I’m enjoying the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. It focuses on how social media transforms the way we live and do business. And, I agree. Social media is just another form of communication and those formats are ever changing – as we see with the extinction of the pay phone.
One particular excerpt I enjoyed was the topic of “Assessing You Life Every Minute”. Addressing that age-old question of “What am I doing with my life’, Qualman quotes Bill Tily, from a personal interview. Tily at the age of 83 shares,
I actually made a habit of physically printing out my social media updates from the previous month and going through them one by one and highlighting updates that were necessarily contributing to a “full” life. Over time, I reduced the amount of “waste” and actually became so cognizant of it during the actually act of updating my stats that I’d recognized in that specific moment in time what I would deem an “unfruitful activity” and cease engaging in it immediately. I wish these social media tools were around a long time ago!”
How many of us have ever printed out our updates in Facebook , Twitter or LinkedIn; or our blog posts and comments we’ve made regarding blog posts?
Would our communication be something that we would be ‘proud’ of?
Take the challenge and look at just this last week’s updates and leave feedback in the comment section below on how you fared.
A recent survey by Hubpages, found that people find that 84% of status updates are negative.
Define
Use your updates to DEFINE your brand and share what makes you unique. Focus on those things and look that every Facebook status update, every Twitter tweet, every linked in news update – does each one support the definition of who you are? Do they exude your brand attributes or excrete something different?
Refine
Next, REFINE your updates. No doubt there will be negative stuff that happens in our lives. The key question to ask before you post about these events (and it’s actually the same question to ask yourself in real life – even if it has nothing to do with posting to anywhere), is this: What can I learn from what I’m experiencing?
Now, share what you’ve learned in your update.
This will refine your communication to be genuine and yet more valuable because there’s a problem and solution (or solution mindset) that you are communicating. That will refine your communication to being on brand and ultimately make your updates and brand attributes more visible and viral as people “like” your update or retweet it.
