In the social media world we model the journey people make from becoming concious of the environment to making it cohesive in business terms thus:
I sense that annoyance on Social Media websites such as Ecademy often arises when people are in different parts of this journey. New members becoming concious of the environment may seek to sell, or overtly market their services whilst others are seeking conversation.
When you talk to people face to face, you don’t add a whole advertising piece after each speaking part. The conversation flows because one thought expressed leads to another and people converse through a mutual desire to understand and to be understood. So, if we don’t know if we are marketing, advertising, selling, conversing or something else we aren’t going to get a good understanding.
Advertising isn’t bad, but advertising in the wrong place and time is. We don’t call a dog food advert in a commercial break spam, but if David Tennant had suggested we all took up smoking small cigars in the recent production of Hamlet we might have felt cheated and annoyed. Most annoyance occurs because our expectations aren’t met or are met in the wrong way.
On-line then we need to be careful – are our words and links and signatures appropriate, it’s probably OK on an article to link to our websites and have a signature which advertises our other services, but not in the conversation that ensues. I used to think otherwise, but the more I think about the 5 C’s model the more that I see the importance of thinking about how what you do would translate into the ‘real world’ – After all, what is the on-line world emulating? Marketing/Advertising, or conversation? On Ecademy’s marketplace we are clearly advertising and marketing, so we should, but on the blogs pages we are mostly seeking conversation, and cooperation. Sales and Marketing may crop up en passant, but in general we should act as we would when having a face to face conversation, dealing with uncertainty, correcting misunderstanding, exploring the topic and having tangential discussions. Big signatures, overt selling and marketing is just an interruption and just as annoying.
In general, our websites advertise and inform, our free standing blogs market us and our products, share knowledge and add to our credibility – they tend not to be that conversational, but our social networking is conversation, so let’s be chatty, be open, and gain the understanding of each other that helps us all grow. In addition each conversation can be left, rejoined, developed, or ignored, now or later, or interrupted with inappropriate stuff. It really is up to us how they progress.
If we strive not to interrupt 2010 may be the year we all have the best conversations of our lives.
