Last week I was invited to give a lecture on social media at George Brown College here in Toronto (see presentation below).
Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., there’s so much you can cover.
But given just a little over an hour, I really didn’t want to get into any of those things.
That’s because those things are merely “mediums” (media is plural for medium).
And as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message”. It’s not the content that’s communicated that’s important, but the character of the medium itself.
In the case of social media, the importance lies in the “social” part.
If there’s one thing I wanted to stress to future marketers, is to understand the meaning of social.
Social media means two way communication, it involves both listening and talking.
When it comes to business, people can not only be anti-social, but narcisistic.
People don’t care about your business, they care about what your business can do for them (e.g. save time or money, solve a problem, create an opportunity).
So if people don’t care about your business, and all your business does is talk about itself, there’s a problem.
Enter my #1 rule for social media success…
Everyone matters on Social Media except you.
I call it the “reverse narcissism rule”.
It’s not to say you’re not important. The point is to approach social media with a “social” first attitude.
Understand (really understand) that social means two-way communication, and that means that everyone else is as important as you.
Is your business not getting enough exposure? Try giving exposure to other businesses.
Not getting enough blog comments? Try posting more comments on other blogs.
Not getting enough business referrals? Try being a referrer to other businesses.
You get the idea.
As a rule of thumb, promote other people 10x as much as you promote yourself and/or your business.
People will inherently return the favour (not all the time, of course) because people are inherently social.
So whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, remember: the “social” always comes before the “media”.
This is so helpful but also so hard to do. I love how practical some of this advice is, such as, “Not getting enough referrals? Try referring other businesses.” It’s also so incredibly true that people don’t care about you or your story, they care about what you can do for them. I’ve seen so many projects where people think, “My project is so special because of [X],” when in reality, nobody cares about [X]. We all care about our own projects so much more than other people and need to realize that it’s a marketer’s job to find a real reason why people should care, not just the fact that you exist as an option and personally care a lot about your brand.