social media

Social media provides two ways for you to get your message out. Participants can choose to 'push' their information out to others or take a more passive approach and wait for others to 'pull' in the information they choose. This distinction is critical, especially for businesses trying to promote themselves through social media.

The 'Push' approach places decision making in the hands of the sender. You decide the value of your message and who needs to receive it. You must be careful that what you think is worthwhile, others don't consider unwanted and 'spamish'.

A good example of this occurs on LinkedIn where a growing number of participants are linked not only to each other but also to their Twitter accounts. Numerous, daily tweets may be appropriate on Twitter but invasive in the social media culture of LinkedIn.

Few realize that their LinkedIn connections can simply click 'hide' on the offending posts and subsequently not see anything posted by that person yet remain 'connected' to them. In this case, 'pushing' out unwanted posts results in the worst possible outcome for the poster, losing all contact with some community members and not even knowing it!

The 'Pull' approach allows your social media community to maintain control over what they want to view. By allowing them to retain control over the content they receive, you not only respect their choice, but also avoid being hidden from view. This approach provides an excellent mechanism for displaying your work and credentials to the social media community and potential clients, on their terms.

For many social media posters, the message is about them: what they offer, what they suggest, what they promote, what they think you need or will find interesting. Millions of people enjoy this genre of social media. But it's not for business.

In business, each moment of time has a cost. Not just in minutes or in dollars, but also in opportunity. Savvy businesses understand the opportunity cost of social media participation. To make your posts worth a business's time, you must create value in the post. Value can only be created by writing the post for the benefit of the business reader. It's about the reader, not about you.

When I was in the corporate world, we would route literature among management. Some team members liked to write notes on the route slip indicating an article they recommended others read. The notes served little purpose since members often didn't share the same interest in an article. More importantly, it was easier to simply read the Table of Contents to determine what you wanted to read. Sometimes I thought members made notes to appear they read an article when they didn't. There was one person, however, who would give a brief synopsis of an article and why it was important to the business we were in. I always read any notes from that person because more times than not, they were of value to me.

What was in it for my colleague? The same thing todays businesses exploring social media hope to acquire, professional recognition and influence.

Even though you may not have the time or desire to be social and develop relationships through social media, you still need to create an audience for your posts. Social media without an audience is like sex without a partner. It may be ...O.K., I think you can figure out the analogy. Minimum participation in social media means creating an audience through connections, friends, links or shares.

Some web designs are more amenable to social media participation than others. One simple addition can easily transform websites into social media magnets or at least social media wallflowers.

Service links for social bookmarking sites, blog search engines, and social networks are the single, most effective website addition for developing an unsocial social media presence. The service links allow you to easily post links to your website content from your accounts on these various services. With a minimum of effort, a website can establish valuable external links as well as increase exposure.

Website visitors can also use the service links to create bookmarks to your content from their own social media accounts. Although the number of links acquired in this manner may be small, the number will be zero if no service links are present. Since visitors will also use the service links, businesses should consider including links to popular services even if you do not have an account.

Content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress have service link features that can easily be added. Non-CMS websites can quickly find scripts and graphic icons for incorporating service links into just about any type of website design.

Although service links allow a business to remain an unsocial wallflower while developing a greater social media presence, many of the service links provide options for forwarding your content to groups you have joined as well as to any followers, friends, or connections you have acquired. The next blog post will cover these options and offer some strategies for identifying and acquiring an audience for your content.

Your business creates and receives content everyday.

Mail boxes, both postal and email, are filled with numerous wanted and unwanted messages. Correspondence is conducted with suppliers, customers, partners, affiliates, employees, vendors, government agencies, family, loved ones and not-so-loved ones. Telephone calls, texts, and old fashioned face-to-face conversation all contribute to the wealth of content we all produce and receive each day.

Creating original and compelling Internet content begins with realizing you are surrounded by it. You choose to use or dismiss every bit of it. Much of the content you receive is similar to the content we all receive. What you do with it, how you use it, or how you dispose of it is unique to you and the source of content you create. This is a value-added process. You create value by determining which content to discard and which content to keep. More value is created when you use the content you receive in a beneficial way.

