Do you remember Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year? You should, it was you. To justify its choice, Time cited the boom of Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and other community-driven, socially contributed websites (since that time we’ve also seen the meteoric rise of Facebook and Twitter).
Time got it wrong. Social sites aren’t about you; they are about us. That’s why it’s called social media and not hey-look-at-me media or product selling media. Being social in any setting is about building relationships and gaining trust. True, some of the people you connect with through social media may turn into customers or vendors or clients, but if that’s your primary goal, you had better hide it well.
The true power for companies and brands using social media doesn’t come from self-promotion; it comes from community promotion. Groups of people sharing ideas and spreading links are what have made social media so powerful.
Think of Blendtec’s Will It Blend video series, which was made to creatively show how amazing these blenders are. What caused this campaign spread on the Internet wasn’t shameless self-promotion on the part of Blendtec, it was how remarkable social communities found the videos, and they wanted to share them.
If you want to have a successful social media presence, remove outright promotion from your strategy and start sharing ideas. Sure, you can share your own ideas, but you should also share the ideas of others. It’s not about you, it’s about what you can do for us.
Photo from David Fraíz via Flickr.
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