marketing and PR teams. Itās a bunch of tools that can be used throughout businesses, in different forms.
Think about the things social media does best:
ā¢ Blogs allow chronological organization of thoughts, status, ideas. This means more permanence than e-mails.
ā¢ Podcasts (video and audio) encourage different types of learningāand in portable formats.
ā¢ Social networks encourage collaboration, can replace intranets and corporate directories, and can promote non-e-mail conversation channels.
ā¢ Social networks can amass like-minded people around shared interests with little external force, no organizational center, and a group sense of what is important and what comes next.
ā¢ Social bookmarking means that entire groups can learn of new articles, tools, and other Web properties instead of leaving them all on one machine, one browser, for one human.
ā¢ Blogs and wikis encourage conversing, sharing, creating.
ā¢ Social software, like Flickr,2 Last.fm,3 and even Amazon .com, promote human-mediated information sharing. Similar mechanisms inside of larger organizations would be just as effective.
ā¢ Social news sites show the popularity of certain information, at least within certain demographics. Would roll-your-own voting within the company be useful?
ā¢ Social networks are full of prospecting and lead-generation information for sales and marketing.
ā¢ Social networks make for great ways to understand the mind-set of the online consumer, should that be of value to you.
ā¢ Online versions of your materials and media, especially in formats that let you share, mean that youāre equipping others to run with your message, should that be important (e.g., if youāre a marketer).
ā¢ Online versions of your materials and media are searchable, and this helps Google to help you find new visitors, customers, and employees.
ā¢ Social networks contain lots of information about your prospective new hires, your customers, your competitors.
ā¢ Blogs allow you to speak your mind and let the rest of the world know your thought processes and mind-sets.
ā¢ Podcasts are a way to build intimacy with information.
ā¢ Podcasts reach people who are trying out new gadgets, like Droids, iPhones, iPods, Apple TVs, Zunes, and more.
ā¢ Tagging and sharing and all the other activities common on the social Web mean that information gets passed around much faster.
ā¢ Human aggregation and mediation improves the quality of data you find and gives you more āexactly what I was looking forā help. (See also Mahalo.4)
ā¢ Innovation works much faster in a social software environment, open source or otherwise.
ā¢ Conversations spread around, adding metadata and further potential business value.
ā¢ People feel heard.
And thatās a great place to ask you what Iāve missed. What else does social media do best, in your estimation?
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Social Media Does Not Replace Marketing Strategy
In yet another moment of informational threading, hereās a post by Dan Kennedy5 about hyperproductive markets. Kennedy points out that knowing your rough sales target is one thing, but knowing the most productive and yielding part of the whole bunch is worth so much more.
Thread this together with Robert Middletonās
6 post about a karate model for marketing. Thereās a lot to it, but the key point was something he took out of another presentation heād seen, which was this:
1. You first have to get your clients and customers to consume what youāve already sold them.
2. You need to offer new services in progressively more complex stages if you are going to truly serve them.
Iām working on launching a few new things at work, and they are projects that have strong social media and new marketing elements to them. In so doing, Iām thinking a lot about what these tools can do for the communities we serve, and Iām also thinking about the marketplace elements that my business will need to sustain all this. My company is in the business of helping people connect, learn, and do business together. We do this through creating content, building online and face-to-face events, and enabling a marketplace between people selling emerging technologies and people looking to understand which of these technologies will help them next.
Kennedyās point about understanding that thereās a group of people you can sell to, but within that group lies a more productive area, is useful. Middletonās point about having some kinds of selective level-ups7 in your marketing efforts struck a chord insofar as one might consider narrowing the potential funnel for specific products and services (and thereby marketing efforts) once you move deeper into territory that applies to only a select few.
SOCIAL MEDIA LETS YOU GO WIDE, BUT YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT GO DEEP
The tools we use to create social media (blogging, podcasting, video, social networks, etc.) are great at building potential relationships, growing community, serving an audience, helping people find your business, and several other things.
But social media tool...
