Musings

Hello!

Last weekend, I started posting here about a “town hall meeting” that would take place. Well, tonight is the night.

A couple of little things have been refined, so I wanted to post here.

First, we discovered that the hash tag #SMS has already been taken. Therefore, for the chat tonight, we’re going to use #SMSafety (standing for Social Media Safety).

Second, I had initially posted that we’d have 2 points of conversation. I think that’s going to be hard to do. So, there’s just 1 topic now, but it’s huge.

How can Social Media be used to combat the suicide epidemic our country is experiencing, especially among our youth?

I don’t like to ask for help very often, but I’m asking for your help in this case. Please join us. Please help spread the word. I feel very strongly that now is the time to set standards to make sure Social Media is used properly – both for business and for society. Suicides must stop. If we can use Social Media to make that dream a reality, let’s do it.

Tonight, 9 PM EST.

Any questions, just let me know.

Thank you!

Well, here we are. Already more than halfway through the 7 habits and how they made me review and evaluate my perspective on my Social Media reality. I hope that at the very least this is inspiring you to give the book a try to see if you get the same sort of benefit from it!

Habit 4 is about creating a win-win situation. Now, how many times have you seen people in Social Media talk about this in different terms? For example:

Promote others at least as much as, if not more than, you promote yourself

Make sure you comment on other peoples’ blogs. It makes them feel loved and sends traffic back to your site

Make sure you respond to people who comment on your blog. It lets them know you appreciate them and keeps them coming back.

These are all win-win situations, right? Sure thing.

The trap that people fall in to is losing the balance of the win-win scenario, whether in real life or in Social Media. Here are some examples of how one can lose the balance of the win-win in Social Media.

Empty Promotion: A lot of people participate in Follow Friday on Twitter. I’ve talked about this interesting phenomenon a few times here. The concept is a good one, but what happens a lot of the time is that people do tweets like this: #ff abc, def, ghi, jkl, mno, and pqr. Then, each of those people retweets the #ff post. The original poster may also end up retweeting posts where they are mentioned as someone to follow. This is not really a win-win for your followers though, is it? You could just be going down your list for all we know. To make Follow Friday a win-win, mention 1-2 people throughout the day, separately, and really tell your followers why they could benefit from following that person.

Empty Promotion, Part 2: Another easy mistake to make in Twitter-land is to just hit the “Retweet” button without making a comment. I used to do this a lot when I first started. “I’m promoting the person and sending their info to my followers,” I thought to myself. Well, after being on Twitter for awhile, you come to realize that a retweeted post is basically just an echo. If you really want to create a win-win for the person you’re retweeting as well as your followers, explain what you got out of the post. If it’s a really important infographic, work in something like, “Really changed my perspective!” Something short, but something that shows the value. See the difference?

Never promoting yourself: This is another trap that it’s easy to fall into. A lot of people think that “win-win” means self-sacrifice. Dr. Covey gives several examples of people who make that kind of mistake. In Social Media, this may mean that you give up chatting with your friends in favor of just retweeting other people. It might mean that you give up your blog so that you only comment on what other people write. This is not a win-win because you are not feeling good about the situation. You are not benefiting as much as other people are through your actions.

The Leaders in Social Media Get This

If you think about some of the bigger thought leaders in this space, you see that they live by this rule, whether or not they have read the book. Why offer phenomenal content? The benefit to others is obvious. The benefit to you is that you become a trusted resource, and people will be willing to give you a boost when you need it. Why ask people to guest post on your blog? It gets them recognition, gives your readers a new perspective, and doubles the number of people driving traffic to your blog that day. See?

All of the big secrets in Social Media really and truly revolve around this principle of creating win-win situations. The people that do it right are the ones who, well, win.

So take a moment, as I did, and evaluate whether you are creating win-win situations for your community, or whether you are creating lose-win situations for yourself. Even more important, make sure you aren’t creating situations where your community is losing while you win (this would be something like popping out press releases via your blog or ads via your Twitter account).

Are you winning while also helping your community win? To me, that is the core principle of good Social Media practice. And there it is, in a book that was written before Facebook or Twitter existed. Who knew?

Image by Billy Alexander. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ba1969

Habit 3 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is called “Put first things first.” This was my favorite connection between how one can be effective in Social Media and how one can use the 7 habits to improve things beyond Social Media (is there such a place??).

Think about your life. If you are asked to name to the top 3 priorities that your life absolutely revolves around, what do you say? Go ahead, I’ll wait.

