A Guest Post by Linda M. Lopeke
Running a successful business comes down to how well you manage your numbers. Social media enthusiasts often rave about the new medium as an expressway for growing higher revenue. But building successful networks and communities is not about numbers, it’s about creating and sustaining high-trust relationships. Building relationships takes time and energy in both real life, business, and social media. Your statistics, as in “number of friends”, “number of social engagements attended”, and “number of followers” are not an indicator of your success in the relationship economy.
Businesses and marketers will spend over $350 billion on slick campaigns designed to attract you into entering into a relationship with them in the coming year. They want you to spend your conversational currency interacting with and responding to their ever growing number of advertising messages.
Some will produce meaningful and worthy content to seduce you into engagement. A few will respect and perhaps even admire you for the unique person/prospect/customer you are. Many will only add to the noise and clutter that bloat Twitter and every other social networking site in the universe; to them you’ll just be one of a number. Even fewer will get it right (after all Liz Strauss, Chris Brogan and others like them can only help so many people understand how to use social media properly at a time).
If you talk to everyone, how long will it be before your time and energy are exhausted, leaving you emotionally bankrupt, with nothing left to share with those with whom you once had a meaningful relationship?
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The SMARTSTART Coach, Linda M. Lopeke, writes at SmartStartCoach.com Her twitter name is @smartstartcoach
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Thank you, Linda!
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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