Leesa Barnes at one of the workshops I attended at NABShow said that to collect "leads" on social media, your posts have to be "relevant." To be relevant, posts have "to solve a problem." Target a problem, not followers was her shibboleth. If readers find your postings useful, they are more likely to read it, respond or react to it, and the technology becomes the communication and potentially marketing tool it promises to be. If they are not relevant and readers will drop your from their lists. If they find what you are posting filling a need they have they are more likely to read what you post and, as habit forms, will look forward to each post you make.
Collecting followers is not the most effective measure of the successful use of social media. Success depends on the followers you collect, and this in turn depends on why you are on social media in the first place.
Signing up on Twitter revivified my experience in social media. Prior to signing up for the 140-word-limit instant universal posting site, I had signed up for Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster and maintained photo upload sites at Flickr and Picasa but Twitter made me see how amazingly inter-connective the technologies were. Twitter, Facebook and their ilk are not called "social" for nothing. In our rapidly whirling, hurling universe, people are not only anxious to sell what they do well. We are increasingly isolated from each other, even from our domestic partners and children. Each one is busy with her or his own agenda, whether the agenda is work or fun-related. Social Media allow us to connect. Remember E.M. Forster whose motto was "to connect?"
To provide solutions to problems one has to have some expertise in an area. What is my expertise? I am not interested in what I have sold as a product for thirty years in my "old" career. I am all for new things now, New Media, new adventures.
For me, expertise is more than just knowledge or experience about some aspect of human mental, spiritual or bodily activity. It has first of all have to be some aspect of being human that fascinates me, that excites me, that I am prone to spend time and energy on, that challenges me and makes the juices flow. In a word, passion, or, since the word has recently been bandied around so much, that which is near the core of my being, the soul of life, my raison d'etre.
I shall be looking to identify this in the next few weeks. I don't seek followers or "influence" as much as I want to create supports for the energetics of creativity and productivity in my life. I have halfway learned to look inside myself for that excitement that verges on creativity. Company, friendships, loves are welcome but at this stage of life I know the buck stops with me. Notwithstanding I'm still a social creature like ants and bees and emigrating herds of gnus and Canada geese: why not utilize the benefits of community? Social media is community as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan in his famous prediction of the arrival of the "global village." Ethernet community is not the same as flesh-and-blood community. It is better. In some ways, any way.
So, the formula is: Find my passion and delineate within it expertise. From expertise offer what others may be useful or even necessary. Between the two, create.
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