If you said “family” or “friends and family,” you have fallen right into Stephen Covey’s trap. As he points out, this answer is universal wherever he goes.

Now, let me ask you a different question. When you think about the top utmost concerns or priorities in your Social Media life, what do you think think about?

It’s kind of a tricky question, isn’t it? When you think about your mission statement for what you are doing with Social Media, you are probably thinking of Social Media as a tool, or as a way to achieve some objective. “I want to use Social Media to increase traffic to my website,” you might say. But as we all know, we are spending lots of time in this online reality. So what are we doing here? What’s important to us in this particular space?

If you are still scratching your head about this, let me give you the answer I came up with. It’s still about people. My utmost concern, my utmost priority, is the community I am building with people. Each of those relationships that comprise my community would be mixed in there too.

Putting People First Makes Social Media Chewable

Dr. Covey talks about putting first things first for some of the same reasons that he talks about developing a circle of influence. We are utterly surrounded by distractions. Now the word “distraction” can seem kind of negative, and I don’t mean that here. A distraction can be your kid asking to play with you, or your boss wanting to go out golfing with you. In Social Media, we are similarly surrounded by distractions. There are people asking us for things, maybe. There are people who are attacking us with spam. There’s our email. How can you keep it all sorted?

Put people first. This can help you guide everything. Here are a few ways how I’m thinking about this.

Reach out and touch someone: If you are just getting started, the first thing you can do to help yourself get situated is to reach out to people. Don’t worry about who is retweeting you. Don’t worry about numbers. Are you talking to people? Are you trying to build relationships?

When you Blog: A lot of people lately have talked about how they write blog posts with a specific person in mind, even though they write on general terms. They are putting people first, external to themselves, of course. Blog based on what you think your growing community might want to hear. Put your readers first. Don’t worry about your analytics or whether your design is pretty. It’s about the people.

In a Twitter Chat: A lot of people get flustered very quickly when in a busy Twitter chat. It’s easy to go down that road. There are so many conversations going on at the same time, so many retweets of something someone said 20 minutes ago – it can feel like a blizzard. The way around that confusion? Put people and conversation first. I never have tried to absorb everything that goes on in a chat. I find people to talk to. I try to answer questions, I swim in and out of various topics, and I let conversations guide me. I put people first.

If First Things Are First, Everything Else is Not First

One other little benefit to putting first things first is that in choosing what you value most, you are also, by necessity, choosing what you value not as much. For example, if you decide to put people first in your Social Media world, numbers become a second or third priority. If your choice is between posting something that you think will get retweeted versus helping someone with a question, that choice becomes much easier.

It’s easy to forget that Social Media is all about people. It’s easy to let people, even though we see their faces, become numbers. But really, except for spam bots, we are all people around here. Everything else in this world is about numbers, competition, and ego. My choice is to emphasize the people part of Social Media and let the rest follow. This makes my decision process easier. This makes defining my circle of influence easier. This makes keeping true to my mission statement easier.

Of course, what you choose to put first is entirely your call. But this approach to Social Media, which I previously did not really have a name or framework for, makes Social Media rewarding for me.

What do you put first in your Social Media world? Are you really putting those priorities on a higher level? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image by eric bernard. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/alphao

I wanted to post an update here where I actually have more than 140 characters – you can tell I am so not a 140-character woman, can’t you? More like 140 pages.

Anyway, after a lot of feedback I received, I have tentatively scheduled the first Twitter Town Hall Meeting for this Wednesday, October 6, at 9 PM EST. I know that 9 PM can be tricky for West Coasters, but I think, I think…there are fewer chats going on then, it’s in the middle of the week, and this gives you some time to potentially plan for it and spread the word.

The format, as per the name, is going to be open. For this first townhall, we’ll have 2 general points of discussion.

1. Framing the problem – what are we talking about? Are we talking about identifying a specific problem, trying to create a supportive framework throughout Social Media, or both?

2. What do we do next? This could either be a decision to do a second meeting, a decision to create a hash tag so we could get it to trend, or something else.

These are big chunks of information to discuss and digest, so I don’t want to set the expectation that everything will be 100% clear by 11 PM on Wednesday. The point is to start now, but to do it right.

If you wouldn’t mind, please let me know if you can come so I can get a sense of whether I should reschedule this. If you have any ideas re: structure, etc., I’m all ears (er, well, all eyes, I suppose).

And if you wouldn’t mind, please spread the word. This is really important to me. I think, as I said before, that we have a chance to really do something important here, something to make the world better.

