What has the Fall of The Roman Empire got to do with Social Media? Is this another of those weird analogies that “guru’s” like to throw around? Possibly, though I hope you will see the connection in the way I do. Over the past few years those of us who advise others on how to get the most from marketing through social media channels have agreed that the model which works best for all size businesses is the outpost model. I referred to it as the hub and spoke model others use different terms but we all mean the same thing.

The Collapse of The Social Media Outpost

One of the major contributing factors to the fall of the Roman Empire was its size. It became too big to be sustainable. The Roman’s had outposts at every point of the known world. Communication became harder and harder, supply become harder and the trade that was supposed to flow back to Rome started to diminish. So focused on their outposts were they that they ignored what was going on in their own Capital. In the end the model collapsed. Roman was over-run by hoardes that didn’t rely on developing large empires but instead existed in small groups that were more sustainable.

So how does this affect Social Media? The truth is that the model that so many of us have been promoting is about to collapse. There are just too many outposts. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Plus, Pinterest, Tumblr, WordPress, Forums, Email, and endless other places to establish an outpost, all with the same end to drive traffic back to our Capital.

Retreating From Your Social Media Outpost

Look at your own statistics, how many of the various sites that you have established as an outpost is actually generating significant traffic? Why are you still there? The low numbers tell you that the people interested in you aren’t there, you are either doing a poor job of maintaining your outpost or you just aren’t providing the locals with what they want. Either way you need to get out before it becomes obvious that you can’t sustain that outpost.   In a recent post Chris Brogan says:

2012 is the year where social media oversaturation hits hard. We will scale back on our participation in social networks, and we will most certainly scale back who we choose to follow as sources.

He is right (he usually is), and if that is the case then that scaling back by users means that your content is going to get even less eyeballs at your outposts. Your empire is about to be over-run by hit and run hoardes who are better able to leverage those particular outposts than you are. So why wait for that to happen?

Deciding Which Social Media Outpost To Keep

I am not suggesting you abandon all your outposts, but take a good long hard look at all those outposts you have established and see how often you are posting – not automatically cross-posting from other places, but actually generating original content targeted at that particular audience. If the answer is “not much” then that outpost probably needs to be abandoned.

Just because new sites appear doesn’t mean you should immediately establish an outpost – try instead to see if there is a real fit for your business. Currently lots of people are trying to shoe-horn Pinterest into their marketing mix – for some this will become another cross-posting, under-supplied outpost that will die off in a few months. For others it will become a major driver of traffic, allowing them to remove other outposts that are not performing as well. But simply building an outpost for the sake of it is not a strategy for success.

Which Social Media Outposts can you let go of?

This is a continuing series of posts by Speakers for speakers. If you are currently a speaker and looking to improve, if you are an aspiring speaker and worried about the mistakes that others make this is the series for you. Each Wednesday a speaker who I value will share their thoughts on how speakers can be better, their experiences as a speaker and generally tell you the insider secrets that make it look so easy when they take the stage.

This weeks post is by Lynette Young. Lynette is CEO of Purple Stripe Productions, Lynette Young is one of the first podcasters to have received a six-figure sponsorship just to chat (and that was her first year).  Since then, she has been helping others put their dreams into action as a social media coach, social technology specialist, and a strategist for businesses regarding implementation services.  Her love (besides her family) is Google+.  Ms. Young believes that Google+ is the future for business and, as such, is the founder and curator of The Women of Google+.

Know The Lingo

As a professional speaker, I present within my own industries of social media, women entrepreneurs and technology, but most of the time I speak at events in other industries. While I know the lingo we throw around, I am not always privy to the terminology of other industries. It is imperative that to be a professional speaker you do some research to find out about the people warming the seats. If you don’t what matters in their industry or day to day jobs, you will never connect with them with your content from the podium.

