Charles Heflin | |
Do you have a bunch of worthless friends?
What is the meaning of a “friend” in social media?
We know who our friends are in real life… Has the Internet changed the definition or terms of friendship?
We create friends in the offline world because we have things in common. You scratch my back, I scratch yours… We feed each others interests… It’s never discussed, it’s just what friends do.
The same should apply to online friends… You share something in common, feed the interest, share, comment and reward your online friends so that the connection goes a little deeper and you are granted mind-share from the other party becuase you “scratched their back”… The unspoken law.
Mind-share is what we are all after in our online endeavors… Always remember, when someone gives you their attention (mind-share) then you have increased your reach. Reach is never determined by the size of your friends list, it is determined by how many are paying attention.
Does your social media strategy include a system for ensuring quality or is this a numbers game for you?
Here’s a formula or law of engagement that fosters quality, breeds trust, builds authority and enacts the law of reciprocity among those you network with. As in the offline world, the mechanics of online friendship abide by the same unspoken laws…
I call it the O.G.R.E.S. relationship management formula
O = OBSERVE
Staying on top of your industry by reading the top bloggers’ blogs is a way of observing. You are staying connected with the top of your game. You know where and how to find bleeding-edge information that will be timely and well received by your target audience.
I will cover ways to observe in another post but for now I just want the point to be clear. Without observing (listening) then you will not be able to connect with your audience in a meaningful way.
G = GATHER
Based on what you observe you can now gather good information into your social communities. An example would be writing a blog post about what you observed. Another example would be bookmarking the observation. Another would be sharing a link to the observation.
R = REWARD
It is rewarding to the blog owner that you gathered their information into a blog post and expanded on it or repurposed it for your audience. You linked back to the originating post and the blog owner received a trackback notification. This notification tells them that someone just linked to their content. They will probably follow the link and read what you wrote. This is rewarding to the blog owner becuase you recognized (rewarded) their effort. Now you have branded yourself in their mind… good for future relations.
Rewarding is a way to get “noticed” by the community amidst a sea of noise. Rewarding is how you rise above the noise and the chatter to become a player in your industry. Recognizing and rewarding others for what they do is the only way to establish meaningful and powerful relationships in social media.
Reward people by telling them happy birthday… Reward people by commenting on their latest photo… Reward people by commenting on their blog posts. Doing this will build a community that will aggregate / syndicate your content to the far reaches of the web… It’s the unspoken undercurrent of “real” relationships.
Breaking it down this way is a little blunt but it really is the undercurrent of all relationships even though we don’t talk about it.
E = ENGAGE
Engage your community with information that you have gathered. When you find something interesting, create an entire content strategy out of it… Engage the people that you know are interested and be sure to reward them for their interaction.
Engaging fosters two-way communication. Without two-way communication, the social web would not exist. You can engage through social networks, audio, video, text, email, SMS texting … you name it, if you can two-way communicate with it, you can engage with it.
S = SEEK
Seek people that also Observe, Gather, Reward and Engage. By doing this you will ensure that you are building a powerful and active community. These will be your aggregators, they will share your content across the social web becuase you have done the same for them.
The power of your aggregators, your “true” online friends, compounds over time… It gets stronger and stronger… It is a true asset… Work that does not have to be repeated. Your true online friends will cause your search engine visibility and resulting traffic to surge becuase they follow this same formula… They reward becuase you reward… It’s pure, unspoken, human nature.
Your friends will put your material in front of your target audinence through many different channels bringing you traffic, action and sales. They’ll Digg it, Mixx it, Plurk it, Feed it, Tweet it, Blog it, share it, you name it.
This is how you increae your “reach”… This is how you build authority on the Web.
Continuing to work this formula will continue to build your authority over time. Chris Brogan recently asked his community how they would define authority on the Web.
I define authority by the amount of mind-share you have which is fostered by the number of real connections you have. This post is how I define it and act on it… How do you define/build authority on the Web?
Are you building relationships of value (breeding authority) or are you building a “friends list”?
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This has been part 6 of a multi-part series on using social media effectively to build a “real” business online. Here are the previous 5 posts that have led to this one.
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