Tag Archives: LinkedIn

Content is King: Your Social Media Content Strategy

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content_strategyToday I had the privilege of speaking at UCLA‘s Anderson School of Management at the BizSoMe (biz sum) conference about creating an effective social media content strategy.  Content is more than just information, content objects are critical hubs of conversation – they are social objects that get consumed, shared and manipulated by the viewing audience.  By deliberately planning a social media content strategy companies can increase engagement and achieve their business goals by leveraging social networks and their inherent content sharing features.

In this talk I focused on content strategy from a high-level view and then looked at it specifically for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.  Unfortunately I ran out of time and had to skip past much of the Twitter and Flickr portions of the talk.

A couple of notes:

A couple of people asked for recommendations about custom Facebook Pages. Here are a few options:

Any other questions? Drop me an email or connect with me on Twitter.  And feel free to add me on LinkedIn.

Content is King – Your Social Media Content Strategy

Social Media Content Strategy: Content is King

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The Art of Access

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Access. It’s what everyone wants.  Access to the best events, access to the famous people.  If the adage “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is true (and, it is) then access is what gets you to the “who” that can make a difference.  But, more often than not, meeting the “who” that matter is a pipe dream – and any interaction is often little more than a passing handshake in the hall of a conference or a feeble “great panel” comment as you stand in a sea of others all clamoring to meet the person you really want to know.

Gaining access is an art. An art that they don’t teach you in business school, but one that changes everything, from the events you attend to the people that you meet to the jobs that you get.  It is the secret to getting to wherever it is you’re going.

Here are the key principles in gaining access:

Pre-Gaming

If you’re not pre-gaming conferences and events you’re killing your chances at gaining access.  You or your company have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to get you to an event (say, South By Southwest); you can’t simply walk-in without doing any prep work and expect to successfully connect with the people you want to meet.  These people have schedules at these events that are booked weeks in advance and your chances of just “running into” these people are zero. Do your homework.

  • Identify who will be at the event ahead of time
  • Make a “hit list” of people you want to meet
  • Mine Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to learn about the events outside of the conference (often unofficial) that will provide better settings to have a meaningful interaction
  • For your hit list: read their blog posts, twitter stream and articles so that you can talk intelligently to these people about topics that are important to them

Create a Platform

The people you want to meet are the same people that everyone else wants to meet.  Typically, you and everyone are not the people they want to meet, they want to meet with their friends and business associates.  Bottom line: they are busy.  In order to break through the noise and get a meaningful interaction with them you need to bring value.  And this is not about what your company does for its customers.  It’s about how you can help promote and advance the interests of the individual you want to meet.

You can do this by creating a platform that can help distribute their message and further their own goals.  For example at SXSW we created a platform called 100 interviews.  We went around and asked the top 100 social media and technology people if they would be willing to be interviewed on video as a part of this “experiment” at SXSW.  It took 4 days and we met and had meaningful interactions with people that you can only dream of.

Why did it work?

  • We created a platform – 100 interviews – that gave us a coherent and easily understandable value proposition for the participants.  Get your message out, be involved with 99 other luminaries, be part of the project.
  • We created value for them – a distribution network across all online video sites tied to a big, recognizable event (SXSW)
  • We played off of SXSW’s theme – by calling the project an experiment we played to the collaborative nature of SXSW.  People want to be a part of a cutting-edge way of doing things and participating in something novel.
  • We used social proof

Using Social Proof

Social proof is essential to gaining access.  It is the proof that gives the people you want access to confidence that you’re worth their time.  It is also the engine that drives the momentum of your access.  The concept is simple.  You get one notable person to say yes to get the next, and so on, until you’ve lined up meetings or interviews with everyone else you want to meet.  And it’s just like bowling pins – get one key individual and you can leverage that agreement to connect with the next person.

How to use social proof:

  • Make yourself look bigger than you are – If we had randomly asked people to interview them, they would want to know who we were and for what purpose.  Instead we created a powerful hook “100 interviews” that instantly created an easy-to-understand premise.
  • Create a presence – We instantly launched a web site, Twitter account and YouTube channels. By having these concrete elements people could validate what we were doing.
  • Use commitments to gain other commitments – We publicly announced when we secured big commitments. By Twittering and posting those commitments on our site we were able to validate our project and get more people involved.

