MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Hel­looo, it’s called Social Media

Social media is turn­ing mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions upside down. The rules of the game are chang­ing and shift­ing, and amidst all of this won­der­ful, innovation-driven chaos, many get into social media with­out keep­ing a focus on the “social” in social media.

How many times have you got­ten onboard a social media web­site, went on an “adding friends” wild spree, start­ing send­ing links to these new so-called friends and wished for the best? I don’t know about you but I’ve had sev­eral attempts with dif­fer­ent social media sites. Many failed, and some succeeded.

Don’t Just Add, Interact

Don’t suc­cumb to lazi­ness and evil shortcut-ish temp­ta­tions. Social media is a long-term effort which requires patience.

Come up with goals that can eas­ily be bro­ken down into small, very achiev­able steps. For exam­ple, every­day, gen­uinely make 3 or 5 acquaintances.

Adding many “friends” alone and imme­di­ately send­ing con­tent to them in hopes of get­ting them to vote for it is not the right approach.

1. Add a few peo­ple at a time — prefer­ably like-minded peo­ple and power users.
2. Inter­act with them, and make it a daily goal.
3. Mean­while, keep in touch with those you’ve already added.
4. Main­tain your focus on power users and
5. Turn acquain­tances into friends.

Using a spread­sheet will be help­ful to keep track of who are new/old acquain­tances and friends.

Keep It Human

I grad­u­ated uni­ver­sity with a major in Knowl­edge Man­age­ment and before join­ing Mind­Val­ley, that is pretty much what I used to focus on dur­ing my pre­vi­ous pro­fes­sional work­ing life.

From my expe­ri­ence, when Knowl­edge Man­age­ment ini­tia­tives fail, they mostly do because of too much focus on a techno-centric view.

There is a related and impor­tant les­son here.

Social media sites pro­vide inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies which merely act as enablers for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and social inter­ac­tion, so ulti­mately it’s not really about the tech­nol­ogy. I repeat, com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies are merely enablers. They don’t and won’t replace com­mon pat­terns of human psy­chol­ogy which exist in the real world and which are also behind suc­cess­ful and healthy social media efforts. Don’t fall for a techno-centric view.

Keep it human.

Last 5 posts by

• The 5 Profit-Exploding Secrets of “Passion-Based Inte­grated Social Media Mar­ket­ing” — Jan­u­ary 1st, 2009
• Val­ley­wag Amuses Mind­Val­ley — Novem­ber 27th, 2008
• McAfee Magic: How One Tiny Tweak Boosted Sales by 15% — Novem­ber 20th, 2008
• The Key to a Win­ning Sales Angle — Novem­ber 5th, 2008
• Tes­ti­mo­ni­als Sell. Email Them. — Sep­tem­ber 9th, 2008

About the Author

Having been invited for conferences co-organized by Harvard University and attended international ones, Amir is a blogaholic and a passionate observer of the blogosphere who's built a number of successful blogs. On top of that, he's obviously a full-time web junkie at MindValley where he focuses on blogging, SEO and social media marketing trends.

Check out other posts by Amir Ahmad

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