by Gary Powell
Austin psychotherapist, Amy Person, gave me the perfect metaphor for explaining how we might maintain a professional presence within our social networks, whether it is Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, or some other social site. She contends that your social networks are an ongoing 24-hour a day convention for your business. To make the point, I’ll write only about Facebook. Please apply this idea to all your social networks which you intend to use professionally.
Yes, your Facebook Wall is an ongoing 24-hour a day convention for your business. In that, the content you post on Facebook, or any other social networking site, should be tightly controlled and consistent with your goals and then purposefully managed for the benefit of your convention-goers. We all want to attract people who will derive some benefit from our services and therefore visit often, and possibly even hire us or buy our products. We want them to see us as a valuable resource, right? Think of your future business leads and then consider how you would like them to see you. Are they interested in ground-breaking facts about your new hair color? How about that fascinating esophageal laparoscopic surgery I had this year? Wait, surely your future client, and the one client you have always waited for, will want to be notified when you walk your dog, are warming a can of Campbell’s soup or when you are waiting for your hair to dry.
Worse than just not caring, if they are indeed looking to you as a serious business partner, they will be judging you through what they experience on your site. Therefore, I suggest keeping your Wall as clean as possible and sweep the convention floor as many times a day as needed to control the endless drivel and to keep your content relevant to your goals.
Some personal content at your convention can give visitors insight into who you are and even humanize you, but Facebook is notoriously permissive and indulgent of a ridiculous level of triviality. Maybe you don’t have a problem with that, but you probably don’t want it on your convention floor either. Scrub the floors with great purpose. Deliver positive, helpful information through all the media you have at hand. Post it on your Wall, Tweet it, Blog it, Flickr it, but don’t trivialize your life, dump your garbage, or air your laundry there. Once you run a well-organized convention, your Facebook audience will grow in a healthy way and keep coming back. And maybe, most importantly, Google will love you for your efforts.
Helpful? Then Copy, Paste and Tweet It:
How Social Media is Your Convention Floor. http://tinyurl.com/6re9g5
All Content of Gary Powell’s Site is Licensed Under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License
.
by Gary Powell
Austin psychotherapist, Amy Person, gave me the perfect metaphor for explaining how we might maintain a professional presence within our social networks, whether it is Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, or some other social site. She contends that your social networks are an ongoing 24-hour a day convention for your business. To make the point, I’ll write only about Facebook. Please apply this idea to all your social networks which you intend to use professionally.
Yes, your Facebook Wall is an ongoing 24-hour a day convention for your business. In that, the content you post on Facebook, or any other social networking site, should be tightly controlled and consistent with your goals and then purposefully managed for the benefit of your convention-goers. We all want to attract people who will derive some benefit from our services and therefore visit often, and possibly even hire us or buy our products. We want them to see us as a valuable resource, right? Think of your future business leads and then consider how you would like them to see you. Are they interested in ground-breaking facts about your new hair color? How about that fascinating esophageal laparoscopic surgery I had this year? Wait, surely your future client, and the one client you have always waited for, will want to be notified when you walk your dog, are warming a can of Campbell’s soup or when you are waiting for your hair to dry.
Worse than just not caring, if they are indeed looking to you as a serious business partner, they will be judging you through what they experience on your site. Therefore, I suggest keeping your Wall as clean as possible and sweep the convention floor as many times a day as needed to control the endless drivel and to keep your content relevant to your goals.
Some personal content at your convention can give visitors insight into who you are and even humanize you, but Facebook is notoriously permissive and indulgent of a ridiculous level of triviality. Maybe you don’t have a problem with that, but you probably don’t want it on your convention floor either. Scrub the floors with great purpose. Deliver positive, helpful information through all the media you have at hand. Post it on your Wall, Tweet it, Blog it, Flickr it, but don’t trivialize your life, dump your garbage, or air your laundry there. Once you run a well-organized convention, your Facebook audience will grow in a healthy way and keep coming back. And maybe, most importantly, Google will love you for your efforts.
Helpful? Then Copy, Paste and Tweet It:
How Social Media is Your Convention Floor. http://tinyurl.com/6re9g5
All Content of Gary Powell’s Site is Licensed Under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License
.
words well taken and I can learn from this blog myself…Time to start sweeping! Thank you Gary. Looking forward to you teaching some of this gainful insight to my students. It is something that I believe is most important to further their careers in the right direction.
Debbie Bello