Create Buzz

Promote. Promote. Promote.  We promoted 100 interviews like crazy in the days leading up to the event.  We asked our friends to Tweet about it on Twitter, we posted our commitment updates on our blog and tweeted them out.  By generating buzz we created additional credibility to what we were doing.  After a few days the people we contacted said “oh, you’re the 100 interviews guys!” Having the buzz gave us credibility and helped us gain even more commitments.

How to create buzz:

  • Create a brand – 100 interviews had a nice ring to it. We supported it with a logo, web site, Twitter handle and YouTube channel.
  • Cash in your Whuffie – Whuffie is social currency, the goodwill you accumulate with people you’ve helped in the past. It’s time to cash some in and ask people you know to help spread the word. Reach out on Twitter, email, Facebook, whatever, to ask them to help get the word out.
  • Leverage online tools – Create Facebook fan pages, event pages, a WordPress blog, a Twitter account, and more. Give people every possible way to interact and promote what you’re doing.

Make it Count

Look, even with a great platform and buzz you still have just one interaction with a person you want to meet.  Sure – it’s a more meaningful interaction than just shaking hands after a panel, but it is just one.  And one does not make a relationship.  The best way to move from interaction to relationship is to follow up afterwards. And follow up quickly and personally.

Write a personal thank you note to every person you met and interviewed.  Make it handwritten, and get it out the door in a week.  This will make you stand out from the rest of the folks who simply drop emails or Twitter direct messages.  Then, follow the person on Twitter, interact when appropriate and keep in-touch with them periodically.  Then when you see them at the next event you’ll have another reason to say hi and chat for a few minutes.

Guess what?  You now have access.  Welcome to your new world.

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If you’re not using Facebook search you don’t know what you’re missing

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Tonight while I was going through some of the different social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook I decided to do a search on the name of the company I work for “TurnHere.” Now I do this regularly and automatically on Twitter and the Web. I use Google Alerts to monitor for TurnHere mentions on the Web (they’re pumped into my Google Reader), I have a column of Tweetdeck assigned just to listen for TurnHere in the Twitterverse and we have a paid subscription to Scout Labs for monitoring the brand.

But I hadn’t drilled down on Facebook search yet with the brand name and none of the above tools give you insight into that community. Talk about opportunity. The new and improved Facebook search is a gold mine for opportunities to connect with people who are talking about your brand or topic of interest. Previously, Facebook would only search people, names, events, pages and groups. But now that they have added status updates in the search it’s a whole new world.

Take a look at what I saw in the results for TurnHere (note that these are just my friends, you can also click on “Posts by Everyone” below the “Posts by Friends for a broader view, note you’ll typically only be able to interact or engage with your friends depending on people’s privacy settings):

Facebook search

Don is looking forward to his TurnHere shoot next week. That’s a great piece of information and an opportunity for me to engage with him around that. Is he feeling ready? Excited? Nervous? Can I answer any last minute questions for him? Or can I just give him a word of encouragement and let him know that we’re excited to see the finished video? All sorts of opportunities are there to create a meaningful connection with Don around his video shoot experience.

Or further down the page:

Facebook search 2

With Debbie I have the chance to help spread the word about her new video and also check in to see how everyone felt about the shoot and the finished product. The same for Cindy.

Lastly, notice the note from Paulo (who works with me at TurnHere) and the retweet posted to his Facebook profile about the kind words some gave about a recent speaking opportunity I had. This is a great find for me personally and allows me to reach out to that person and thank them and see if there is anything I can do to help them out as well. I am also able to add that kudo to my speaking page which will hopefully give people more confidence in extending speaking invitations to me and helping me grow that part of my career.

So now I know to make sure that Facebook search is a regular part of my brand and personal monitoring to catch more opportunities to interact with people talking about TurnHere.

For reference here are the tools that I use to monitor personal and brand mentions:

More than just brand mentions:

Obviously search goes just beyond monitoring brand mentions.  It can be used to find people talking about the things your company does or areas of interest to you personally.  It could be about events or needs or anything really.  Search across these networks is a powerful way to identify opportunities to make new connections and grow your influence, whether for your brand or yourself.

Check it out and let me know what your tips are for using search to build and strengthen your network!

