Know Me Like Me Follow Me -What social networking means for you and your business
Firstly, a confession. These are not entirely my ideas. But, they do represent my views on a book called Know me Like me Follow me by Penny Power who is the founder of the Ecademy an online networking organisation that was set up way before Facebook or LinkedIn or any other social media.
The first question that I ask myself and I presume most people have at some point asked themselves is “why bother with social media?” The simple answer really is that this is a very rapidly changing world. The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace.
I recently noticed a huge difference in the experience between my daughter going to university this year and my elder daughter going to university just six years ago. When Hannah went to university, six years ago she was very much alone. She suffered greatly from homesickness. And this was down to a number of factors but mainly due to isolation. Before she got to university, she didn’t know anybody else who was going there. She knew very little about the course, she knew very little about the place where she would be staying. In contrast to my other daughter Gabrielle went to university just this year, she had already made contact with a large number of people through Facebook. Almost as soon as she knew that she had a place on the course, she was contacted by a student mentor who had been assigned to her and would look after her during her first few days there. She knew where she was staying and she even knew who her neighbours would be in the halls of residence. She was able to have a conversation with these people and to make arrangements before we made the long journey to the University. So, therefore she doesn’t suffer from homesickness. In fact, she couldn’t wait to get rid of us because she already had a whole new bunch of friends waiting to have fun with.
There is definitely a move away these days from old-style corporate thinking of being closed suspicious and controlling about who you network with who you are in contact with. Rather, there is a move towards an open random and supportive network of people around you.
These days it is very important to create a brand just for you where you share yourself your values and you can be authentic. The old adage that people buy from people has never been truer. One of the reasons that you need brand yourself rather than the organisation you’re with or with the business and you currently run is that that may not always be the case. In the future you may want to move on from your current job or you may wish to wish to change direction. But, your brand still remains and that is what people will be searching for and it is you that people will ultimately be buying from the matter what it is you’re doing.
So I want to do now is go through the stages of taking people from strangers people who know nothing about you through friends to becoming followers in the first case what you’re doing is social media broadcasting you’re getting your message out there, you’re getting your brand out there to people who at the moment don’t really know you and this is where the random nature of online networking really comes into its own.
An example of this the other day highlighted the really random nature of connections and how they can be so valuable to you in your business. As I was watching the X factor the other night, I heard a song that I really enjoyed. I knew that it was a cover of somebody else’s song. But for the life of me I couldn’t work out who it was. And, for once Google didn’t help because it was a very general phrase as the title of the song. So on Twitter I placed the question “who did the original of this song?” Even I was amazed that within 10 min I had 12 people who told me the original song. But, that’s not where the story ends, because a few days later I was contacted by one of those people, who I have to say, until that point I didn’t even know existed, and they offered me some work. Now, who could have predicted that the song on X factor would have led directly to be earning more money?
Social media broadcasting is more where you share you. I think you can be as random as you like. People have all sorts of diverse interests and it may be that something that you tweet about or something you put on your Facebook profile just catches somebody else’s imagination. And they then feel a connection to you; at which point they stop being strangers and they become friends. This is where you can really get into social networking conversations.
When you have friends in the online networking world you can start to have real conversations about them, their lives, their businesses ,your business, your life and start to build up real friendships. It definitely gets beyond the point of just telling people what you had for breakfast!
At this point, you can also share your thoughts about subjects that will be of interest to people and in fact you can be doing this during the social media broadcasting none of these stages are mutually exclusive. Once you start giving out valuable information, people will pass that information on, again in a random and unpredictable manner. People will recommend you because they’re passing on your materials. So if for example you produce a video on how to do something and send that out to your followers so that out your friends and they will automatically pass it on to anybody that they think will benefit from that information. You cannot predict this in advance.
At this point you become more of a thought leader. When you have followers, people are keen to find out what your next piece of information is going to be about. People begin to feel that they know you and like you and trust you. At this point they may well start to buy from you. In traditional terms we have taken strangers otherwise known as suspects through being friends (prospects) into into followers (customers).
Obviously, this is just my (brief) take on this excellent book and I would urge you to read it.