Know where you’re going so you can get yourself there

Posted on | December 31, 2009 | 2 Comments

There are any number of places I could have gone to find my last post of 2009 but I decided to go with the obvious.

The big politics and policy story of 2009 (if you want to by-pass Inauguration Day) was undoubtedly health care reform. I’m not going to write about it; I found it tedious when it was happening and I have no desire to rehash it here right now.

But the big online microbusiness story of 2009, which I haven’t heard put this way anywhere (although that might just mean I need to get out more, in terms of what I’m reading), is social media … specifically Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to the fact that the year has hatched a bevy of self-declared overnight social media “gurus” — once upon a time, people were polite enough to wait until somebody else dubbed them a guru but now I guess it is standard operating procedure to simple assume the guru title for yourself without waiting for validation — this was the year that both those social media platforms (as well as LinkedIn did albeit in less spectacular fashion) reached critical mass, for a variety of reasons.

Small business owners and microbusiness owners latched onto social media (especially Twitter) because it was a really low cost method for networking and marketing, low cost being particularly relevant when the economy is in the tank.

The maturing of Twitter also happened to coincide with the apparent disintegration of the traditional infrastructure of the news business. Journalists came to Twitter to make connections and source stories and follow breaking news, and everybody else in the world who had any reason to want to connect with journalists followed them there.

Ditto for politicians.

One of the most important values of Twitter is that it makes all sorts of people appear to be more accessible — even when they’re not.

I got to thinking about all this thanks to a recent post written by a recent connection of mine from Twitter.

Rachel’s dilemma is really interesting because I think it’s pretty common, so that the answers are worth exploring for all of us.

Rachel’s basic problem is not necessarily that she wants to make connections and develop relationships via social media. She seems pretty confident about having done that and done it well. But she is having trouble figuring out how to translate the connections she has made into action.

In other words, Rachel asks, how do I get people to do stuff?

A home question. Because, if you stop and think about it, that is the central question of business, isn’t it? How do you get people to do something they would not have otherwise done, whether that’s buying your product/service or buying your product/service from you rather than from somebody else, or whatever.

And, as you can see when you get towards the end of Rachel’s post, it comes down to figuring out what your social media goals are, doesn’t it?

What are you doing there on Twitter or Facebook, anyway?

Rachel says she wants to be “popular” and that she wants to be “heard” but it really sounds to me like she wants to be able to get people to do stuff … which is close but not quite the same thing.

(And, for the record, it seems to me that Rachel already has an authentic voice … so that’s something she really doesn’t need to worry about.)

Or maybe it’s just that she wants to be able to invite people to join her at a restaurant in Mankato, MN and actually have more than one person besides herself show up. It still comes down to getting people to do something they wouldn’t ordinarily do.

And that’s not about being popular, at least not at first. It’s about having or developing relationships.

It’s about tweeting back and forth with enough locals so that eventually a pair of you say, “You know, it would be really cool if we could sit down for coffee face-to-face. Say, do you know @So-and-So? She’s right down the road in St. Clair, let me DM her and get her to join us, you’ll love her!”

And then you mention that to somebody else, who surprises you by saying that they’re fine with schleping in from Perth, it’d be fun to get together with some Minnesota tweeps.

And that’s enough.

What’s important to understand is that, to start with, you can’t expect to pull together the same sort of crowd as @PRSarahEvans of #journchat fame can, because you’re not her and you haven’t developed her reach — yet.

And early on, you don’t really want to pull together that kind of a crowd.

To start with, you get together with just the four of you, because that’s a small enough group for genuine connections and deepening bonds to be formed.

So, you four go and you have a really good time drinking beer and eating pizza (or whatever you eat and drink in Mankato). And, of course, at least two of you are tweeting the whole thing and everybody who follows the two tweeters are livid with envy that they are missing all the fun.

Next time you guys decide you want to get together for beer and pizza, you’ll make your date in public via Twitter again and — well, wouldja lookit that! — suddenly, an extra five or six people ask if they can join you.

And maybe, in a month or two, you’ll ask who is attending that conference in San Francisco and find that a bunch of tweeps make arrangements to meet you there.

And so on. You build. It takes time.

And that is part one of the moral of this story. If your purpose on Twitter is to turn yourself into an influencer, you will find that it takes time to seed the universe that you want to place yourself at the center of.

Part two of the moral of this story is this: before you jump through all these hoops, ask yourself whether being at the center of your own personal universe is what you really want. What will that get you, besides ego fodder? There are some kinds of businesses and professional services in which being well-known, with legions of followers like your own personal herd of lemmings, will get you a lot of business.

But famous is not the same thing as influential. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter that everybody doesn’t know who you are, as long as certain people know who you are.

In my line of work, for example, it doesn’t matter that Guy Kawasaki doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. But if President Obama knew who I was, I wouldn’t have to care if nobody else had ever heard of me.

Maybe you don’t need to be popular. Maybe you just need to make the right connections.

Which brings us to part three of the moral of the story: before you can figure any of this out — do you need to be popular? famous? influential? well-connected? — you need to know what the goal is.

Are you looking for referrals? Do you need to be able to go behind the scenes and get exclusive information? Do you want to influence the thinking of the influential thinkers, so that you eventually become an influential thinker yourself? Do you want to be insanely popular so that you’ll get voted in as Homecoming Queen?

This should be a basic part of your planning for 2010 because you have to know by now that you can’t ignore social media anymore. If you’re not already there, you really need to jump on this particular bandwagon.

But, when you arrive, have a plan so that you don’t have to waste a year trying to figure out how this social media stuff should be working for you.

Know what your social media goals are and know why those are your goals (what those goals will accomplish for you). Then you can put together a social media strategy that will get you from Point A, where you are now, to Point B, where you want to be.

And, truth to tell, that is advice you can apply to just about anything, isn’t it?

Happy New Year!

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