This is part 1 of a 3 post series.
An extract from Sonja Falvo's new eBook: http://www.sonjafalvo.com/books.html
I won’t spend too much time on the whys about participating in social media. You’re likely reading this because you’re already convinced of the benefits of it. In the simplest terms though, it offers the potential to widen the reach of your message exponentially without the need for an enormous budget.
Skip this part if you’re already a social media advocate but if you’re still wondering, Reed’s law states it best:
The value of potential connectivity is the value of the set of available transactions that are afforded by the system or network.
This means if a bunch of people (say five) want to hear at least one crazy thing I’m saying, you and the other crazy four people might also know five crazy people and each of those five know another five etc. etc.
In even simpler terms and for brevity’s sake, Reed’s law states it on one neat line:
2N – N – 1 = potential connections
(N is the value of participants. E.g. the above example was 5 participants)
Let’s change the value to 100 participants and see what happens…
2100 – 100 – 1 = 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376
That’s a lot of crazy people!
The reason this is so relevant and even more likely to occur on social media is that communication methods are super-charged here. Imagine a more traditional approach. If I rang you instead and told you:
The secret is... that it's all so bloody simple we can't even believe it
Would you call another five people and would those five in turn do the same? No, it’s just too hard! There’s too much time and effort needed with little reward. And I’m sure you have better things to do than tell people a whole load of gibberish. It has to be something so outlandishly crazy, highly relevant or inspiring enough to outweigh all that phone calling, chit chat effort. The other interesting factor is the relevance of any message disintegrates over time. The time it takes for this phone process to spread my message reduces its relevance even further
Was it even relevant to begin with?
This doesn’t happen to the same extent on social media. The time and effort for spreading messages is significantly lessened, so Reed’s Law is so much more likely to occur. Also, because communication effort is very low (often just a click), the necessity of a higher quality message (to outweigh effort) is significantly less. It will more likely happen. This means communication is primed and ready for your message on social media.
So, it’s good to know that our messages can even be crappy and still spread far, wide and very quickly!
This occurs…. Over and over again on social media – it’s happening right now. Does that sound all too good to be true? We’ll in some ways it is….
NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT YOUR MESSAGE (OR MINE)
Social media is so much bigger than Ben Hur and has conquered more places and people than the Roman Empire did 10-fold. With all this exponential growth (people joining and communicating on social media with crappy messages every second), our wonderful non-crappy messages sink before we even type.
I’ve got a few thousand people following / connected to me on Twitter & LinkedIn combined but truth be known, I rarely read what 99% of those people are saying. It’s not just that I don’t care, it’s because the sheer volume takes too much processing time. I’ve got a little baby girl, a wonderful wife, an online marketing job and a small business to keep happy. You can understand why reading / replying to thousands of messages hitting my social media streams, can’t be something I care too much about. I’m sure my followers feel the same. In fact, they probably don’t even spare the thought I just gave them.
Basically we’re a selfish bunch and on social media it’s not at all different. We go online primarily to meet our needs. So, if your message doesn’t directly address what people need, it’s not worthy of attention.
When you’ve fallen into a black hole, look for that spot of light – that’s the gateway
Now you know the hurdle, let’s jump over it!
TRIBES, THE GATEWAY IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA BLACK HOLE
There’s no need to get depressed. Firstly, if you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you’ll know that a sense of belonging is a core value for the majority of us. So that’s the stickiness of social media. Within all its vastness, it still offers us an easy way to find and form social groups based on shared values.
Since Seth Godin’s introduction to all this tribal stuff in marketing, we have commonly accepted calling these groupings “tribes” and they do function very much as you’d imagine tribes should. Individual tribes have a shared set of values, they have tribal markings (communication styles) and they too have tribal leaders.
One attribute of a great tribal leader is the ability to connect to other tribal leaders but more so it is the ability to facilitate connections between them. This transforms a linear “one to many” relationship into a circular “many to many” relationship, increasing a larger tribal circumference and strengthening its bonds.
On social media, don’t just find and foster connections but facilitate connections between others. This addresses the primary need of belonging and creates a larger tribal network as a platform to spread a collective set of values / messages. But in case I’m losing you right now, I know someone who’s doing some great tribal leadership work for his business; because what he’s doing and how it is unfolding is very apt, I have interviewed him.
His name is Robin Dickinson:
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