I have witnessed probably a hundred spectacular train wreck talks over my twenty years as a speaker (yes, a few were mine). I will give an example to show a point, and to hopefully learn a lesson. I attended a conference for the insurance industry and was waiting in the wings as the speaker before me was on stage. The speaker was from the real estate world, which was a good fit for the content presented that day. Problem? It was obvious that the speaker assumed everyone in the audience understood what he was talking about when he threw around industry-specific terms like CRV (certificate of reasonable value) and PITI (principal, interest, tax, and insurance). Do you know what a cricket sounds like in a room of five hundred people? I do now.

It was obvious to me the speaker had not taken the time to know that the people filling the seats. The attendees had no real understanding of the inner workings of the real estate world. Had the speaker thought to rework his talk a bit to be more ‘plain English’ the audience could understand and not use his talk as a sleeping aid. The audience wasn’t only lost, but made to feel stupid and uninformed. Not one person left their seats when he was finished to get his business card. (Truth be told, he may have just walked straight to the exit door when he was done, but that’s an entirely different article.) By taking a glance at the conference agenda and sales sheet it would have been very easy to know that these were not attendees that understood real estate financing. Lesson? Talk to your audience as if they were actual people, and do a bit of research to find out who they are and where they come from.

“Lingo-vomit” is probably the most common screw-up I see along with assuming the audience knows all the things you do, or talking to them like they are idiots. There are the rare gems where I get to see a speaker set themselves on fire by jumping into a talk written for authors when the are really in a crowd of nurses. The location slip-up is the all time personal favorite of mine. A battle cry of ’Go Pats!’ when they are really in New York Giants territory is always fun to watch. How a speaker recovers from that is a good judge of their abilities outside the slip up. The correct comeback for that faux pas is “just keeping you on your toes – GO GIANTS!”

“GO EAGLES!” is not.

See last weeks post – Speaking Is About More Than Speaking by Thom Singer

This week sees the kick off of this new series of posts about speaking written by speakers that I know do a great job. I intend this series to be of interest to those who are already speakers, those looking to get better at speaking and to those who aspire to speak in public.

This week the post is written by Thom Singer.

Thom  is a professional speaker, sales trainer and the author of nine books on the power of business relationships, networking, and presentation skills.  He has spent over 20 years in sales, marketing, and business development roles with major corporations. He regularly consults with corporations and individuals on how to cultivate their personal brands and establish professional connections that will lead to more referral business. His speaking includes impactful keynotes, break-outs sessions, training programs and the “Conference Networking Catalyst” program, which sets the tone for better meetings.

Speaking Is About More Than Speaking

Simon Salt recently made a profound statement on Google+ when he said “Speaking is the new blogging”. It was only a few short years ago that seemingly everyone you met was a self proclaimed “blogger”. But what the classification meant was as varied as the number of people holding claim to the title. Now in 2012 it seems that the label of “speaker” or “conference speaker” has been added to countless LinkedIn profiles, resumes, and bios.
PR professionals work hard to get their clients onto agendas as speakers or panelists at all sorts of industry events, and open calls for presentations for meetings are often bombarded with proposals (some that fit the needs of the conference organizers, others that are just fishing expeditions). But is calling yourself a speaker and submitting proposals enough?
Speaking in public is a great way to promote your business, your cause or yourself. But just because someone is smart or has done something cool, it does not mean they belong on the stage. Presenting a blah presentation (or worse… being awful )can bring no results or even harm a reputation.

Presenting Can’t Be Faked

Presenting is a skill. Like playing golf, it is evident to all who watch if someone has experience. You cannot fake it or wing it if you wish to make a meaningful connection with the audience. A bad presentation can suck the energy out of the whole conference, which is why it is important that people who call themselves speakers and pursue the opportunity to present are dedicated to bettering their skills and serving the audience.
There is often an argument about content vs. style when selecting speakers. However, there is no reason this should be debated. I am not advocating for “fluffy” speakers who are good performers but have nothing to add to the audience. I am stating that it is not too much to want both style and content.