Thank you for all of the support so far – I know this is dramatically off-topic as far as my blog usually goes. Then again, if you are going to use a powerful tool for business, you should know everything about it, right?

I was innocently eating my dinner this evening when a story came on about a young man named Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers. Tyler was 18, shy, a great musician who had dreams of playing in an elite orchestra.

All of those dreams died with Tyler a week ago.

You see, Tyler’s roommate installed a webcam in their room, controlled it from a friend’s room, and captured Tyler in a homosexual encounter. The roommate then opted to blast the video out to the world via Social Media. Tyler killed himself.

If you feel uncomfortable about the issue of homosexuality, consider the story of Megan Meier, who committed suicide because the mother of a high school peer created an account on MySpace, pretended to be a boy, made Megan think “he” was in love with her, and then began taunting her cruelly, telling her the world would be better without her.

As a business person, as a professional, I have become highly involved in Social Media, but there are shadows lurking in this world, and those shadows are gruesome. They are tragic. They are, in fact, abhorrent.

I’ve talked a lot about the issue of influence on this blog. Now is the time to test your influence. After discussing this issue with @MissusP, @Grit08, and @TomMoradpour this evening, we would like to create a “town hall” chat regarding safety in Social Media. At a minimum, we’d like to create a hash tag that would begin to trend to draw attention to these issues.

At a maximum, we would use our combined influence and brains to determine how to make these tragedies stop. Who better than us, those who preach Social Media best practices? We are in it. We are of it.

Let’s make it right.

Please comment below when you would be available for this chat and any names you’d want to recommend for the chat and/or hash tag. Perhaps an existing chat would be willing to lend us their spot since week days tend to be good for people. Remember, in terms of chat names and hashtags, we need to keep the names short so that people can respond and retweet.

Thank you for your help with this. The time is now.

Image by Mateusz Stachowski. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Mattox

Over the weekend, I finally got to see a new episode of CBS Sunday Morning. One of their stories was about “the new normal.” People have been thinking for the last couple of years that “things would get back to normal” economically. Somehow, the health care crisis would be swept under the rug again. The unemployed would find jobs. Our biggest concern would be whether to shop at Ikea or Target. This story reported, with ample statistical proof, that we are very likely not going to get back to the way things were in 2007. Not right away, anyway. For me, the story was a real bummer.

You see, like many people, I tend to approach life, without realizing it, the same way a little kid does. If you work really really hard, you reach the finish line. You might take first place if you really go gangbusters. Then the race is over, you celebrate, and you move on to the next thing. Since the economy pooped out on us a couple of years ago, I’ve been thinking, “Oh, okay. Well, if I work hard enough, if I save enough, and if I’m a really good girl, things will get right back to the way they were.”

As it happens, this kind of thinking dominates our society, at least here in the US. I can’t speak for places where I’ve never lived. You think, “Oh, okay, well, I’ll get to this point and then I’ll be really really happy.” But you get to that point, like graduating from high school, getting your first job, getting married, whatever it might be, and you find that life keeps on going. The world keeps on spinning. Whether the day is horrible or glorious, the world just keeps on doing its thing, forcing you to do yours.

Listen to the music

A couple of years ago, my brother sent me a link to a YouTube video. The creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, had put together a very un-South Park sort of video. Using an audio recording of British philosopher Alan Watts, Parker and Stone created a short called “Music and Life.” In the video, which I hope you take a couple minutes to view, Alan Watts notes that the way we live would be comparable to going to a concert, hearing the final chord, the final note, and then getting up and leaving. Because we do like to skip to the end, don’t we? We like “closure.” We like rewards. We like promotions. But the final chord is not going to seem impressive if you don’t hear all the rest of the symphony, is it?

We go through our days and we think, “If I can get this presentation done, I’ll be happy.” “If I get this account or this client or this purchase through, I’ll be content.” There is always a sense that something is missing though, and Watts suggests that what we are missing is the singing, dancing, and LIVING that happens while we are focused on one goal after another.

Are you living your life so that it looks like you’re saying, “Boy, I hope get this life done so I can really enjoy myself?” Sometimes I find myself focusing on one goal after another. I spend time thinking about goals. I spend time making goals. I spend time fighting to reach those goals. But there’s more to life, isn’t there?

We only get one chance to write our life symphony. Shall we create something that is just one giant cymbal clash after another, or shall we waltz and sing?

I’m going to focus more on doing the latter.