Imagine Your Reality

I think one of the challenges with social media is learning how to turn your online network into an actual network. While it’s true that many of the people you’ll connect to online are people you might also see offline, not everyone you connect to is someone you see regularly. So the challenge that arises is how to become more than just an internet connection to someone.

Recently I’ve begun paring down my Linkedin connections. While I appreciate that a lot of people have chosen to connect with me, beyond being a number in my connections list, I don’t know most of them or how they will actually be meaningful to my life. So to determine if there is a possibility of a real relationship, I’m writing to my connections and asking them to tell me about themselves and what their needs are.

I’m not writing to them to solicit them, but I do want to know who they are, what’s important to them, and if I can help them in any way, shape, or form. Maybe I can connect them to someone I know or maybe I can answer a question, but I want to be more than a number and I also want them to be more than a number.

I also figure that if someone doesn’t write back, they probably aren’t interested in actually connecting with me in a meaningful way, so I’m willing to let them go as a connection, because I know nothing will come of a connection where I am just a number to someone else.

The challenge of turning an online network into an actual network is that the people you connect with have to be people with real needs so that you can really network with them. By writing a message to a person I’m connected to on Linkedin, my hope is that I’ll actually discover their needs and also become a person to them. My hope is that we’ll actually start networking for real instead of just accumulating numbers.

What about you? What makes a connection on any online site into a person who you are learning more and networking with?

Something I’ve noticed is that many people tend to post the same status update across all of their social networks. And what I’ve also noticed is that it seems like there’s less responses to such postings, because people can probably tell if you’re just blasting a post to all of your networks at the same time. To test this observation, I thought I would run a little experiment.

For one week I posted the same message to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. While I got some responses on Twitter, I got almost no responses on Facebook. There was not Twitter icon to indicate that I’d copied and pasted the same message, but the length of the message would give it away.

The next week I posted longer messages on my Facebook page and I ended up getting a lot more activity. By choosing not to limit myself to 140 characters, I could show my fans that I wasn’t just copying and pasting a message. People interacted more because they knew the message was different than what they would find on Twitter or another social media site with a 140 character limit.

The value of an experiment like this is that it teaches you how important it is to recognize that no two social media sites are really alike and also that people will probably be able to tell if you’ve cross-posted the same message across each social media platform. By varying my message for my Facebook page I was able to get more discussion and interaction than I had before. Treating each site like it has the same limits ultimately limits the interaction, because not each has site has the same limits when it comes to amount of text or other forms of interaction.

Have any of you tried to experiment with status updates, and if so what have your results been?

One of the interesting realities of social media is that in some ways its easier to lose credibility on a site than it is to lose it in person. I personally think the reason for that is simple. It all boils down to the fact that you have a semi-permanent medium of text, which people can look at and reference. If you make a mistake via text it can stay with you a lot longer, if people know where to look. Regardless, losing credibility isn’t something anybody wants to experience, so if you know how you can lose credibility, it can be worth looking over your posts to help you avoid losing credibility.

Reason 1: Typos

You’d think a pesky little issue such as spelling would be forgiven in the age of texting, but its not, especially if its clear that you are trying to use an actual word and you spell it wrong. In an age of spell check, people are much less forgiving if they notice typos in your writing, whether in your social media or on your website. Make the effort to scan what you’ve written for misspelled words, and also for missing words. Don’t rely on spellcheck alone, which will miss some words.

Reason 2: It’s all about you

Nobody likes to be around a person who just talks about him/herself. Narcissism isn’t that attractive accept to the person listening to him/herself. It’s okay to post about what you are doing, but mix it up with some responses, retweets, and show interest in other people. You’d be surprise what’ll happen when people realize you actually want know about them as opposed to just pushing your own agenda.

Reason 3: Hard selling

Social media is about soft touch, not hard selling. Use social media to do research and make initial contact. Learn about the person and at some point, try to set up an appointment via phone or in person and then make your pitch. But use social media to create the social context that allows you to make that pitch, instead of trying to pitch people on social media.

Reason 4: No engagement

If you never respond to someone else, it makes a person wonder if you are really involved or if you just have everything set up on auto-pilot. Engagement is a sign that you are actually involved and interested in what people have to say and offer.

These are just a few reasons people lose credibility on social media sites. What are some reasons you would ad? What do you look for to tell you if someone is a spammer?

Typically, what I read and see in regards to social media is how it can be used for marketing, how it can be used to get in the door and catch the eyes of people. But I think social media is a lot more than just marketing or even networking. Social media needs to be examined in terms of how it can or can’t be applied to all areas of a person’s business.

The other day Chris Brogan posted about the possibility of a social crash. He argues that with social media there is a lot of hyper-connectivity, which leads to ambient relationships, where we touch people via social media, but don’t necessarily have any further contact. Chris rightly wonders what will happen to all of our relationships with so much hyper connection.

I think while Chris is correct to note the ambient relationships that can be formed via social media, that it is possible to also form meaningful relationships with people on social media sites. Also social media is used to make people aware of situations in other people’s lives and in some cases those connections have pulled together to help someone out, even if they didn’t know the person well.

It’s true that social media makes it possible for even casual connections to stay more connected than they would have before, but I don’t think this will necessarily lead to a social crash. It may actually lead to people being more aware of the people they want to spend quality time with and using social media to stay up on those people’s lives and coordinating getting together with them.