I am passionate about presentation skills. Every time I watch anyone give a talk I call it “Speaker’s College”. The person on stage, be it at a conference, in classroom, in church, etc…, is the professor and I am the student. It is exciting to see a person educate, inspire and connect with an audience. It is also painful to see someone bomb on the platform. In every case it is the mix of their information and their abilities to communicate that make them memorable or forgettable. Relying only on the data can be very stale, and thus it is important to work on your public speaking skills.

I have watched thousands of speakers, from the famous industry professionals to regular people in a variety of settings. I have learned from every one of them. I have also delivered over 300 “professional level” speeches over the last decade. To be a “speaker” is more than a line on your bio. I believe a “speaker” must be excited by the opportunity to present to an audience and be dedicated to serving the greater good of the conference or meeting. The necessary preparation that the audience deserves is more than just showing up to promote your business.
It is an honor to be asked to speak, and those who can cultivate an experience that advances all aspects of the meeting will be asked to speak again, and again, and again.

Waiting to write makes you a waiter not a writer, the sage advice from Somerset Maugham. It is advice I give myself regularly and have shared with many others, both privately and publicly. There exists a strange new beast in the creative world, the content scientist. These people can tell you how many times a word needs to exist in a post to count as a “keyword”, they can tell you with accuracy akin to the Swiss railroad when you should post to maximize your audience. They can tell you all this and more. In doing so they scare the writer clean out of you.

Writing isn’t a science, it is an art. Writing doesn’t run like a railroad, if it is any kind of transport it is more likely a rickshaw. Driven by sweat, a heaving mass dragged through the streets by a struggling human engine striving to get to its destination. Of course the content scientists will show you charts and graphs, they will talk about increased readership, click through rates and other impressive statistics. All of which are fairly meaningless. Like murder, good writing will out.

Waiting to Write: Art vs Science

I’m not dismissing the content scientist. In the same way as we need those who write code to enable us to publish our writing online, we need content scientists to show us how we might improve what we do. Just as painters need the scientists to create new shades of paint to enable them to express themselves. The trouble starts when the writer focuses on the numbers instead of the letters. Is Monday at 10am the best time for my audience to see my post? Should I be posting three times a week or five?

I try to write regularly here, if for no other reason than the discipline. I even try to think about what you, the reader might enjoy reading. For the most part, and given the responses I receive, it seems that this blog after existing for the past few years has found an audience that, at least some of the time, enjoys what it reads. There is definitely no science behind what I do. For the most part I post twice a week, but that depends on what else I am doing. Sometimes I write in advance, and other times it is on the same day. I have read many many posts and books that refer to timing, SEO, and all many of other numbers and devices that could increase my readership. I have, to date, ignored them all. At the end of the day, I would rather write for a handful of people who enjoy my writing than try and outsmart the scientists at Google.

Waiting to Write: Enjoyment vs Business

This is not a business blog, or is it? I suppose that depends on how the reader reads it. I think of it as more akin to an advice column, a Dear Prudence of Marketing if you will. I understand that the content scientists aren’t really writing for me, they are writing for people looking to make money from their blogs through advertising and various other means. I understand that, but that isn’t writing, not in the sense I am talking about here. That’s promotion, advertising, content marketing. Its about page views, and uniques, and click through rates.

I’m not being a purist here. Everyone is entitled to create for whatever purpose they deem fit. But those who agonize over when to write, when to post, who to write for and spend their time on reading all that the content scientist have to say are missing an important event – the writing.

Waiting to Write: Waiter or Writer?

So what are you, a waiter or a writer? Will you allow the excuses and the content scientists to distract you or will you take a breath, open the page and make a mark on it? Whether it is poetry, prose, a hobby subject or a business subject, at some point you will have to decide whether those thoughts exist only in your head or if you will give them life outside your head and put them on a page.

Your decision, waiter or writer?