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Why Blogging Still Matters

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People love to claim stuff “dead” on the Internet.  It seems everyday something is dying or already dead.  Frankly, the pace of extinction around these parts is exhausting.  And, of course, the rhetoric is usually completely overblown and, well, wrong.  So it is with the death of blogging.  As Twitter user growth soars (1928% YOY to be precise) and people flock to Facebook in droves, pundits love proclaiming that the statusphere is the new, new blogging.  And with equal joy it’s corollary blogging obituary.

I’m here to humbly say that blogging is indeed not dead, and in fact now, unlike any time in the last 4 years, represents the single best opportunity for professionals and organizations to stand out from the competition and river of noise that is the statusphere.  In this post I look at why it’s still important to professionals.  In a future post we’ll look at why it matters for organizations.

Reasons why blogging is still important to professionals

The case for blogging for professionals has never been stronger.  As more people jump on the Twitter bandwagon and engage in the cocktail party that is the statusphere there are fewer hours and fewer people dedicating time to producing longer-form content that demonstrates their expertise and value to prospective customers, potential employers and others in the community.  While interacting with people online is critical and an important way of building relationships and your network, the effectiveness of  that effort is greatly reduced without some home base that represents who you are, what you stand for and what you know.  Having a well-developed blog gives the people you engage with a true sense of who they’re talking with and can be an important relationship builder in its own right.

Demonstrate Expertise

There is still no better way on the Web today to create and curate a body of work that demonstrates your expertise and insight than a blog.  While engaging quickly and responding to questions and engaging in conversations online is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise they have a definite shelf life and limited utility shortly after the exchange.  Go ahead, try to dig up a Tweet from 5 days ago.  You’ll quickly find that your conversations are washed away by the onslaught of new information added to the statusphere.  You face a similar problem with discussions on LinkedIn, comments on YouTube, Facebook status updates and Wall posts, forum posts and more.     By simply participating in online conversations in these social platforms you’re making your expertise a perishable commodity.  If you maintain a blog and curate your thoughts there you maximize the value of your expertise by giving it a longer shelf life and making it infinitely easier to find.

Why throw away your expertise by using a social conversation only strategy when you can easily create a valuable library of insight and expertise with a blog?

Create a Google-able Home Base

For better or worse you are who Google says you are. And while your profiles on the various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn may appear higher than your personal blog in a vanity search (where you search your own name in Google) Google can reward you heavily with searches that include your name and important industry and career topics.  For example, my previous blog, blownmortgage.com ranked exceptionally high for terms such as subprime mortgage, FHA home loans, loan modification and other key mortgage terms that drove traffic and business to my company.   More importantly, because of the body of work I created at the site (if you can’t tell by the name it was a site intent on blowing up the malfeasance in the mortgage industry) people instantly bonded and trusted me.  And I showed up all over the place in Google on terms that people were searching while looking for information related to my expertise.

While Twitter and Facebook may come up higher in vanity searches, Google will reward you with rankings in areas of your expertise when you create a body of work on a blog dedicated to the exploration of those subjects.  Twitter will never rank for loan modification for me, but my blog (which I recently sold, more below) did. And it created additional (dare I say ‘long tail’) referrals to my home base on the Web resulting in additional business, contacts, and more.

Build an Online Resume

You can either have a resume and say what you know or you can have a blog and show what you know.  What do you think is more powerful to a prospective client or employer?  Exactly.  Particularly in a devestrating job market creating differentiation among your peers is critical to getting out of the deluge of resumes and on to the short list for the interview.  And while your blog can’t help you in the interview, it can certainly help you get in front of the decision maker.   It can often jump you several steps through the interview process in the first place.  Any professional can benefit from a solid body of work that is easily found and referencable on the Web.  When employers look for quality individuals a blog can be an invaluable advantage to you.  It creates the ideal forum to demonstrate your thinking and analysis of issues critical to your industry.  Same thinking applies in demonstrating your expertise and thinking to a potential client.

While you can build a resume online with LinkedIn and other online services it’s impossible to curate a living body of work that speaks to your unique skills and viewpoint like you can with a blog.

