What Social Media Engagement Is Not
A lot of people, including me, spend a lot of time talking about what social media engagement is. I mean, some people even do a whole series based on that subject (heh heh heh). But I think sometimes it’s important to remember what things are *not*. I think, based on my observations over the last month or so, that there needs to be some review of what social media engagement should not become, paths social media engagement would be better off not traveling.
As per usual these are just my opinions, so if you want to disagree or voice a slightly different opinion, you are more than welcome!
Social Media Engagement is NOT a Contest
I see a lot of people engage with others via a mode of competition. It often starts out, at least, as friendly jousting. Sometimes it doesn’t. Regardless of how it ends up, engaging with people is not the same as trying to out-maneuver people. It is not the same as trying to prove to other people that you are better than those folks over there. It is not trying to do everything but one step further to show that you can. That is all under the umbrella of competitiveness, but you are not necessarily engaging if you are only doing those types of things.
Social Media Engagement is NOT Discarding People After They’ve Served Your Purposes
This is a trend that I’m seeing increase at a somewhat alarming rate. I’ve experienced it, unfortunately, a bit myself (on the receiving end that is). I like to call this “the washcloth effect.” When you first get out a washcloth you get it all nice and soaked and soapy, you wash your face, and then once you’re done, you toss the washcloth onto the floor, into the hamper, over the tub, or wherever else you put such things. You are done with it. For washcloths, I think that’s probably okay. They understand that that’s their lot in life. But with people it’s a bit of a different story.
If you engage with people who can help you out with things or who can guide you as you’re working your way into a new business or into Social Media, that’s great. But if you lose those people as soon as you feel like you’ve surpassed them or that they’ve taught you all they can, you are leaving a trail of hurt, angry people behind you. People are not washcloths. You can quote me on that.
Social Media Engagement is NOT Remaining Cooly Aloof from the Masses
Let me just say this outright. There are a few people in the online world who think they are the best thing since sliced AND buttered bread. I’ve tried to reach out to these folks in various ways, even supporting a couple of them with purchases, and yet they do not deign to follow me back, respond to my tweets, and when they do tweet, it’s generally about how they are run down with how uncool and/or stupid people are. And that’s cool. If that’s how you feel online interaction should work, I won’t say you’re wrong. I don’t think there is a clear-cut “right vs. wrong” in this space. But on the other hand, I can tell you that I think those folks are kind of…jerks.
The truly great people of the world do not need to bask in the sunny glow of their success. They keep doing what they’re doing, and they use their greatness to reach out to other folks. That *is* Social Media engagement. That other stuff…I don’t know what it is!
Social Media Engagement is NOT Talking in Promo Speak
I think a lot of people end up over-promoting because they forget that self-promotion is still promotion. When we think of promoting things online, I think we veer towards thinking of promotion as “the hard sell.” But promotion is in fact promotion. That means that if I ask you how the weather is in your neck of the woods and you reply with “I just wrote a blog post about how weather affects bloggers,” you are promoting yourself at a time that I might not view as particularly sensible. Yes, driving traffic to your blog posts is important, and I have no problem with such things (of course). But it is not engaging when you do that, especially when you do it 80% of the time.
Social Media Engagement is NOT Being the Biggest Genius Ever
A friend of mine was recently lamenting how a lot of Twitter chats aren’t that fun anymore. The moderator asks a question, people respond to the question, and everyone responds in a way that makes it clear they are simply trying to outshine everyone else. At that point, can we really call it a chat? It sounds more like an ego battle royale.
There are ways to speak with knowledge about something while also engaging. For example, use some of those 140 characters to say something like, “Like xxx said, blah blah blah.” Give credit to other folks. Show you’re listening to them, not just booming out your own thoughts. We can all do that plenty in front of our mirrors (ehem, if we really want to).
So those are my thoughts on what social media engagement is *not*. What would you add to this list? What other types of interaction can be mistaken for engagement when they really are not?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
This is post #68 in The Engagement Series! If you’re worried about missing a post, please feel free to hit the subscribe button. Thank you!
Image by Tobias Toft. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/tobiastoft
30 Comments
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Excellent post. The personal nature of Social Media appears to make it easier for folks’ bad habits to show. We all could do better.
Thanks for the encouragement, Margie.
Cheers,
Young Skywalker!
Thanks, Taariq 🙂
Margie,
The funny thing is, this has been on my mind. I had been trying (unsuccessfully) to engage with someone who preaches engaging with everyone (unless that “everyone” has less than 500 followers)
So, I have decided to unfollow him. I don’t need to see him in my stream preaching what he does not practice. On the other hand, I made a comment about reading Guy Kawasaki’s book Enchantment and commented that my boyfriend finds me enchanting.