Check Your Hair, Make Sure Your Mic Is On is the title of a  post I wrote a few weeks ago in which I talk about the importance of appearance for speakers. In talking with new, aspiring and even existing speakers it seems people would like to read more of the same.

Rather than simply share my thoughts on speaking  I thought you would find it more interesting to hear from other speakers. To this end I have extended the invitation to some of the speakers that I enjoy a lot to share their stories of being a speaker. What works and what doesn’t, how to handle technology, the good stories and the nightmare stories.

Watch the video below and you can see why I wanted to put this series together:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rHFNJnDPYY

Each wednesday there will be a new post from a speaker who will share their experience. Who are these speakers? Well to name drop a few – Ann Handley – Chief Content Officer for Marketing Profs, Hank Wasiak – 14 time Emmy Nominated TV Host, Lynette Young, Podcaster and Founder of Women of G+ and many others.

The best way to make sure you don’t miss this great content?  Subscribe by email in the top right of this page and get it delivered to your inbox.  Of course I’d love you to just keep coming back to the site because, well that helps my stats and makes me feel good about myself – but I’d rather you got the content the way you want it.

image used under CC License by Ford Buchanan

Last week I wrote about the Three Types of Social Content. I want to extend that conversation by looking at how the use of Social Content is killing Social Networks. Consider your own Social Network streams, whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus – I’d place a bet that most of what you see is content that has been curated for the purpose of capturing your attention. Very little of it is original content. From Cat videos to reposts from news outlets users want to be able to share others content and be known for sharing helpful, funny, and interesting content.

Social Content – Not Friends but Publishers

When we decide to Follow, Circle or Friend someone – our major points of contact (unless we know them in real life) with them are not who they are but what they share. Does what they share fit into our groups of interests? This removes the effort of seeing them as a person but instead we are seeing them as a source of Social Content. Will they provide us with interesting, informative and importantly shareable content?

If you think about the way Social Networks were originally structured, they were meant as virtual places for meeting people. The people you met revealed something about themselves and you in turn revealed something about yourself, in other words a normal social interaction. Now we are moving to a situation where we careless about the actual person and more about the content they share. We like people who share original content, but actually we are hopeful that they will simply share something that is going to be popular and will in turn increase our own Social Currency.

Social Content – Content For Content’s Sake

We are used to hearing that content is king. We all want to be a part of that royalty, the Social Web thrives on popularity and users are seeking ways to promote themselves, their business, their brand through the use of content. Content Marketing is the panacea to all your woes. Your content will help you build a business, develop a network, create a platform. All of these things are actually true. The problem with this is that while these mantra’s were developed originally for business, they have permeated the personal world.

Every user is now a brand, but instead of that philosophy humanizing brands, it is having the opposite effect, it is dehumanizing people. Users of Social Networks are less interested in being Social and more interested in being publishers. There are endless posts on tactics to get “more retweets, more links, more views”, which are great if you are in the content marketing business, however, these posts are being read and utilized by people, real people, ordinary individuals who are actually quite interesting in their own right.

Social Content – Stop Publishing, Start Humanizing

I know that you won’t stop sharing cat videos – I’m not really asking you to. But every once in a while how about sharing a story about you. Share something that lets me get to know you as a person – heck I might even like you and if I don’t well that’s ok too, because there are plenty of others out there that will.

Take a risk and be a human being on a Social Network and let’s stop seeing ourselves as just producers of Social Content.

image used under CC license by tölvakonu 

The Three C’s of Social Content – Creation, Curation and Cultivation. In looking at online content, particularly that shared on social networks I’ve come to the conclusion that there are generally three broad categories of social content. I’m going to expand on this premise in this and a couple of upcoming posts and certainly the later posts will be colored in part by the responses I get to the original concepts that I outline here.

The Three C’s of Social Content – Creation

While seemingly self explanatory, content creation seems to generate a lot of controversy. What constitutes content creation? Is it something wholly original, can it be something that is inspired by other work? Can it be an adaptation of existing work?