Opening Yourself to Other Opportunities

By having a blog you begin to build a body of work to position you as an expert.  While this can lead to direct business gain and advantages in winning business, employment and more; there are other benefits as well.  With a Google-friendly home base pushing your name to the top of results in terms critical to your industry you’ll find inquiries from journalists looking for front-line insight into breaking stories.  You’ll get random interview and speaking requests.  You’ll receive product review requests and feedback on business samples.  And you’ll find more people looking to engage and connect with you than ever before.  These benefits can often lead to new experiences and opportunities that were never visible to you previously.  And while journalists search and monitor Twitter for breaking news you can create more press opportunities by creating a body of work that positions you as a credible source for stories that they may be working on.

My old blog resulted in mentions for me in The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, The Orange County Register, Better Homes and Gardens, The Village Voice, Inman News and many, many more.  Those mentions would never have come from my LinkedIn profile, Twitter or Facebook conversations alone.  I also received several speaking opportunities and won awards based on my work with my blog.  It was the body of work and the easily-found nature of my blog that led to those opportunities.

Crafting Your Personal Brand

Your blog is your home.  You get to decorate it and furnish it in any manner you see fit.  It’s your personal self-expression online and the single best, most consistent opportunity to build and curate the personal brand that you want to project online.  On any number of other social sites you’re dealing with the vagaries of the shifting conversation, newest shiny objects and limitations of the platform.  There is rarely the perfect opportunity to express the ideal position for you as it relates to your personal brand.  Your blog represents that safe harbor in the malestrom where you can talk about the things that are important to you, you can demonstrate your personal brand, and you can work at, improve and refine your voice and brand online.

While your blog can be your online resume it can also be your online batting cage (or putting green if you don’t like the baseball analogy).  It can be a place where you can find your voice and refine it.  Where you can test out hypotheses and construct arguments.  You can analyze problems that are interesting to you and work through your thinking on issues that are important to you.  This is often difficult to do in social conversation platforms.  The flow of the conversation rarely affords that type of introspective learning.  A blogging platform can open up that opportunity like no other platform.

Making Your Blog Matter to You

In an age of 140 characters blogging is hard.  Creating content that people want to read, engage with and share is difficult and the payoff is often not seen immediately.  You can spend hours creating content that is barely read when it is initially published.  But it’s important to remember that social media is a marathon, not a sprint (and the same goes for blogging) and that the effort is a long term investment in your online personae.  It is my firm belief that you cannot extract the maximum value from your social media endeavors without a blog as a home base for your efforts.

So how do you make your blog matter to you?  Here is a quick list of things that I did to make my blog matter to me (and what I’m doing with this new blog as we speak.) These are obvious but if you’re struggling with a way to get started try these out.

  • If you can, register your name as a domain name. It allows you to make your blog the home base for your online activities for the rest of your life. It gives you flexibility in topics and allows your blog to grow with you as your life changes.  It also helps with the aforementioned Google love.  (To wit, imagine if Scoble’s first blog was Microsoft Insights instead of Scobleizer.)
  • Blog about something you’re passionate about. Pick a topic you have an opinion about and start with that. And don’t be afraid to have an opinion and express it.
  • Don’t be afraid to put something out there. Start writing and start publishing.  Don’t let perfection or how you think other people might respond deter you from putting content out there.
  • Get insight and inspiration from other blogs, Twitter and the news.  Just like new writers can often get past writers block by taking the opening of an existing story and spinning their own tale, so can you leverage an existing story line and add your own perspective as a way to get started.
  • Don’t try to write like a journalist or a marketer.  You’re not writing the cover story of the New York Times and you’re not writing the corporate brochure.  Write from the heart and with passion and don’t worry about the formalities when you first start.
  • Be a good online citizen. Don’t steal content. Be sure to link and provide attribution to ideas and give credit where credit is due.
  • Experiment. Try a video blog. Try a long post. Try short posts. Try thought pieces. Try news pieces. Do an email interview. Do a podcast interview. Just do, over and over until you begin to get your blogging legs under you.

Blogging and ‘Winning on the Uphills’

Seth Godin recently wrote about using challenge as a differentiator between you and your competitors.  The idea of winning on the uphills is that everyone succeeds and goes fast on the downside of the mountain.  In a good economy everyone is profiting.  It is in a difficult environment where the good companies and professionals have an opportunity to stand out from the crowd and move forward, ahead of the pack.  The same can be said for blogging.  While everyone is proclaiming blogging dead and lamenting how “hard” it is compared to Twitter you can win on the uphill and begin to carve out your own little portion of the online conversation.  And before you know it you’ll have created an online presence that will serve you professionally and personally for the rest of your life (if you let it) and will help you stand out from the noise of social conversation by creating a clear signal that resonates with readers.

