I don't invite people to groups or sites very often. Only when I see real value do I put a pitch out there for someone to join something. Social Media is like that, if your an insurance salesman selling to friends and family then you aren't doing enough to get out and WIN!
Examples of join requests I have sent out in the last 4 months include: a.) Join My Cause Jamba Juice: Love the Juice / Hate the Cup; b.) Come see my Kingdom on Knighthood (a Facebook game); c.) #twEATup Who's downtown Austin and interested in coffee or lunch? Out side of that, it's pretty much singing the body electric and hoping that my riffing catches some like-minded people.
However, today, I stuck my social media neck out and invited people to a NING community that I was asked to help guide back in March by the creator of the site. And as I sifted through my g-mail contacts and hand-selected about 100 people who could benefit from inclusion in this site, I had a moments hesitation about hitting the send button. But I did…
I have been reading Seth Godin's Tribes again lately and he talks about "joining" verses "participation." I have been struggling with this NING commuity of self-identified Social Media Professionals and trying to get people to commit, participate and do more than join and lurk.
So the tipping point for me today was scheduling an Agile Standup Meeting on Leadership for the site. I have run these before and they are a great way to get some ideas and voices down on paper quickly. What I was not expecting was the 45+ responses so far, of people preparing and ready to come "chat" about Social Media.
I have been running an open source project, with mixed success, called SocialWiki.org, and we have had three Agile Standup Meetings. All of them have been illuminating. The most people we had at one time was 5!
It will take some clear guidelines to keep the discussion on topic tomorrow. I'm up for it.
And what I did in conjunction with tomorrow's meeting, is I invited those Social Media professionals in my social graph to come and see what this community is up to.
And again, Godin talks about giving the people the tools and then standing back and letting their leadership and participation guide them. It is my job as a leader to open the door and make the pitch for why the conversation in the room is worth their time. It is their responsibility to discover where and how they want to participate.
Here's what happened.
I created a nice little pocket of folks who I trust and care about. One was a business partner almost 8 years ago, and I still cannot wait to hear his voice again. He is a visionary that I am curious about. "What are you working on, my friend?" I can't wait to hear his answer. We're going to do a Skype call tomorrow before the Standup.
And so, I have pinged my sphere of Social Medialy Aware friends and asked them to join me in a small NING Bar on the web called inSocialMedia. I can buy them a drink. I can ask them about their lives and see if we have business opportunities that match up. And I can invite them to my Agile Stand Up tomorrow. [Note: It's great to be the Admin where I can "feature" all of my friends as they join. But then, I feature most newbies for a few days... ]
The next step, all the next steps, are theirs. I have opened the door to leadership. Leadership for them. And I have provided a platform and a community that I find to be quite engaging and vibrant in a focused way that LinkedIN and other "social" sites cannot be. This one is for Social Media Professionals. At least that's what it says. (grin)
See you there maybe? See you at the stand up tomorrow or a standup somewhere in our future, hopefully.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/NING-social
May 20 2009
Good 2 Great Content – How Do You Cross Post and Promote Your Best Writing?
So we write and we write and we write. And if we work it really hard we get a hundred or so folks to visit our blog (people other than friends and family) and that's it. Done?
What are the additional options for your content? You can Tweet it. You can cross post it. You can try to get a guess writing gig on Mashable or RWW. You can chat, IM and email about it. But over the course of the last six months I have found the following alternate strategies work for me. Now there is always too much of a good thing, so with any cross posting or excerpting strategy it is best to reserve these ideas for your BEST content and not everything. Cause we all know, everything is NOT wonderful, it's miscellaneous!
inSocialMedia (a professional NING network with almost 3k members focused on Social Media for business)
Having been invited to be an Admin of inSocialMedia I can promote good posts on the front page. This week it happens to be one of mine. (grin)
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Posterous (a free blogging platform, easily updated via email and SMS)
One of the great features of posterous is the ability to create posts from SMS and Emails. And then there's a little "Post to elsewhere" link, seen above, that can repost to Facebook, Tumblr, Google Pages and Twitter. I often repost stuff to Posterous and use their tool to put the post on my Facebook page, my legacy Google blog and Tumblr. I usually don't use Posterous to do my Tweeting. I try to keep my Tweets under tight control.
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LinkedIN (posting in your status update is one technique, but the action is in the Groups)
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Facebook (again the wall is good, and high visibility, but the discussions in the groups, if you find a lively one, are much more interactive.
The OpenAustin facebook page started by Whurley has some active discussions about the City of Austin website controversy. If you have content that addresses an issue, you might find a group that is aligned with that issue.
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Specific commenting on high-value blogs
This post by Patrick Morehead of AMD has gotten thousands of views. And my comment is number one right at the bottom of the first page. Engaging with the tech community via commenting has some great advantages. The company may even take notice of you at some point. Patrick and I have become friends first via blogging and comments and at SXSWi we met face to face. I count him as a mentor and visionary. And when I see that he has posted one an important topic I will go give it a read. Sometimes I have something to add. And when I do, I may pick up a hand-full of the viewers of his original post.
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Best-of Tweets
Occasionally I will broadcast a Tweet with a "best of" Uber.la tag. For example I will occasionally RT my Twitter Rules AND the 1-2-3 Guide to Twitter.
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Collective Pages on your site. This is one of the most powerful concepts. If you look at my site, I have tried to organize it more like a web site than a blog. That's because I hope that the content I am writing is more like a book and less like a newspaper. So I have collected some of the concepts on pages that are tabs across the top of my site. One example is the InfoStreams. I am working on a series of posts on the top InfoFeed tools that I use and how I use them.
If I do my work well, the posts become chapters of that "book" or tab. And the Infostream Strategies tab becomes a reference site for people looking to get a handle on various concepts of social media. If these "posts" were burried in my "archives by date" or even tags like "twitter" or "friendfeed" it would be easy to imagine them vanishing into the blog stream and no longer being found or referenced.
That's it for now. Please add any good ideas you have and I will approve your comments here and share them with a broader audience.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/good2great
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Tags: 1-2-3 guide to twitter, alternate strategies, amd, best-of, blog commenting, conversations, crosspost, excerpt, facebook, fire everything, followers, following, friends and family, google, google pages, high value blogs, high visibility, infostream, Infostream Strategies, inSM, insocialmedia, lifestream, linkedin, lively one, mashable, patrick morehead, posterous, retweet, rss feeds, rss of life, social media strategies, tight control, tweets, twitter rules, twitter tools
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