Ask yourself, is this value-added content worth sharing? If it is of value to you it is probably of value to others. All you need to do is find the right audience to share it with.

Orange County, California (April 18, 2011) – Brian Geary Consulting has begun a new blog series for small companies interested in using social media to promote their businesses. Titled, “Unsocial Social Media”, the blog addresses the challenge of limited time that small businesses encounter when approaching social media. The blog ideas offer a viable way for these businesses to begin building a presence on social media websites.

Conventional social media participation is based on developing online relationships. “The online, relationship building process requires more time,” explains company spokesman Brian Geary, “than most small businesses have.” Furthermore, the opportunity cost of participating in social media relationship building can be high, especially if there is no immediate or proximal benefit. The “Unsocial Social Media” blog series shares ideas on how small businesses can benefit from social media while remaining unsocial in the sense that they are not developing conventional, online relationships.

Blog posts in the series will include topics such as multi-use content, website design for social media integration, audience identification, it's not about you, content value, maker or faker, opinion or analysis, and push or pull distribution.

Geary acknowledges that social media experts may not agree with encouraging social media newbies to ignore relationship building. “It's not an issue about ignoring relationship building,” defends Geary, “but rather an issue of how to get started using this new media.” The unsocial social media members are no different from lurkers on forums and other types of message boards. “They are all part of the social media market,” notes Geary, “and their presence is integral to the success of social media.” “Presently, the early adopters that populate social media are a homogeneous group,” continues Geary, “these new participants, no matter how unsocial, are needed to provide more commercial diversity in social media.”

Many small businesses struggle trying to figure out how to use social media. Those simply creating an account and thinking customers will follow are quickly learning that cultivating connections or friends online requires an ongoing effort.

The social media consultants will tell you that to make social media work for you, you must be social and create relationships. Inviting connections and joining groups based on education, careers, employers, interests, or location are just some of the ways to make contacts. Can't find a group you like? Start your own and begin inviting others to join.

Just joining a group or creating connections, however, accomplishes very little. You, your connections and fellow group members must participate. This is where being social and building relationships becomes possible and necessary.

But increasingly, small businesses are questioning the time required to do this. Creating relationships online is not only a very time consuming activity, but also needs to be conducted by an articulate and empowered member of the business. In other words, unless you have an appropriate professional on staff it will probably be left to you. It's no wonder many companies remain unsocial in social media.

So what can an unsocial business accomplish using social media? Plenty. I'll discuss some strategies for promoting your small business without having to become a full-time social media relationship manager in my upcoming blog posts.

eCommerce professionals already know the commoditizing effect of the Internet. Products lacking scarcity are quickly forced into a low price shootout where the survivor is determined by volume rather than value. Only scarcity, in its various forms of uniqueness, quality or quantity, can keep a product's value propped up against the assault of knock-offs, counterfeits, and clones.

As web 2.0 takes hold, and the triumph of social media is trumpeted through our mobile devices, this commoditizing effect is also occurring to this new media. Texters and twitters are measured by the quantity of their “friends 2.0” and how many messages they can hurl. Message uniqueness has a half-life measured in seconds while scarcity is often achieved through fabrication rather than fact. BFF's are now Binary Friends Forever, or at least until the Internet connection is dropped.

In social media, it's not the message that counts, it's the process. The minuscule but mighty endorphin rush from an incoming message reassures us that we are important. But the rush is as fleeting as the message and can only be sustained by repeating the process.

As I sat with 75,000 other people watching a college football game, I witnessed this process unfold around me. The students and recent grads spent most of the game head down, sending and receiving messages faster than the action on the field, only occasionally looking up to ask “what happened” or “did somebody score?”

I wondered if I was their age, would I still think checking out coeds was more fun than checking tweets, yelling and cheering was more cathartic than typing :-@ or :-(0) , and hooking up with friends after the game meant something more than adding a post to myspace or facebook for my “friends 2.0” to see.

I doubt it. That was so life 1.0.