Flickr photo by Mexicanwave.

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Identifying a social media workflow

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Whenever I start talking to people about social media invarably the question arises “Where do I find the time?”  It’s easy to understand where they’re coming from.  After sitting through several hours of eye-opening presentations about a brand new world of communication and engagement people sit back and think “but I already can’t get everything I need to do done,” and so they come asking “Where do I find the time?”  A fair question to be sure.  Trying to Tweet, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube all while trying to do whatever job you’re supposed to be doing seems fairly impossible at the onset.  It’s almost enough to give up and go back to what you’re used to and comfortable doing.  Which is exactly the wrong impluse.

Change always feels uncomfortable.  And unless you’re forced out of that comfort zone its difficult to take the steps you need to take to get out and move forward.  So what I try to do when talking to people who feel overwhelmed by the prospect of social media is talk to them about email.  And cell phones.  Because I often speak to and work with people who are older than me I ask them “Do you remember doing your job without email and cell phones?”  Invariably they say “yes,” and then they smile knowing where I am going with these questions.  Email and cellphones have completely changed the way we do business during the course of most baby boomer careers; but they have become so ingrained and essential to business today that we forget what it was like before them.  I imagine most of these overworked souls said the same thing about these new technologies.  In fact, I remember my mom resenting the implication of a cell phone when they were first invented.  Now it’s the only number I reach her on.

Social Media is the New Email and Cell Phone

What I explain to them  is that in the same way that email and cell phones have pervaded how we do business and (more importantly) connect with one another, social media is again revolutionizing communication.  With hundreds of millions of people using social media every day (and sites like Facebook adding 750,000 a day) that using social media is no longer a choice for those who wish to remain relevant and engaged with their friends, colleagues, mentors, business contacts and prospects.  Just as people bemoaned the use of another communcation tool in email, and then quickly saw its power, so too will business professionals soon recognize the lasting power of social media in their business and personal relationships.

Keeping Social Media Simple

I advise newcomers to social media to keep it simple to start.  There are so many different social media sites, properties, tools and communities that trying to interact and use them all is a recipe for insta-burnout and a return back to the safe, comfortable shore of business as usual.  You can see a whole host of them in the Conversation Prism below:

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

Trying to utilize them all will lead to abandonment at worst or ineffective use at best as it is easy to be spread to thin in a hurry.  So it certainly makes sense to pick just a few sites and properties to get started with.  Wade into the water and take it slow.

Choosing the Right Social Media Sites for You & Your Business

Many people recommend choosing a handful of social media tools and properties to use in order to make it manageable.  Invariably they recommend this generic combination:

And while these are all surely the leading sites in their respective spaces, and you should probably be involved in most if not all of them to one degree or another, simply recommending a generic list like this does little to address your needs in your business/expertise area.  For example music professionals, A/R people, etc. must be on MySpace as it is still a premiere place for unsigned acts to display their work.  Real estate has networks such as Active Rain and you’ll find computer engineers and others on open-source forums, IRC and bulletin boards.  That’s why it’s important to identify where you’re industry congregates online before choosing the tools you wish to use.

However, once you do find where your community likes to interact and congregate online you need to create a sustainable workflow that allows you to participate in that community in a way that is beneficial for the community and yourself.  Notice how I’ve put the community first.  You need to think in terms of providing value before you can get value.  If you’re used to traditional marketing and prospecting this is going to feel foreign to you.  But it is essential that you “pay it forward” before jumping into a sales pitch.

Becoming Part of Your Online Community

Once you’ve identified your online community its time to get involved and become a part of the community.  But like any social gathering, you can’t just storm in and scream at the top of your lungs “I’m here!” It’s important that you move slowly and humbly and deferentially at first.  What you want to do is get a lay of the land and a sense for how the community operates online.  You’ll start to notice the rythym of the community in terms of communication, how people talk to one another, who are the leaders and influencers and who are the clowns, etc.  It requires a bit of anthropology 101 to observe and understand this new ecosystem that you’re about to join.