I honestly don’t think there is a hard rule for this. I have a personal opinion about what I consider original work and therefore content creation, but that is just my opinion. I happen to think that for content to fall into the Creation category it needs to be wholly original in nature. Now that of course would mean that 99% of everything I write wouldn’t fall into that category because it is, in one way or another, inspired by other external influences. I write about things I have seen online, in real life, about books I have read, commercials I have seen etc. However, I would like to think that my interpretations of these external influences is unique and therefore original.

I occasionally create images, either for this blog or for Google Plus posts that are based on words that I have seen in other places – I consider those not to be original content. Yes, I have used the words in a way that might well be original, but the emotion that is being evoked is not original. I didn’t create that response originally, the words that I have chosen have already done that.

The Three C’s of Social Content – Curation

Many social networks have really become social curation depositories. Google Plus particularly strikes me as being this type of network. While I do see plenty of original content there I also see much that is the collecting and resharing of content. Sometimes grouped together in an organized manner, sometimes not so organized. I personally tend to think that truly curated content has at least some form of index to allow it to be found quickly. Pinterest is a great example of a social network that focuses solely on content curation – to the point of having indices that allow users to quickly find content that they are looking for.

The point of content curation was of course originally a selfish one. I find something interesting that I want to refer to later and I want some way of  finding it later, browser bookmarks and then bookmark sharing sites were great forms of this. The rise in popularity of sharing these pieces of curated content led to more sophisticated sharing strategies, ones that focus on carving a niche based on the content of others.

The Three C’s of Social Content – Cultivation

This is the last form of Social Content in my observation. When a publisher – someone who posts content of any kind to a social network focuses on a specific niche to attract or nurture an audience it can best be described as content cultivation. The content itself is less important than the impact it has on the end goal of audience development. Frequency, density, imagery, time of day, all of these things start to play an increasingly important role in the social content cultivator’s arsenal.

Which type of Social Content do you consider you produce?

Check your hair, make sure your mic works – sound advice given at the start screen of a Google Hangout. Increasingly bloggers, marketers, and others involved in the online world are making appearances in the real world. Taking their content from the virtual to the real world. I asked a question on Google Plus a few weeks ago – is speaking the new blogging? It seems that every blogger wants their 30 mins of stage time and there are no shortage of conferences for them to speak at.

Check Your Hair – Paying For the Dancing Bear

Some are realizing that they can supplement their income and in some cases generate their entire income from paid speaking. Like blogging this is something they have stumbled upon and they are watching the success of others and want their share of the pie. When bloggers see other bloggers earning six digit speaking fees they believe that it is as easy as that. Just put a price tag on their last blog post and deliver it. What they are missing is the years of hard work that goes on between deciding you have something worth sharing and being paid to share it.

I reject far more conference requests than I accept simply because the organizers want my content but have no way or intention of paying for it. They also expect me to cover my own travel and accommodation costs. All this while they charge attendees anywhere from $150 to $5000 per ticket to attend. However, speaking for free is definitely something that all speakers do at the beginning of their careers and will continue throughout their careers given the right circumstances.

The point here is that just because you think you have something worth sharing don’t expect to be paid for it immediately.

Check Your Hair – The Dancing Bear Show

If you are tempted by the thought of speaking then you have to consider a lot more than just what you are going to say. The best speakers provide not just information but entertainment. The session is an experience. The audience walks away talking about it, not just the content but the presenter and the way in which the information is presented. Everyone has a horror story of having Powerpoint slides read to them in a conference session. Presentation goes past this, a long way past.

The trend for a many recent years has been to follow dress codes from the work place, in other words downwards. Jeans and a T-Shirt are considered “cool”, almost de rigueur. I’m not saying that your outfit is more important than your content, but consider your audience. They have paid good money to sit in front of you and look at you for anywhere between 30 and 75 mins – giving them something that is comfortable on the eye is definitely going to win you points. Personally I prefer to be slightly over dressed than under but that is my preference. Blending in with your audience is unlikely to leave a lasting impression.

