The topic during last night’s #blogchat…chat…was a great one submitted by @WriterChanelle. “Do you blog for yourself or do you blog for your readers?”
In all of the chaos of the chat (and trust me, there was chaos) I realized that what I have been working on is my own philosophy, if you will, about Social Media. I have been saying that I have been a “blog purist,” but I didn’t really have a context for that. Last night I responded that ultimately, if you are doing Social Media right, what your readers want should be the same thing that you want because you are doing this for them. I don’t want to say that my view is “right,” but that statement falls into line with a lot of other things I believe about Social Media and how to use it. It guides me on a lot of things that I say across the board. At the core is one simple belief:
I will always be doing what I do in Social Media because I am passionate about helping others.
Does that mean that I end up feeling rewarded by doing the stuff that I do? Sure. It makes me happy to do what I want to do. But that is different from starting a blog saying, “I hope that this gets me blog traffic.” I write things to help people, to try to fill in gaps that I see, to try to improve a practice that I think could lead people astray.
Some of the tentacles of this core belief are:
1. The number of followers I have on Twitter doesn’t matter to me. If I can engage with the people who are following me, and if I am providing them value, then I am doing things right.
2. Being listed on a top ten countdown will never be important to me. When compared with 1 person saying, “Thanks, you helped me xyz,” there’s no comparison.
3. I will always be honest with you, which means that I will disagree with you or sometimes say that I think something you did could be improved. This also means that if I think something is really super duper, you know that I am saying that from the heart.
4. My ultimate dream is to improve the world in some small way. If that means that I can help people succeed in business, that would be terrific, and that is one of my passions. If I get to a point where I can leverage my Social Media community’s power to help charities as so many great people do, that would be a dream come true.
Who are you doing all of this for? What are you hoping to get out of it? I’d love to hear your story.