Following is a guest post from my friend David Leonhardt, President of The Happy Guy Marketing. Among the blogs he runs are an SEO blog and a writers blog.
The big fallacy that most people make about social media is trying to create something new out of it. People fall in love with “new” and fail to see that social media is just a name for what people have been doing all along – networking – but now they can do it online.
Some people say it’s about the relationships. They are right. Some people say it’s about the conversation. They are right.
The main difference between online and offline networking is how much more can be done and how much faster, on the one hand, and how much shallower the relationships usually are.
If you keep these principles in mind, you will find that Twitter offers the best opportunities, possibly with FaceBook and LinkedIn also working well. But don’t discount social bookmarking websites like Digg, which also have a strong social aspect to them. In fact, I have found it best to work across a few different types of platforms to build relationships that are, if not deeper, at least more well-developed.
In the reception hall
Take the time to get to know individuals. Just like in a reception hall, some people will always remain just a face and a name; others you might get to know quite well. In fact, Twitter is very much like a huge reception hall, with hundreds of conversations, and people slipping from one to the other quite fluidly. The only difference is that in real life you don’t have a microphone hanging over each person’s head. On Twitter, you do. And to some degree on FaceBook and Digg, too.
So be very careful what you say; this is not a personal journal, but a public networking forum, where we all should be on our best behavior.
Forget the technology. Forget the whole concept of “social media”. Focus on the people, and you can advance almost any goal through sites like Twitter, Digg and FaceBook.
