Taking an Active Role in Social Media for Your Business

Jeff Molander wrote a post on his blog about social media. I decided to write a response at ReveNews instead of my own blog because, frankly, it is more provocative here. Plus, this is the community that introduced us. And that is the point Jeff misses about social media: it’s about the community.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

In his post Jeff wrote about Mary, a woman who chose not to hire Jeff or attend one of his speaking engagements. Jeff humbly accepted that Mary was right to reject Jeff based on her logic. Mary thought that Jeff did not tweet enough and, therefore, could not provide value to her on the topic of social media.

Jeff called out Mary for looking at the quantity of tweets which is a statistic and does not denote value. On this, I think that Mary is more correct than Jeff, even if she cannot or did not express why.

Well, there’s this Guy

Jeff gave a little detail on Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter. What he left out is that @guykawasaki is really just @alltop with each item tweeted and retweeted at least 3 times (often and unfortunately more). Guy added the @alltop account after I asked about his self-retweeting and started a heated debate that continues today.

@guykawasaki is widely followed. While it started out with stories that Guy himself probably found interesting, it now appears to be operated by the Alltop staff. It links to Alltop articles that give an inferior summary and often make it difficult to find the link to the information that sounded interesting in the tweet that got a follower to the page. Which begs the question if/when Guy leaves Alltop, who keeps @guykawasaki?

Guy’s third Twitter account is @guysreplies. This is the account that Guy tweets from. If you reply to @guykawasaki, oddly the reply back to you is from @guysreplies.

The problem here is that Guy isn’t present. He is not a part of his own community. His blog post that is the heated debate is a debate in the community but Guy is not a part of it. This is what Jeff should be talking about. Regardless of the amount of tweet volume, Guy is absent from his own twitter account, in his own community, on his own article.

It’s in the conversation

So why was Mary right and Jeff wrong about the quantity of Jeff’s tweets? Jeff lectures on social media but he is not a member of the community. He does not take part in the conversation. If Jeff finds articles that others have written, he rarely tells his Twitter followers about them. If Jeff is active in commenting on a blog post he thinks is provocative, he doesn’t tweet about it. To me (and I think to Mary), that shows that Jeff doesn’t get social media.

Jeff tweeted a link to an article about what 1-800-Flowers has done wrong on Facebook. That post criticizes 1-800-Flowers for not taking an active role in its community. The author writes that 1-800-Flowers has little more than Facebook posts of Monday, Wednesday and Friday contests and a stock answer to anyone who has a complaint. That is not showing your community that you care. That is not taking leading the conversation, let alone even taking part in it.

We can discuss metrics to measure success of a retailer’s social media campaign another time. The real issue Jeff should be looking at in order to counsel retailers is how a retailer can be an active member of its own community whether on its own pages or that of others.

The beginning & end

The tweet that got me going on this was your ability to create meaningful biz outcomes w/ social media rests in your ability to act on this single realization. The single realization that I think you need is that to succeed in social media, you need to be active, proactive and a leader in your community. Hey, that’s no different than how people used to succeed in the brick-and-mortar world of days past.

[Author's note: I found Jeff's article via a tweet as I follow him on Twitter and then I read the article on his blog with a domain I used to own.]