Key Strategies to Define Your Social Media Story

How do you determine which story you want to tell?   

On which channel(s)?  To which audience(s)?  

I’ve found if you ask ten people, you will receive ten different answers.

Here are the key questions that I started with and continue to revisit.

  1. Where do I want to tell my professional Story?  Personal Story?
  2. Do I have distinct boundaries delineating each Social channel?
  3. Do I combine them into a soup and they all intersect with each other?

What are you trying to accomplish using Social Media?

When I first started engaging with Social Media it was a result of peer pressure from a good friend @JonDale.  In his words this is the way the world works, get on-board or be left behind.

Am I trying to communicate strictly for fun with some friends about where I ate and what movie I liked?

Or am I trying to communicate thought provoking ideas and solutions to business problems?

Today, I have settled on a combination of both.

The pendulum of my Social Voice has settled toward thoughtful business ideas and innovations with a dash of personal interactions.

Which channels are reserved for different conversations?

Facebook-Personal

This channel for me remains predominately reserved for personal interactions with people I know.  If it were not for Facebook I would not be connected to people from High School, College and previous eras of life.

I never got involved in Multi-Level Marketing because I wanted my friends to be my friends and not my prospects.  I do include an occasional Blog post but generally I stick to personal topics.

Intersection of Professional & Personal

I am very aware of my professional relationships encountering my Facebook presence.  Therefore I generally don’t venture into any deeply personal topics in the open forum.

LinkedIn-Professional

In the same manner that I have chosen to keep Facebook for predominately personal interactions, LinkedIn is reserved for my professional relationships.  When I hear a speaker at a conference, previous co-workers or a new prospective customer, this is a great channel to maintain those connections.

I choose to add status updates related to professional topics: new customer’s we acquired, new job openings we have and some peppering of Blog posts added.

Primarily I have grown to rely on this channel as a professional rolodex.  It has become less about what we talk about and more about who I know and want to get to know.

Blog-HomeBase

This is my “HomeBase” as @MichaelHyatt calls it in his book Platform.  I control the interactions, the topics, the branding and the discussion.  The commitment level of up keeping this channel is much greater than on any of the other Social channels.

The beauty of this channel is the clarity of message you can control.  And yet if no one reads it then your level of influence is zero.

I have found that regardless of the perceived value of your content this channel must be marketed.

At the end of the day my goal is to create a level of influence in the Social dialogue about topics of building your own brand, entrepreneurship, getting started, and pursuing your inner Art.

For many this channel may start out being your smallest in terms of reach.  However, this channel is made up of allies.

This is your Tribe.  These are your people.  You think alike.  You talk alike.  You learn from each other.

Getting wrapped up in the numbers is less important than being regularly engaged.

Twitter-broadcast channel

Early on I was misinformed about my beliefs about Twitter.  I thought it was simply another tool for someone to show pictures of their cat in dress up clothes.  Yeah, I know…..who does that?

I spent over ten years in the broadcast media industry.  Today, I see Twitter like owning your own TV/Radio station.  Just like viewership or listeners, they are accumulated over years of curating quality content and connections.

My recent sentiment is to reject the “you follow me, I’ll follow you” nicety.  It seems like a willful resignation to receive spam on topics that you would never subscribe to.

Over time, you and I can become micro-brands broadcasting specialized content to engaged tribe members.

The best answer I received on this question was from @Webtherapist.  I am happy to share her insights.  Just ask.

How have you segmented your Social Voice?  I’d love to hear your story here.

It is More Difficult to Be Chosen in a Noisy World

You shouldn’t base your future success on the number of Facebook likes you have.

A retweet is not a success.  Nor is the number of empty followers you have collected in trade for shallow allegiance.

You need more than this to be sustainable.

Social Media has a catch.

Yes Social Media has changed the opportunity for you to offer your Art to the world.

But there is a catch.

The mass of content being generated today compound by the immediacy of distribution is making it more difficult than ever before to be chosen.

Previously in history distribution was the major challenge in order for your innovation to reach the masses.

Today, with the click of your mouse you can distribute and deliver everything from your musing thoughts to a product that you created with recycled material in your basement.

And you are among a sea of competitors adding to the noise attempting to allure eyeballs, ears and hearts.

How will you and I be any different?

Two formulas of Social Media today:

1) Ease of communication x large crowds = higher probability of being noticed.

2) More content x short attention spans = quickly move on to something else.  

Understand how ideas and products are accepted.

The Diffusion of Innovation graph is often used when dissecting the stages and speed of adoption.

Key ingredients required are:

  1. The Innovation (Your Art, business, book, music, message)
  2. Communication Channel (Blog, Social Media)
  3. Time
  4. Social System (The Crowd, Your Tribe)

Although we have never had a vaster Communication Channel it has become saturated and polluted with noise.

In today’s instantaneous e-world the speed of adoption is accelerated.  Yes, you can indeed know within hours or days if your Kickstarter campaign is going to be funded.  The downfall is the speed of departure has increased as well.

How many Kickstarter campaigns are there to choose from before they choose yours?

Fickle Faster

The world is rapidly becoming more fickle, faster. In order for your innovation or Art to be adopted it has to be plucked out like a small needle in a one tall haystack standing in a thousand acre field at harvest time.

Your innovation or creation may instantly receive massive distribution but there is another one right behind it to capture the attention of the adopters.  The “Like” button or a re-tweet requires so little allegiance or conviction.  And the brevity of the impact is fleeting.

Sustainability is still core to survival.

Continual value over time is infinitely more important than a spike, a peak or even a dip in your Google Analytics stats.

The issue is that the information globe has increased its speed of rotation. The rotation increase has caused more of our vision to be blurred. We see more, but we see it at such a high speed that it is something like driving down the Las Vegas strip at 100 MPH.

Yes, we saw it.

Yes we were there, but none of it sticks.

What do we do?  What choices do we have?

  1. Invest your time in original creations, not knock offs and redistribution of someone else’s Art.
  2. Turn off your Google Analytics and offer your Art to those people who have already chosen you.
  3. Change your definition of what it means to be rich and famous.