Trumblog

Search Engine Journal’s Jennifer Horowitz wrote last week about the  The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media, which got me thinking about the Seven Virtues and reinforcing the positive rather than the negative in order to reap the rewards of marketing in social media.

1. Chastity (which I am defining as “Courage and boldness. Embracing of moral wholesomeness.” As opposed to some variant of purity): Right now,  in a social network somewhere, people are talking about your industry, your brand, the problems that your product or services solve.  You should be a part of that conversation.  As a participant you can help your perspective customers, express your point of view and build up good will as a member of the community; good will that may be necessary when someone else disparages you or something bad is posted on YouTube.  Take a deep breath and jump into the conversation.

2. Temperence: Listening, not talking, is the most important part of a conversation.  First you should use Google Alerts and monitor the Twittersphere to find the conversations that you should be involved in.  Then listen to those conversations before getting involved.  Understand who the community is, what their interests are and how to be a member of the community; don’t just launch into a sales pitch.  Marketing missteps in social media don’t reduce results they can lead to negative results.  The self-control that you show will pay off in better relationships and more effective marketing down the road.

3. Charity: Content is the currency of social media and social networks.  That content can be text, photos, graphics, video, audio, etc. and members of the community who are interested in your content will want to share it with their community.  Making that content free and easily shared increases the speed that it is  spread to a wider audience.  Make sure that your content is creative commons licensed so that others can use it (with appropriate credit) and available in common formats.  Give your content away and reap the rewards.

4. Diligence: If you are making your content available you need to ensure that it can be found.  Using a variety of the free services available for distributing media is crucial.  Make sure that your blog and press releases have an RSS feed.  Bookmark your posts on Del.icio.us.  For photos and graphics use Flicker and Picasa, for video use YouTube, for audio and video podcasts make sure that they can be subscribed to on iTunes and Zune Marketplace.  Even PowerPoint can be shared through Slideshare.  Distributing your media in this helps your core audience find it, creates the opportunity for your content to be discovered by secondary audiences and increases your visibility in search engine results.

5. Patience: Don’t expect success overnight or be lured by “get friends quick schemes.”  The number of friends and followers as a metric is the same as the number of hits on a website; it tells a superficial and artificially good story.  It’s not the number of connections that you have it’s the way that these connections pay off.   Cultivating relationships with a small set of influential members of the community may be better than many less engaged “friends”.  Finding those fans, understanding them and relating to them takes effort, but the payoff of their good words about you and their influence on the larger community is what you are really after, not thousands of superficial connections.

6. Kindness: Social media is a community and maintaining that community takes manners and respect.  Be the nice guy not the jerk. Be the one who is answering, supporting, providing help, and having a dialogue not the blowhard with a message who turns a conversation into a monologue.   That listening, giving and time that I described before leads to the relationships that will benefit you in the long run. Be a part of social media rather than a user of it.

7. Humility: Give credit and share the love.  Find something interesting? Pass it on.  Link to your friends and inspiration. Digg that blog post that you just read.  Comment on that great photograph that you found.  Retweet the amazing insight that one of your friends had. In social media there is no greater love than to have what you have shared shared again therefore increasing reach and audience.

Finally, consider the golden rule in all your actions within social media and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

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