At the same time, being connected to so many more people can be daunting because with many of those people we won’t really get to know them. They will provide us status updates, brief snippets of their lives, and then be gone. It is only with some effort on our part that we’ll be able to significantly make a relationship with them and usually both people will need to see a clear need for that relationship to occur.

Even with said I don’t think a social collapse will occur. Instead what I hope will occur is that people will become more thoughtful and aware of the relationships they chose to cultivate and make more effort to get to know the people who they feel are important to them, using both social media and other forms of communication. That, at least for me, is how I’ve used social media.

Return on Relationship is more than just a buzz phrase. It’s a philosophy about Relationships and how important they are for business.



In a recent discussion, a commenter asked if I wanted an automated message sent to me that was tailored toward what I wanted. I don’t want an automated message that someone has crafted in an attempt to get me to buy, because s/he thinks s/he knows what I want. What I want is engagement, and this is why I don’t think automation and social media mix well. At one time, a couple years ago, a lot of people were talking about the benefit of automating your social media by connecting all of your accounts together and scheduling your posts so you didn’t have to be around, or hiring someone else to do it for you. Even now there people who still push this approach to social media.

At some point people who are connected to you on multiple networks begin to notice if your message is the same on each network and even begin to ask if you’re really there and if it’s really worth their time to keep reading the same message across multiple platforms. And they’ll likely come to the conclusion that it’s not worth their time because the message is the same, especially if you aren’t involved in some other activities on the social media site.

While automation can save you time, it can’t help you when it comes to engaging people and since social media is a two-way communication, people will notice if you only push information out, and unless they find that information valuable, or you happen to be a celebrity, they’ll tune you out so that they can focus on engaging with people who want to talk with them. It’s a good idea to take a look at the kinds of posts you write and also look at the responses you’ve received. Also take a look at how many responses you’re offering to people. If you’re not writing responses to individual sites, then it tells people that you aren’t really present on those sites. You’re pushing out information, but you aren’t there to actually engage people.

For some people, pushing out works as a strategy, but the problem in the end is that lack of engagement hurts your business more, especially when people are looking at whether or not businesses are actively and sustaining creating relationships with their customers. Since people tend to trust their friends and network more when it comes to recommending businesses, making the effort to engage people is key to fully understanding what they need and also for creating a sense of community that lasts beyond that initial transaction the business has with them. Automation doesn’t create that sense of engagement, but actual participation and individualized posting can and does work. The investment is a bit more time spent in order to create that level of engagement.

As social media policies are developed, one factor that needs to be considered is relationships. Since social media is ideally about creating and cultivating relationships with other people, a social media policy needs to consider those relationships and respect them while also making it clear to employees that they also have a relationship with the company.

In fact, a social media policy should, right from the beginning, make it clear that there is a relationship between the company and the employee. That kind of understanding can help policy makers frame their policy in terms of showing employees how that relationship is impacted by their actions on social media. At the same time, policy makers do want to consider that employees are using social media to be social, to answer questions, share ideas, and otherwise cultivate relationships with other people for a variety of reasons.

In developing a policy that employees will need to follow, a special section should be devoted to the company’s stance on respecting the personal lives of the employees as well as the relationships employees cultivate and maintain on social media. Employees need to know that their privacy will be respected and that their choices for who they contact won’t be held against them, as long as it doesn’t endanger the company. That last point is essential for employees to understand, so that likewise they respect the relationship they have with the business. Sharing proprietary information would endanger the company, or speaking badly of a fellow employee or client on a social media forum would also endanger the company. Employees need to consider the relationship they have with the company they work for, so that when they communicate online, they do so and still protect company secrets and represent the company respectfully.

While an employee might only work eight hours a day, s/he still nonetheless represents the company 24/7 by virtue of being employed there. This doesn’t mean the company owns the employee, but it does mean that the employee needs to recognize that s/he always has a relationship with the company and that relationship will effect other relationships, insomuch as what the employee says about work to the people s/he interacts with. By addressing social media relationships in a policy, companies can help employees understand the importance of respecting the relationship they have with their company, while also cultivating new relationships with people they meet online.

Social media is more than technology, but many people get stuck on the technology. One of my clients expressed that what frustrated her the most was not being able to see how social media could contribute to relationships, because all she could see was the technology. She’s not alone, as other people have expressed similar frustration to me before. The problem is that technology can be a steep learning curve, especially if you only explain what to do. If you take the time to explain why someone needs to do something, it can help that person see past the technology to the underlying reasons that will help them grow their business.

Social media isn’t just technology. It’s a social medium, where you connect with other people. Technology is the means by which you connect with those people, but the actual activity is social activity that each person generates by commenting on their own news or commenting on other people’s news. When we look at social media in that light, we recognize that social media isn’t just a technological interface that does something that no one else can see. We recognize that social media is a conversation between people happening in a virtual space through technology.

The perception that social media is just technology is partially derived from how much people discuss the technology without considering the overall use. While it’s important to understand the technological piece of social media, focusing on it too heavily will lose people who otherwise might embrace it as part of their business. When I work with clients who feel frustrated by the technology, I spend a lot of time explaining the social piece because I recognize they need to understand how it actually connects them to other people as well as how those same people can sometimes end up contacting them offline as a result of that social media contact.

If we only frame social media as a technology we are missing out on what it can actually do for us. What do you think? Is social media just a technology for you, or is it more, and if so how is it more?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media can build community. I see people pull together and help each other out on social media and also spread the word, so I think social media can be an expression of community. What do you think?