With that here are the steps to getting involved with an online community:

  1. Listen. The most important part.  Use your newly-acquired anthropological skills to listen and learn about the community and how it operates.
  2. Learn. Learn the “rules of the road” about how to engage and interact within the community.
  3. Provide value. Start by providing value. If you see a question you know an answer to, answer it. If you have a piece of insight on a topic, share it.  If you have an interesting article that you found online share it.  Rinse, repeat.  Providing value is the best way to build up your social capital within the community.
  4. Engage. As you’re providing value engage with the people who are responding to your answers, shared articles and more.  Talk to them like a normal person – not a salesman or a corporate press release but as a normal human being (crazy right?)
  5. Promote Others. How can you help other people? Can you advocate for their position? Can you share or (in Twitter’s case) retweet something they’ve said?  How can you help advance the cause of other people?  By doing this you’ll build social capital within the group and specifically from those individuals.  That capital will eventually be available for you to draw on for your own needs.
  6. Share about you. Self-promotion is often looked down upon in communities. It’s far better to get others to promote you (see #5) but you can share information about yourself that lets people know what you do, your background, expertise and more.  The last thing you want to do is be a hard salesman; but there is nothing wrong in demonstrating your expertise and background through meaningful conversation and engagement.
  7. Promotion. If you do all the steps above right eventually you may earn the right to promote on a very limited basis.  This does not mean that one day a switch will go on where you can just spam the community with your marketing messages. There is never a time when the community will look favorably on that behavior.  But as you build your social capital in the community you may find natural opportunities where what you bring to the table is viewed as valuable and welcome by the members.  This doesn’t happen overnight, so don’t hold your breath on shouting to the world about your product or service.

Creating a Social Media Workflow

You’ve found your community online in the areas that they congregate. You’ve identified the sites that are most important to you in connecting with those communities.  Now you need to create a social media workflow that helps you make interacting with those communities a regular, ongoing occurence.  Social media is like a marathon, it’s not a sprint.  So the only way to gain value out of it is through repeated, regular involvement.  To make sure you do this you need to set up a workflow and schedule that ensures you develop a repeatable cadence that becomes part of your reputation online.

Setting your Cadence

Set your cadence by identifying time throughout your week where you can commit a certain amount of time to social media.  Think of it like setting an exercise routine.  Start with something manageable and build up.  How about 30 minutes every other day?  Or for blogging, perhaps it’s a post per week.  Whatever it is you need to create a block of time that you’re committed to learning and using social media.  There is no other way that you are going to be successful using it otherwise.

Choosing your Activities

If you’ve determined that you’re going to spend three 30-minute sessions a week using social media and also want to blog you should consider what activities you’re going to do when.  For blogging you should look at how many times a week you want to create new content.  Once a week? Twice a week? More?  In order to develop a cadence blogging I suggest you blog at least once a week.  Then you need to identify what the 30-minute sessions are going to entail.  Is it using Twitter to talk with people in the community and share interesting links? Is it connecting with people on LinkedIn and answering questions, joining and participating in groups and writing recommendations? Is it recording a how-to screencast video and posting it to YouTube?

Think of the most important and valuable activities that you could be doing via social media and make those your priority.

Become a Local

By choosing your activities and meeting your commitments regularly you’ll establish a strong cadence which will become identifiable and predictable from the members of your community, followers, readers, etc.  This will begin to establish your role in the ecosystem and community as you carve out your own particular niche.

Make Life Easier

As you get into the rythym of participation you’ll notice that some people have identified tools and systems to help them make their participation more efficient.  You’ll want to do the same thing.  Taking Twitter for example, there are a large range of tools that make Twitter more seamless in your day-to-day activity.  From desktop publishing and monitoring tools such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Destroy Twitter and more to automating Tweets with HootSuite, to tracking links through bit.ly and su.pr you will find a host of solutions that make the experience more rewarding and easier to manage.

Keep at It

Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint.  Social media isn’t like old media. You don’t buy a newspaper ad and wait for the phone to ring.  It takes time, persistence and the creation of real value for others in order for the system to provide value back to you.  This doesn’t come over night.  Start by paying it forward and work to provide value to the people you interact with.  By keeping it simple, sticking to your social media workflow plan and by looking to contribute before looking to extract you’ll be well on your way to leveraging social media for you and your business.

Flickr Image: Binary Flow by Adrenalin

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