Your Succussful Social Community starts with engagement – Ends with respect.

In the last post we talked about two social media strategies

1. Becoming part of existing communities
2. Creating a community around your brand and/or cause

The first is less resource intensive yet less long-term growth potential. The latter has more potential to create a significant impact yet requires a longer-term and more significant investment of resources.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. - find out what it means to... your social community.

Your ultimate goal is to become a trusted and respected member of the community(ies) in which you participate. PERIOD. Increased sales $, # of click-throughs, # of referrals are all important benchmarks and indicators of performance / success. Don’t, however, focus your interactions in the social media space on these indicators. Focus on becoming a trusted and respected member of the community. Done correctly, your success in social media will lead to an increase in sales, click-throughs and referrals; not because you are on Twitter or active on Facebook, but because you are trusted and respected.

Surprisingly, this is a difficult concept for some to grasp, but it’s quite similar to most social communities online and offline. Let’s draw an analogy to the offline situation. Consider you join an offline community – organization; perhaps a chamber of commerce or an industry organization. When you first joined you took a while to get to know the organization, the leaders, the members, the way things are done. The first meeting you didn’t walk in, go up to the first person you saw and start pushing your “stuff”, right? I’ll bet most of the times you probably didn’t “push your stuff”, did you. You may mention your “stuff” from time to time, but you didn’t approach the members with,

• “Hey, buy my stuff”
• “I’ve got a great sale on my stuff”
• “Please refer people to me who will buy my stuff”.

You got to know people – as people first and potential clients second. You engaged in conversation. What were their interests? What was THEIR work about? What was important to THEM? You’d try to get to know more about them and listen for ways you could follow up later; for ideas to share that would be helpful; maybe tell a funny story.

Online networking is the same. Think about how you can use social media to get to know people (your community) better and add value to their world. If you have a blog, think about how you can use your blog as a tool to create value for your readers. What is this “value”? It depends, but typically we all need / want to be:

• Informed
• Educated
• Entertained

Developing a relationship in person or though social media, you have to give people a reason to want to interact with you. If you truly engage with your community through relevant, interesting dialogue (relevant & interesting to THEM) then you’ll be successful. Online or offline, make no mistake – social media is business. Marketing, customer service or otherwise – social media in business is also SOCIAL. Social media is not just a marketing channel to “push your stuff”.

A social community’s  raison d‘etre is an online venue for people who share a common interest (the community members) – to engage; to commune. Commune…Community. Get it? The objective of your social media strategy is to commune; engage and become part of the community, whether the platform is Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn, a blog, a Blip.tv channel or a Slideshare account. Engage and become part of the community, whether it’s your own social online community (#2 above) or a community built around another brand or cause (#1).

Being social and being helpful is the key to being successful in social media. Always think about how you can help (inform, educate, entertain) others. That’s how you build awareness and influence in the communities where you participate. That’s how you become trusted and respected.