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View Full Version : It's About Building Relationships



KristineS
04-09-2009, 01:06 PM
It seems that more and more lately I'm seeing Twitter or Myspace or some other social media site touted as the latest savior of Marketing and business. You can also find a million articles with tips and tricks on how to make Twitter or Facebook or whatever pay off for your business.

My feeling has always been this: you can use all the tricks you want, but the thing that will bring you the most success on a social media site is being genuine. If you're truly there to build relationships that will show through. If you're just there to publicize your latest effort and all your posts are a constant rant of "me, me, me" than you most likely won't do well.

Am I right or wrong about this?

Blessed
04-09-2009, 01:51 PM
I haven't gotten overly involved with social networking yet - but from what I've seen I'd say that you are exactly right. It is about building relationships.

rezzy
04-09-2009, 02:18 PM
Its about the social part. Its almost like friends sharing information with each other. The more trivial that information is the less likely it to be shared. Would you help spread word about something if you thought it was uninteresting or worthless?

Tips and Tricks are just neat little marketing ideas. But they dont say how to build relationships., etc.

vangogh
04-09-2009, 02:39 PM
Its about the social part.

Yep. Sadly most focus on the media part and try all the latest tricks to generate quick, but mostly useless traffic. Take the recent explosion on Twitter. You see people following thousands so they'll get followers back. You see people sending out direct messages with a link. Sure people click the links and they think how great it is to see their traffic go up.

But it's all artificial. The clicks don't really mean anything. You haven't gained someone interested in you. You've just tricked them into clicking. It's little different from developing a robot to visit your site thousands of times a day. Works great if all you want is to see your traffic stats artificially inflated. Not s great if you're hoping it will lead to business.

People seem to spend too much time focusing on an intermediate step as the end goal. The end goal is making a sale, not getting someone to your site through whatever means.

Dan Furman
04-09-2009, 08:12 PM
to me, in the end, it's "do you have something worth reading / clicking?"

That's it - you can Twitter all you want, have as many Facebook/MySpaces, etc, but in the end, if you don't have anything that's worth reading - really worth reading - you simply won't do well with it. And the real trouble is you have to be consistent. That's hard to do.

vangogh
04-09-2009, 11:13 PM
Consistency is tough, especially when some of us have so many different hats to wear to run our businesses.

Dan to me places like Twitter and Facebook, etc are similar to what we have here. There's a community of people at those sites you can build relationships. Another other advantage to social media sites is they have a lot of traffic so you can reach more people. If you build a profile at a site it stands a chance of being seen by a lot more people than your site and it can be a way to get people to notice you in the first place.

You still need to deliver after they visit your site, but still it can be an effective way to get people there.

janiels
04-11-2009, 12:09 AM
you mean people who are self centered and thinking nothing except on improving their current status and credibility by praising themselves, for me those are misuse of a lot of people about social media sites, it should be me-you-helping each other, both should benefit in all actions..

vangogh
04-11-2009, 12:32 AM
Agreed. Ideally it should be a win-win situation. I think the best way to approach social media is to think about what you can add to the community. People will see that and want to give back to you, thereby creating the win-win.

The people who go in looking only to extract from the community are more apparent than they realize. They may generate some quick artificial gains, but usually those gains are mostly useless and won't last long.

KristineS
04-16-2009, 12:40 PM
Another thing I've started seeing lately is people who try to publicize something by saying the same thing in slightly different ways about 50 times. We get it already!

Plus I feel like I'm seeing more instances of people who have multiple accounts to promote the same thing. I have multiple accounts myself, but they're all for separate purposes and I don't tend to crossover from one to the other.

Spider
04-16-2009, 02:51 PM
...The more trivial that information is the less likely it to be shared. ...Really? I would like to be your Friend, then! I am amazed at how trivial peoples' posts can get.

I really do not need to know that Mary is washing her hair tonight, that Bill just dropped is Quiznos sub on his jeans, or that Walter has posted a video of his two kids doing whatever kids do at 9 years of age and - No. I do not agree that I just HAVE to watch it!

Maybe I had better delete all my Friends and start over!

rezzy
04-16-2009, 04:21 PM
If you care about the mundane facts of life, then Ill start posting them here for you to follow. I guess you are talking about Twitter. I am surely not going to retweet something about just getting to work, etc.

But I think I will start posting on the forum my daily activities.. so I am finishing this post and about to click "post quick reply"... I misspelled a word so I clicked edit, fixed the word then clicked save....

enjoying it yet?

vangogh
04-16-2009, 07:49 PM
Frederick I know how you feel about the mundane tweets and posts on social sites. One thing to remember is that these sites weren't developed specifically for business. The average person using them is actually looking for the mundane info about real friends.

Take a site like Facebook. Many people use it as a quick way to update a lot of friends about something new. Maybe not what they had for lunch, but some photos of a recent vacation. You can update your profile and let all your friends know at once about what's going on with your life. Twitter is less about the profile and more about the tweet and with 140 characters it can get mundane.

However look at any conversation you have with family and friends. The majority of that conversation will consist of the mundane. Because you care about friends and family it seems less mundane, but it's still mostly mundane.

Spider
04-16-2009, 10:35 PM
I get that, VG, but does the very dearest, closest, bosombuddy friend *really* want to know that Suzy can't get all she wants into this bag she is packing for a trip somewhere?

Ach! That's why some people can talk for hours on the telephone and my calls last 30 seconds max!

I know - I'll just "hide" everyone!!!!

Or just go back to pen, paper and the postman!!!

vangogh
04-17-2009, 02:31 AM
Yeah I don't need to see all those tweets either. I think sometimes it's people not really sure what to day and Twitter is all about answering the question "What are you doing?" They ask so people answer.

I actually don't mind many of those posts since I think the mundane says more about a person than some of the witty things people try to say. You can learn a lot about people by observing the ordinary. Is it annoying to see the tweets? Yep. But you can still gain some useful info from it.

KristineS
04-17-2009, 04:28 PM
I have to agree that some people are kind of annoying with the Tweeting of every mundane detail, but I just tune those people out. There are enough people I find interesting, and things like Twitter generate enough interest in my companies and organizations that it is worth doing for me.

If someone gets too annoying or boring, unfollow is a great tool.

vangogh
04-17-2009, 05:11 PM
Or use something like TweetDeck, which lets you filter your twitterstream or create groups. For example you can follow 10,000 people, but create a group with only 50 of them. You then pay attention to the group of 50 and generally ignore the other 9,950 with the ability to check in on the 9,950 when you want.

Spider
04-17-2009, 07:55 PM
10,000 people! Jeez! I'm complaining about my 60 Friends on Facebook. I don't think I could take 10,000 Tweeters!

vangogh
04-17-2009, 11:21 PM
It's a lot. I don't follow that many people, but I have reached the point where I follow more than I could reasonable keep up with. Filtering into groups helps to follow what I really want to follow.

You should be able to set up different groups on Facebook. That might help.

HaleyMurph
04-20-2009, 09:23 AM
Yes, I agree with this completely. No matter how advanced technology and the internet tools get, they will NEVER be successful without a strong basis of honest human connection. The way I see it, the internet should be used to bring people together, but the connection should be made by the people.

vangogh
04-20-2009, 11:13 AM
The internet is the means, but it's still all about us little ol' people connecting with each other the same way we always have.