It’s Called Social for a Reason

Talking about the weather is often considered the most trite of verbal exchanges.  In fact, tweeting about the weather was cited as a prime of example of being boring in a recent PC Mag article on the Top 13 Twitter Don’ts. (Along with tweeting about food and greeting the Twitterverse.)

I’d like to point out that the person they quoted for that alleged faux pas, @kmonson, is a New Yorker. As a native of that city I can tell you that as a rule, New Yorkers don’t have much patience  for small talk.  I can also tell you that if you travel elsewhere in this country you start to hear about the New York minute.  In fact, people in other parts of the country are often surprised that I was born in NYC, because I don’t “talk too fast”.  (I only talk fast when I’m trying to make a point, at which time I also tend to GET VERY LOUD.)

Talking about the weather or saying hello are forms of speech that are intended as a social lubricant to ease interactions between people.  In fact,  there is a word, phatic, that describes such communication:  “speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information.”

Phatic speech exists everywhere but the form it takes may differ regionally. New Yorkers may disdain talking about the weather but they just use other empty phrases: “How bout them Jints.”  And if you’re in Florida during hurricane season, talking about the weather may actually impart important information.

When you are blogging or tweeting you are talking to the world and you cannot possibly tailor your speech to each region.  (And I do mean the world.  My wife, Megan, known to the twitterverse as @freemybrain, is constantly surprised at the number of people from India who read her blog posts on migraine management.)

What people respond to is authenticity.  People want relationship and that means you have to give them something to relate to.  Simply reporting about the weather is boring.  Talking about how the blooming red buds make you feel alive again is communicating something of yourself that other people can recognize in themselves. (And they don’t have to have ever seen a red bud tree to know what you are talking about.)

When I thank someone for following me - you do thank your new followers, don’t you? - I make a point of trying to find something in their profile or posts to reference.  I started this practice to indicate that a live person was responding to them and not an autoresponder.  An unplanned benefit has been that many people respond back.  And that could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Joel Comm recently broke the “food is boring”  rule when he twitted about donuts.  He has an excellent blog entry about the terrific response he got to this post and how the mundane actually builds relationships. Here is the heart of the blog entry:

Commonality in the human experience is a starting point for relationships. We are drawn to people who think the way we think, like the things we like and have been to the places we’ve been.

When I innocently made a tweet about donuts, I received a massive outpouring of interaction with other Twitter members. I tapped into a shared experience that so many people could relate to. Not only that, but they were EAGER to relate to the experience. Donuts! Yum.

So why is this imporant?

My mundane tweet was not about donuts. It’s was about connecting with a large number of people quickly and effectively.

It was about getting them to interact in a way that would endear them to me further. After all, if Joel Comm likes donuts, he must be a pretty good guy.

Talking about the mundane is not necessarily boring. Even repetition is not, by itself, boring (Let’s go Mets!).  Inauthenticity and withholding yourself: that’s boring!  I may be using a computer to communicate, but I want to be dealing with a real person on the other side.

In many ways social networking is no different than any other networking activity.  You aim to make connections and build relationships that will help you further your business goals.

You also have the same variety of goals in online networking as you do face-to-face, including:

1. Meeting potential clients
2. Promoting a product or service
3. Developing  referral partners
4. Establishing your expertise, credibility and trustworthiness
5. Keeping on top of developments in your profession

There are some people who take a burn the bridges approach to networking.  We’ve all met networkers who come up to you, slap their business card in your hand and launch into their sales pitch. (They might for appearance’s sake ask you about your own business, but they are not listening. They measure you up as a potential sale and quickly move on.

The Twitter equivalent are people who follow you but either never tweet or only tweet about their own product.  All they really want is for you to look at their profile and follow their link.  I will follow almost anybody who follows me so long as their tweets seem related to topics I am interested in.  Nor am I offended by people who follow me as a way of introducing their Twitter stream.  Who knows, I might be interested in their topic. But if someone’s Tweets clearly indicate they are only interested in pitching to me, then they are wasting my time and I won’t follow them in return.  Unsurprisingly, those Tweeters unfollow me after a short time.

Social networking does differ from face-to-face marketing in one important way.  Because your interactions with Twitter followers and Facebook friends create a sense of intimacy, it is easy to forget that they are still mass media.  The fact that they are mass media has pluses and minuses:

1. Your idea or product has the potential to go viral, far outreaching what you could achieve face-to-face.
2. Negative publicity can also go viral.  Just look at the recent firestorm Amazon.com faced with the creation of the #amazonfail hashtag on Twitter.  (See Anatomy of the #AmazonFail protest )
3. Anyone on Twitter or Facebook (depending on your privacy settings) has access to what you say, so be careful.
4. Customers have public access to you for both commendation and complaint. You know which of the two has the most impact so be prepared to handle grievances quickly.

A major focus of this blog will be how to use social media to create mutually beneficial business relationships, whether with a potential client, customer or other business.  Hence the name, “It’s called Social for a Reason”.