Don’t go the other way either – I’m not suggesting you come to your session dressed like Bjork in a Swan Gown! Think of it more as an interview situation. In that audience are potential clients, potential event bookers, in other words people who might just want to spend money with you. Even if you have the most compelling content available, image matters. Having the audience see you as not only knowledgeable but also capable of sitting in their conference room might just be the line between additional work and none.

Check Your Hair – Pictures Are Worth A Thousand Words

Find someone to take your profile picture – preferably a professional but at least someone who knows their way around lighting and can make you look good. When someone is considering you for a speaking opportunity you can guarantee they are going to look at your online presence – and if your profile doesn’t project the right professional image – if it looks like you just rolled out of bed and took it in the bathroom mirror are they going to trust you to deliver quality content to their audience?

If you are seriously thinking about adding speaking as a revenue source or just as an additional way to promote your content you really need to think about the whole show and not just what you are going to show on the screen.

What do you think of speakers who don’t pay attention to their appearance?

image used under CC license by RPhlegm

Can Social Media really be called Social any longer, is Social Media broken beyond all repair? Almost since its launch, people have been observing the “Echo Chamber” effect of Twitter. There have been studies that only 20% of the users are actually producing original content, the other 80% are simply reposting that content. Some have even gone so far as to claim that this “reposting” is in fact Content Curation. I think this is a very loose interpretation of any definition of content curation – if indeed such an activity really exists. What most people seem to refer to as content curation is in fact content aggregation. Content aggregation is the process of finding, culling and republishing other people’s work to make your content seem interesting.

Why Social Media is Broken

Don’t get me wrong I use content aggregation as a strategy in marketing communications – I don’t consider it curation though. I use services like Paper.li to produce aggregated content that is then republished. I also aggregate content for my weekly newsletter “Did You See..?” (feel free to sign up). Some people would call this curation because I collect specific content – Digital, Mobile and Social Media marketing news, and then republish that. I disagree with it being called curation, because it misses one important factor – cataloging. Curation has to have a sorting/searching function for it to be curation. Can you imagine a Library that simply housed books with no way to find them, you just had to walk around until you found something interesting?

So back to why Social Media is broken. Its broken because it is no longer truly social. It is competitive and at times almost combative in nature, its all about being heard above the general clamor for attention. Evidence of this is in any one of the expert posts on how to get “retweeted”, “reshared”, or increase your “whatever” score, they will all tell you the same thing – share good content. They have strategies on where to find this good content – Alltop, Pulse, Taptu or any of the other feed based sites will make you popular.  How many of us complain about seeing the same posts over and over again when something becomes popular? But how many of us also share the same things that we have already seen? We know that the people we are sharing with, for the most part, are reading the same sources as us, but we share nonetheless. Occasionally, and increasingly rarely, do I see original comments posted with these shares. And that is where social is broken.

Lack of Thought Broke Social Media

The technology we use has made it too easy to share things. No longer do you have to use services like Evernote to “bookmark” a webpage and then remember to share it. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and every other social network has a widget for that. Want to share a funny cat picture no problem, want to share an article about the Wall Street Occupation, one click and done. The problem with that approach is that there is nothing of you in the share. There is nothing personal and therefore nothing social. I have no problem seeing the same content repeated but without the context of why you are sharing it becomes noise.

In the next few months Google Plus will open it’s doors publicly to businesses. This could quite possibly be the worst thing to happen to the platform in its short life. Google has been running a beta with select businesses to work out how the Google Plus business pages should work – there are two distinct problems with this approach. Firstly, the businesses they selected to work with have social media departments run by early adopters – obviously or they wouldn’t even know about Google Plus, secondly the noise that these pages will introduce won’t come from the businesses, it will come from the wannabe influencers who feel that by repeating posts from their “favorite” brand they will get “noticed”.