Guy actually replied to that tweet! How cool is that! I was really impressed that he saw, and replied to a tweet that mentioned him because I am sure he gets so many mentions in one day. THAT – is engagement.
This is an excellent post my friend. 🙂 I needed to see this today too. Thanks!
You’re exactly right, Nancy. I look at people like Ann Handley, Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, and Becky McCray who all have tons of followers, and they are always out there engaging and don’t have a problem following people back. In fact, some of my first followers were Ann and Jay.
People who are snobby about following should be careful what they preach, as you say. If you want to limit your engagement, don’t tell other people to go out there and mix it up with everyone. Yarg! 🙂
Great read – and a fair reflection of society as a whole. The speed of social media means that our culture/societies are changing quicker than ever before and we need champions like this to steer the ship!!!
You have my support…!
thanks, Nic! I really appreciate that 🙂
Hi Margie,
I heartily agree with all points. I wanted to share with you/compare notes on something I heard at a conference. The speaker’s topic was online media and went through the usual list of platforms. When he got to Twitter he mentioned that greater weight (I’m guessing Klout but don’t know for sure) is given when you have way more followers than people following you. He went on to call this “Rock Star” status and mentioned that he was systematically unfollowing…well I guess the “wash cloths”. Have you heard this? Seen anecdotal evidence of it happening?
I thought I was for a while…you can almost tell from the stream when a so-called best practice has gained some traction.
I’m not too worried about it – as it has a Darwin Award aspect to it – just curious.
actually the only place I’ve seen that referenced was in a post by Trey Pennington where he was mocking that sort of aspect of Klout. As Nancy says, there are people who will only follow people who have x number of followers. There are people who will only follow a few people so that they look more exclusive…I guess?
I don’t really get any of that. It kinda grosses me out.
What honestly irritates me most are the celebs who get out on Twitter or Facebook, tweet and post, and NEVER bother responding when they get a mention. Look, I get that you get plenty of mentions in a day. And that you can’t answer all of them, or you’d never be out there doing what I love you for in the first place. But if you’re ignoring all of them (and there are some so-called Social Media gurus that do this on a regular basis) sooner or later they’re going to drop you.
Guy Kawasaki, Theresa Medeiros, Christina Dodd, Victoria Dahl, Sally Hogshead-all people whose works fills my bookshelves, but who I have had some great social media conversations with. In fact, both Guy and Victoria have been known to hop into the #usguys stream every now and again! And there are some celebs that have honestly said they don’t maintain social media accounts because they don’t have time to keep up with them, and I’m okay with that too. But pick and choose. You’re in one camp or the other, you can’t be in both.
And that’s MY rant for the day 🙂 Lovely post honey.
Hi there!
Looks like I hit one of your buttons there, lady 🙂
I agree – if you aren’t going to respond to people, maybe a middle ground would be to put something in your bio. “Due to sheer scale, I won’t follow back or respond much, but stay tuned here for updates.” That way expectations are clearly established.
Excellent post Margie.
I agree, these are some of the darker spots of social media that pop up way too frequently.
Seems there are alot of changes happening in the world of social media lately – some good, some not so good. I’d like to say “it is what it is,” but that excuses all of us when we participate in behavior that is not social online.
Great point regarding chat’s as well as the “washcloths.” (Love that!).
You also have my support, always.
Sherree
Thanks, Sherree. Everyone seems to love the washcloth thing. I guess we all needed to be reminded we are humans 😉
It looks like you’ve been sharing a lot of the same feelings that I have in regards to social media and networking online. It’s as if the entire concept of actually “networking” and using social media for more then just shameless self promotion is falling as fast as the entire great idea rose.
It’s nice to see other bloggers getting annoyed with it as well.
It definitely has changed in the year I’ve been using Social Media sites. I hope that we can prevent it from becoming a totally icky environment. That would be really sad to see it degrade that way.
Hey Margie!
Really enjoying your posts. I see in some chats a lot of really great, helpful people — you included! But I also see the Pedestal People who think they know it all and have a certain disdain for others in their replies/comments. Or they tweet something that has an air of imperiousness about it and no sense of ‘social’ or friendliness. I just love responding to these asserting my own sense of imperiousness as if to say they are not the be all and end all. I am very willing to learn from these so-called experts, but I won’t abide snide or snobbery.
The other people on chats that get me nutty are the RT’ers. Some chats are only filled with RT’s of the ‘experts’ instead of offering a new query or comment. And oftentimes there is no reflection of being in the real business world and in the trenches – it’s all high-falutin’ “shoulds”. Puhleeze! Of course I jump in and give a different perspective which wakes up a few people. 🙂
Thanks for letting me share my 2 cents!
