The problem is that people that aren’t part of any communities are trying to tell people what to do with communities. It’s not realistic. They don’t know what they’re talking about and lead people down the path to being shunned Encyclopedia Salesmen like they are. This doesn’t matter to them, because they’re not actually FRIENDS with anyone they’re “Friends” with. It’s all an attempt to eventually make money off of the people they’ve connected with.

I have a friend whom I think is great as a person and a fun, sexy & attractive gal, but she’s a straight up SHILL. She doesn’t say ANYTHING in social media that doesn’t have to do with the company she works for… So… Every time I see her name on something, it gets ignored. I never even get to the subject of the email (since my Social Media updates come to me through email). It doesn’t matter. She’s demonstrated that the only reason she says anything is for her company’s benefit and there’s no personal value in ANY of it.

That’s fine, and it doesn’t make me like her any less as a person and it doesn’t make her any less HAWT! :P~~~ but she’s made herself a walking, talking commercial, and I don’t watch commercials anymore. They get Fast Forwarded on my DVR. GoodBye! :D

Meanwhile, my friend Dave and I recently teamed up to create a Presence Management agency. Getting started and deciding what we’re going to do has been taking up a lot of my time lately, so it comes up in conversation when people mention I’ve been much less visible lately than I’ve been for the last three years. It comes up as an explanation, but ends up with people asking what services we’re providing. Once I tell them that, they start thinking about whether they or someone they know can utilize our team to increase the quality of their business’s presence or just free up time that they were spending on things they didn’t WANT to do but that they HAVE to do.

The result is that between our individual sets of clients and people who have expressed interest before we ever made any form of “hard sell” (because we still haven’t), we already have more interest than we currently have time to convert. We’re figuring out solutions to this, which is causing us to spend even MORE time on our project.

The POINT is that for us to talk about the business all the time, and have everything we do point to the business and ask people for business and tell them to tell their friends about the business and get involved in things JUST so we can get our names out there, etc etc, we would be making people LESS interested in what we have to say, not MORE interested.

Last I checked, I had 1,635 Facebook friends. I would guess that about 100 of those people might have a positive reaction to me shilling about business all day and all night. That means that 1,535 people would have a NEGATIVE reaction, IMO. Obviously, alienating the majority of your viewership/readership isn’t worth the relatively minute amount of conversion you’ll generate, so leave it out.

This is what a lot of people don’t get, because they only “Friended” people in order to sell them stuff in the first place.

This whole thing is kind of funny. We’ve been using Social Media for years already for what it is… Social… Media… It’s BEING SOCIAL, THROUGH MEDIA. That’s all it is. :)

At some point, people realized that they had audiences and might have been able to get those audiences to do something, so it became a marketing tool.

The *ONLY* reason I was on Twitter two years ago was because my friends from the Yahoo Videoblogging Group started using Twitter to communicate with each other and I had a built-in community. I was following the people whose content I was watching ANYWAY. I was following the people whose emails I was reading ANYWAY. The people following me were reading/watching/listening to my content ANYWAY. I’ve never had any interest in having people follow me for no reason, but that’s what people want now. They see an opportunity for their voice to be heard… by ANYBODY, and they want to convert that into business or fame.

So, what’s happened is that people are getting involved with SM *ONLY* to sell stuff to people. They’re missing the real point of why SM’s effective. You’re supposed to be being SOCIAL through your MEDIA. That’s what makes people wonder what you’re going to do next and subscribe or follow you. You end up “giving the people what they want” instead of trying to push your own agenda on a supposedly captive audience.

I think DOING instead of TELLING is really important if your goal is to be perceived as a credible resource in your niche. Anybody can tell a client to make a video and put it on an internet video host and embed it in their blog and advertise it and reply to the comments they receive… That doesn’t bring the client ANY CLOSER to achieving all that stuff. That just makes them aware of what they need to do or have done for them.

Another reason DOING’s so important is that a lot of people only understand things by example. I don’t have to tell people I have > 1,500 Facebook friends.. I can just send them to my page and they can see it for themselves.

Demonstrating by example get you way more credit than telling people that you do something, but there’s no evidence of it. People can CLAIM that they can help your business, but there’s no list of businesses that they’ve ever helped. People can CLAIM to be production companies, but there’s no list of productions they ever were hired for. People can CLAIM to be Emmy Judges (which would be a dumb idea, hahaha), but I have the disks to prove it. :D

Cheers! :D