If Social Is Broken How Do We Fix It?

This is a huge question and I quite obviously don’t have the definitive answer, I do however have a few opinions for what they are worth. Firstly, think of sharing content like sending an email. When you click send most email software warns you if there is nothing in the body of the email – something along the lines of “The body of this email is empty. Do you really want to send?” Imagine if we could have a share function that did that – “this content has been shared xxx,xxxx,xxx times in the past 24 hours, the comment field is empty are you sure you want to share it?” Or perhaps a filtering system that only shows you new posts on Facebook, G+ etc if there is a new comment attached by the person sharing.

As it stands, there is very little about Social Media that is truly Social. It is a collection of Media and broadcast media at that. In the general rush to be noticed we are all guilty of compounding the problem. In fear of being ignored, forgotten or left behind we pump out content – other peoples content, through our social channels in an attempt to be relevant and meaningful. Social Media is supposedly bringing the death of journalism, but if that is the case why is so much of what is shared on social sites culled from news, magazine and journal websites? Not only culled but shared without comment?

Perhaps the new mantra of the social web should be “Think before you Share”.

If Social Media is Broken how would you fix it?

image used under cc license from oddharmonic

Over the past week I’ve seen an amazing number of what can only be called “missteps” in social and it got me wondering whether being social is just too hard for most businesses. In particular what has amazed me is the number of those who have been less than careful with their social presence who are supposed to be in a position of advising others on the use of social media – marketers and PR companies in particular.

Social Is Too Hard

Economically times are tough. Every one is pressed for time. The “do more with less” philosophy is running rampant and driving business is what is expected of everyone at a company. It seems that in reducing the amount of time any one channel receives being social has become too hard for a lot of businesses, particularly businesses who are supposedly associated with being social. This is a worrying trend. What seems to be missing from these organizations is the understanding that while social media are channels through which you can communicate, the receivers at the end of that channel have to be nurtured, relationships have to be built, trust has to be gained. All of that takes time, time that apparently cannot be spared by these companies.

Over the past week I have seen small businesses berate and argue with customers on Twitter, large PR company employees use their personal Twitter accounts to comment disparagingly about people, conference organizers make demands of speakers in return for nothing and small PR companies use Twitter like a Press release outlet. Are we all so rushed that we have given up even the pretense of being social? Are we all just so desperate to get our message out that we don’t care about the image we portray?

Has Social Become Too Hard For Us?

There is no doubt that being social is hard work. It is time consuming and can sometimes lead to disappointment. Anyone who has been in business longer than five years knows that this has nothing to do with social media. Before Twitter we went to events and networked. We would “work” the room, dipping in and out of conversations, hoping that someone might be interested in what we did for a living and  maybe just maybe we would make a useful contact that we could nurture into a lead and eventually a sale.

Many people still work this way, without the help of any social media channels and do it well. They take the time to develop relationships. I know Car sales people who are selling cars to the third and fourth generation of family members and have been in the business 20+ years. They don’t use Twitter or any other social media channel, the build relationships. For them being social is as natural as breathing. Perhaps social isn’t too hard, perhaps the technology is making us lazy?

Social Isn’t too Hard

The reality is that social isn’t too hard, but it is time consuming and of course there are plenty of automated tools out there that will make tweeting, posting to Facebook or Google Plus or your blog less time consuming but those are just the media. The real success stories in social come from those who actually nurture relationships. Finding that even people who align themselves with “social” as part or all of their business failing to recognize this fact is a trend that I find concerning.

PR companies that berate their audiences, small businesses that argue in public with their customers, Tweets that start with “For Immediate Release” and conference organizers that threaten to pull sessions if speakers don’t use their social networks to promote the conference should be things of the past. I’ve always been an advocate of content being king, but the ace that trumps it is relationships.

Is Social Too Hard for you?

image used under CC Licence by meehanf