– Miller
Hi Miller,
Thank you!
Yeah, chats seem to be heading towards a slightly cantankerous end of the spectrum. People jump in, say everyone is dumb, then jump out again. I’ve never really understood the motivation there, but then you and I are rather odd, right? 🙂
Hey, why be normal? 😉 Normal is boring.
Thanks for the reminder that humility will always take us farther… Recently, there was an opportunity to win a copy of a free book as long as there were a review of the book. 25 people would get that chance. I was game and tossed my hat in. Later, there was an announcement that there were so many qualified people who wanted to review that they increased the number to beyond 25. And no, I wasn’t one of them. I don’t think they meant it but I felt rather silly.
The long and the short is that one person’s shallow learning curve is another person’s steep one. We all have moments where we are students and we all have moments where we are teachers. Both roles have responsibilities.
Online contests are tough, no question about it. You can get no reaction or you can get an over-abundance of reactions, and in either scenario you can be in big trouble.
Yes, there is a lot of learning that can be done in the online world – but you need to be open to it 🙂
More and more I find that how people behave on social media is the exact same as they behave IRL. There are always people who promote themselves, feel ‘above’ it all, users, etc.
The difference is in social media, we can watch and notice who’s the real deal and who’s a narcissist.
Needless to say, I only strike up relationships with those who treat others with respect and as real humans with feelings. All the rest won’t get my attention….
I’m hearing that a lot. People in general are getting more insensitive, more self-centered. It’s possible. But would humanity be going in that direction without Social Media, or is Social Media helping the process along?
Now that could be an interesting sociological study 🙂
Fantastic post, Margie! You’ve certainly captured some of the misconceptions that are rampant online about what is engagement. I hope a lot of folks read this post!
I also noticed Jay Baer mentioned this post in his e-letter today – well done!
Thanks, Laura! Yeah, Jay Baer made my day. He is far too awesome. Thank you for your kind words! 🙂
What’s with the cat photo? Looks like a cat @Oatmeal would turn into a killing machine.. but it’d make a funny comic. 😉
Really enjoyed this as I’ve seen a lot of these myself. The ‘promo speak’ is a big one. I’ve seen someone’s ‘personal’ professional blog talk nothing but client business, just name-drop one brand after another about their latest ‘successful’ campaign. So why isn’t that on the company’s blog? I’ve seen ‘look what I just did’ and ‘let me repeat my pithy quip’ tweets scheduled to repeat, b/c they were so impressive the first few times. IDK.. I’ve just seen a few too many ‘experts’ use their tweets, blogs, everything to advertise themselves rather than be social. Ditto on the contests, the one up games, discarding or forgetting the ‘little’ people once you’ve broken into the top number clique or whatever. There’s a difference as you say in promoting yourself and networking, vs. doing so all the time.
What I’d add? Not leaving your own sandbox or playing nice with the other kids. This applies to tweets, blogs, other social networks. It’s the following only 300 of your 5K followers.. and ignoring many good @replies and RTs. It’s getting (and asking for) comments and RTs, then only replying to a select few; it’s not leaving the safety of your own blog to return those courtesies elsewhere. FWIW.
Margie, I’m so glad someone finally said this! Not only have I encountered all the behaviors you describe, I see this problem becoming more pervasive. I am so tired of the “experts”, “Jedi”, “Ninjas” and “Geniuses” that talk like they have all the answers. They seem to always have a circle of friends that reinforce their behavior…they’re the only ones in on the joke….the only ones that get it. What is this…high school? These people are supposed to be social media professionals.
Thanks for saying it like it is! You go girl!
Danny Hanssel
Great post – I like the one about nothin’ but promo stuff and I’m Too Cool To Acknowledge You.
It also mystifies me how many people describe themselves as social media enthusiasts but either have hardly any followers, no activity or just fill their tweets with quotes-of-the-day……
Margie,
You are always on point and on time.
It seems much of the engagement factor in social media (and what it could be) is beginning to lose steam. I would agree with Sandra’s reflections on SM enthusiasts and their online behavior. While an SM novice, I’ve also seen some interesting and unflattering non-dialogue.
Thank you Margie for always being respectful and engaging. As one who is not showing a need to only self-promote, many of us would say that you’re definitely not afraid to show us all a better way to get it done. Cheers – raising my tea cup for you!
Rose
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Margie, I really liked this post and will pass on to others. Such a great way of how we are suppose to be as humans. 🙂 Just wonderful. Mike