Have you ever tried to make soup? In a way it’s kind of like making salad. You throw stuff into a pot, let it boil, let it simmer, then feel all warm and snuggly. What you realize after making a few different kinds of soup is that there are a few integral ingredients you usually need, no matter what kind of soup you are making. Most soups, for example, require water. Many require bay leaves. Seasoning is often nice. And inevitably, soup recipes will ask you to add chicken bouillon, beef bouillon, or vegetarian bouillon (yes, it exists, and it’s freakin’ delicious!).
I’ve been watching a lot of people talk about recipes for making Success soup in Social Media. Everyone has their own particular point of view on how you can make the most of these sites, but, as is the case with soup, there are certain nuggets that most would agree you need no matter what it is you are trying to do (even if you think you aren’t trying to do anything but have a good time).
So, being the Working Class Hero of the blogosphere (ha ha), I thought I would show what some of the essential ingredients for Social Media Success Soup are without all of the heady concepts, interesting takes, personal opinions, etc. This would be the beef bouillon cubes before you take off that shiny red foil. Raw, uncooked, unmelted ingredients. Are you ready?
1. Know what you want to do. You know what happens when you go to the store at 11 PM to get toilet paper and you don’t really have a plan of attack? You come home with the craziest mix of stuff ever. Like, you bring home fat free sour cream and then 2 pounds of caramel apples. What is up with that? Today I went to the grocery store and I saw a box of “Smooth Move” organic tea in the candy aisle. I’m not going to detail what “smooth move” tea does, but what made someone randomly put it down? There? They didn’t have a plan. The Social Media alternative might be starting a Twitter account and then ruthlessly abandoning it.
2. Be nice. Or to put it another way, don’t be mean. I uh, well. Yeah. That’s about it for that one.
3. Read like a maniac. Read peoples’ blogs. Read peoples’ links that they post. Read peoples’ profiles. Read peoples’ tweets. How can one share data if one does not have data? How can one compliment a person’s excellent writing skills if one does not read said writing? Well, okay, you can probably fake that, but this is not “Meg Ryan from When Harry Met Sally’s” take on Social Media Success Soup. This is the real deal.
4. Do not get full of yourself. I know, the people you connect with on Twitter are called followers. As such, it’s easy to think of yourself as your followers’ Twessiah. However, in most cases, percentage-wise, people are following you because they think they are your Twessiah, and they want you to follow them. Think about that when you feel your head getting big!
5. Don’t give up. Social Media is time-consuming. It requires patience, endurance, perseverance, and lots of other words that end in either “ence” or “ance.” You will very probably not “win” within your first 5 tweets or your first blog post. It just doesn’t happen that way. Hang in there.
Really, if you want to know the truth, these 5 little cubes can be the base for really any kind of Success Soup you want. I mean, there are people who will say that you need to add exotic things like Saffron, and there are people who argue about what the most important ingredients are. Which vegetable makes vegetable soup GOOD vegetable soup? These are important questions, no doubt. But still, if you hang with these 5 points, extrapolating them to suit your own realities, I think you’ll find that you’re well on your way to having something delicious.
Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/kaleff