Social Media is Not About You

Social Media is such an easy way to reach the many and varied communities on the Internet that it has become the darling of would be marketers who often are enmeshed in marketing 1.0 and take all of their preconceptions with them when they start to write.

I just read a blog written by an real estate broker, who spoke about how they were writing this initial blog because they were going to teach leading edge technology to their agents. Now maybe I’m overly critical, but it seems to me that it might be helpful to have done something before you begin to teach it. Especially something that has long term implications and never goes away once its published to the web. So like may other writers before, this person starts writing about them and their perceptions without having the experience to determine what might be effective in this milieu.

I am a firm believer that Social Media as a business vehicle is a platform that does need, at some point, to have a commercial benefit. What that commercial benefit may be, or how the writer may realize a benefit from the content they publish is so varied that it is difficult to measure in any effective manner. However, just as it is obvious that people do not want their lives to be interrupted by your advertising message, it is obvious that readers can easily discern when your message is self-serving, and when they do, they will not read you nor trust you, defeating the commercial purpose even before it comes to fruition.

In this new social media person’s world for example, posting your listings on Facebook is a great use of that platform. If I “friend” a person, and their newsfeed consists of their listings, I will be “un-friending” them pretty fast. If I wanted advertising, I would go to a web site which shows me large amounts of listings from large amounts of brokers. I wouldn’t want my day interrupted by single photo listings of random properties, and their abuse of the social portion of the network would have me feeling that they had betrayed our social contract.

I don’t mean to suggest that they should not be inserted into your social media effort, but they need to be inserted in the spirit of the community. If the intended results of your actions as an individual in the world of social media is to generate trust, then you need to think about whether your actions will be perceived as sales efforts (not engendering trust), or efforts to share knowledge and expertise with your community (which does engender trust). And when people trust you they are pre-disposed to do business with you, in either the physical or virtual worlds.

Tags: Advertising, Business, Facebook, Marketing, real estate, Real estate broker, Social Media, Twitter