If you are viewing this you probably just left Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or one of the trillion search engines used to find information that really mattes.  Well if you are looking for answers to the question…

Is All this Really Worth It?

..then you may or may not come to the right place.

What is ‘This’?

What ‘This’ has become over the years is now called Social Media.  Yes, you have heard the word and see this phrase used everywhere .  Plus you probably have receiving notices to attend seminars and workshops on learning how to use it.  But what is ‘This’..Social Media…thing and is it all worth it?

Well, on the most part Social Media is a lot of work and if you are not sure what you are doing attempting to use SM make backfire on you. Why?  Well anything that has to do with dealing human beings is subject to a opinion to be developed.  Some people are going to get what is said and accept openly what is being said.  Others are going to question everything and even take steps to project a negative image of what was said.

Social Media is building a relationship with people in an effort to indirectly promote one’s self of business.  Most people do not understand this or don’t want to understand it since it goes against previous marketing trends they have a lot of capital invested it using.

What is at the core of Social Media is conversation.  If someone is good at carrying on a neutral conversation SM works out to developing a higher level of trust in what is being talked about.  If someone is not good at conversation or focuses on making the conversation more about ‘What’s In It For Them’, then the Social Media used resulted results in a waste of time since the Trust factor dipped into the negative figures.

Temptations

Many people get no results from their initial push with Social Media primarily because they do not know how to use it properly.  As a result they start taking efforts to gather a large following of people they do not know in hopes to market to a broader audience.  They do this by posting large quantities of “Connect with me” posts in all of the business/social networking groups that quickly develops into direct or indirect Spam campaigns. Some of the misguided efforts are:

FollowFriday – What started as an effort to get the followers on someone’s Twitter account more attention now has become a lounge for all of the Spammers who have set up shop on Twitter. This barrage of posts telling Twitterville who would be good to follow makes for a Spammers shooting gallery for Spammers.  Twitter can’t keep up with the blocking of their accounts so what was an effort to build social media efforts now is resulting in Tweets asking not to be mention on the FF hash mark.

Facebook Game Apps -I am sure the apps FB allows are fun for a few who have nothing else to do and think harassing their contacts with invitations to join them is fun.  But these efforts to gather more friends on Facebook are backfiring.  The large logos and Spam emails the developers of the apps make result in the friend who thought the game was cute and fun to be disconnected from his friend’s contact list.

Be an Idiot – The Shock Rock factor is so over and aren’t we all glad?  Nonetheless, there still are may people who want to act an idiot to draw attention to themselves or to a product.  This truly is a last resort for many and a temptation that is driven by many receiving ill advice on what social media is all about.

Email/URL as a Name – Many uninformed business people cannot resist the urge to focus on a brand and place their email address or URL with their name in their LinkedIn account.  This does more damage to their professional image than any of the other attempts made to gather attention towards their brand. This purely is a sign of someone not ‘Getting It’ or caring how they appear online.

Time Value

All these temptations to gather contacts quickly is a result of trying to find a short cut around the time it takes to build a business relationship.  It really does take time to use Social Media effectively.  There is no quick way of going about using it.  The secret to Social Media is..

If you don’t have the time to build a solid relationship then don’t attempt building it.

So, is ‘This’ Social Media thing really all worth it?

The time spent to use Social Media effectively is worth it.  Getting to know someone and then staying with them over time results in them telling others about you.  This is the most proven effective way Social Media works for you.  Anything you do out here in La-La-Land takes time so to make all this worth it, spend the time effectively, calm down and listen.  Getting to know someone will develop into a great opportunity.

To make ‘This’ all worth it..use Social Media wisely.  Let me know how I can help.