How many friends, followers, and connections do you have? Have you discovered MySpace yet, or have you long since left it in the dust? Are you on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? NING? Plaxo? Plurk? FriendFeed?
Only a few of you do them all, and a few do even more.
I started my first MySpace account as a fairly early adopter, then got out, then got back in. If you go there now, it says "You can find me on Facebook. Sorry Tom."
I've been on Linked In since 2004, thanks to my friend LaMont Snarr, who invited me to join, but have been pretty dormant until the last few months. I have just over 430 connections, I think. I like the discussion strings on LI - they reach a broader audience than a typical Google Group. Seems a bit of life has been sparked there recently - but many of my connections are also connections on Facebook.
Google Groups, as mentioned above, cater to a narrower audience. I started a Toastmasters Group almost 18 months ago (to replace an older one, which had been overtaken by SPAM) here - and it offers quite a bit of conversation about Toastmasters International, and has even been known to catch the eyes of the higher ups in our organization.
Facebook has been a blast since January of this year. I had been on it, but barely, for at least a year prior, but didn't start working it til lately. I've got 801 friends at the moment. It's a lot fun, but a lot of time to devote, as well. I had pages up for Go Ahead and Laugh and The Champion of Choice Challenge, but took them down when it was apparent they were to much to maintain.
Twitter - yeah, Twitter. Joined just before the boom hit, 14 months ago. Didn't work it much til December, and now I have close to 19,000 followers. I used to communicate a lot using a third party program called Tweetdeck (I even wrote an article about it here), but haven't opened Tweetdeck in months. Its not even on my new computer. I still tweet regularly, but my conversations have gone down.
I'm involved with many of the others, as well, but to lesser degrees. NING is an interesting program - a niche-oriented Facebook. A great way to create a community if you find a niche that will motivate. As well as being a member of 6 or 7 NING communities, I have created one for The Champion of Choice Challenge here.
So - cool Rich Hopkins - you're involved in SO MUCH. WHO CARES? What's the point? What choices are you making? Is this driving your success, or just sucking all the time out of your life? (And I haven't even talked about blogging, building websites, writing articles....)
There are so many avenues to connect with people without ever leaving the comfort of your chair that nobody with access to an internet connection should ever complain about loneliness again, much less lack of prospects.
Uh oh - did I just call you a prospect? My dear friends on Facebooks are now nothing more than marketing targets? Twitter is all about making money? Well, yes. And no. Do you do business with your friends? Do you buy their books? Do you recommend them to others? Do you support them in their endeavors? Of course you do. Customers are friends, and friends are prospective customers. The more friends you have, the more successful you are likely to be.
Even if you are my best friend in the world, and I give you all my books for free, let you into my workshops at no charge, and give you all the free advice you want, you are still, technically, a 'contact'. Shudder. You just might say something to someone at the right time in the right way that connects me to another gig. Or send someone to my website or blog. If you don't, I probably haven't been a very good friend, right?
I'm still optimizing my usage of these platforms. I'm no social media expert, but I know a lot of people who claim to be, and one or two who actually are. Below, I share my personal rules for social media usage, based on what I want to accomplish. They may work for you, they may not. But, as any REAL social media guru will tell you, the rule is there are no rules. Do what you feel will get you where you're going.
1. Don't be overly political - it's worse than peeing in the pool. If you're just there to be purely you, consequences be darned, then fine. But know the consequences may cost your friends, opportunities, and in some cases, even your job. Or, if you're Larry Winget, it'll simply make you more popular.
2. Use humor, but know your audience. Don't assume others will take your humor with humor. Just trust me on this - or read my post on Michael Jackson a while ago, here.
3. Keep your friends your friends, but remember everyone who's a 'contact/potential customer' wants to be your friend at some level. I don't want to be overly personal (that's why we created email and IM), nor do I want to be overly sanitized. The closer your real personality and your professional personality are, the greater your authenticity and level of integrity becomes.
4. Promote others. Share other people's blogs and products on Facebook. Retweet. Get involved in conversations on LinkedIn. Zig and others say it constantly "the more success you create for others, the more success you create for yourself" (paraphrase).
5. Be consistent, but not manic. I have issues with this one. I'm constantly online, checking statuses, tweets, emails, etc. Even ONE platform can dominate your day, if you aren't watchful of your time. You want to be seen, but 24/7 monitoring may not cast a great image of your business or time management.
My goal is to reach out and connect to as many people as possible - from old classmates to Toastmasters to all the speakers I will eventually sharing the stage with to anyone who might want to see me speak, hire me as a coach, read one of my books, etc. As the connections, friends and followers grow, so will my personal friendships, and professional successes. Sometimes, they are amazingly intertwined!
Why are you using social media? ARE you using social media? If you're reading this blog, you are - even blogger is social media to a point. You have choices to make. Which to use, or not. How you'll use them. Why you'll use them. But make no mistake, social media is here to stay, in one form or another. I suggest choosing to do something about it vs. waiting out its demise. The world is getting closer every day - are they getting closer to YOU?
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