Successful Blog

How Social Media Is Like Sex Education

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At First Blush …

The thought struck me as I was leaving an offsite meeting I spoke at not long ago. The presentation was about using social media to share your story. The group was all from the same company, but to a person their experience with social media was varied. Some were avid fans who logged onto Twitter daily. Some were curious and experimenting. Some were living in fear of the stories that if they tried anything horrible, unforgivable things would happen.

As I headed home after a fabulous conversation that got the group thinking, I found myself realizing that sharing information about how social media works is a lot like sex education.

5 Ways Social Media Is Like Sex Education

At first blush, it might seem a reach to you to connect these two topics. But as I look back on my experience in that corporate meeting and other meetings like that and compare them to my experiences as both a student and a teacher of sex education certain compelling similarities stand out. I’d like to share them.

  1. Beginners, experimenters, and the experienced In every group and every meeting, we have those who know nothing, who know some, and who have experience. To make it interesting for all of them, storytelling is still the best way to relate new information or give context to those who might need a refresher.
  2. Definitions and history The simple definitions are necessary, but deep explanations and history of best practices are only fascinating to folks who already know the basics.
  3. Pictures, diagrams, and conversation Powerpoints and pictures might underscore what the presenter is saying, but they’re not the same as hands on experience. No matter the room or the age group, the role of the presenter needs to be like a blog post — a short burst of information followed by comments, and questions. If the meeting becomes a guided conversation the participants ask their questions and follow their curiosity. The whole group learns more from each other than they could ever take from a presentation.
  4. Safety and reputation Frank talk about keeping ourselves safe from “malware” and viruses is crucially important. And in our enthusiasm for these new “fun” interactions, we all need to touch base with our values to decide how we will be appropriately social without being promiscuous or shameless in our relationships.
  5. Revisiting the information If you are, like I am, a student of social media, you know that scaffolding — returning and revisiting the information as we gather experience — is important. After we try a few things, it’s good to explore what we know, what want to learn, and what we didn’t understand the first time we tried what we’re doing.

And the test for success of great social media presentation can be likened to a test for a great talk on sex education …

If you

move the audience from fascination with the tools and the transaction,

steer them clear of harassing behavior and selfishness

show them the marvelous and meaningful relationships

that are enhanced through sincere concern for others,

then your social media class will be better because they knew you.

(and so will your class on sex education.)

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Bid for the Presidency…Tweeted? What Does that Mean to YOU?

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Guest Post
by Riley Kissel

On May 11th, House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced he’s running for President of the United States. According to CNN, he officially announced his intentions to run via the popular social networking site, Twitter.

Anyone who takes their online marketing seriously needs to pay attention to the 2012 election starting now. Political action at the national level was always executed with the intent to cast the biggest net possible, similar to business advertising, but those tactics are changing. In traditional politics the customers transcend all market “types”. There’s a particular focus put on the means to reach everybody all at once through television or radio, because votes can come from anyone, kind of like how money can leave anyone’s pocket and go into your business. But today’s political arena is focused on strike force access to niche markets through social media, with the expectation that these strikes will go viral and the effort will be more cost effective than alternative mass-media means. Your entrepreneurial arena is undoubtedly the same.

President Barack Obama is estimated to raise $1 billion dollars for his re-election campaign. This number is unprecedented in presidential politics, but it won’t be for long. President Obama’s comparatively enormous war chest is the result of his presidential efforts back in 2008. Obama was the first national politician in American history to utilize the power of social media and social networking effectively. Nearly half of that figure was attained through donations of $200 or below made online. It wasn’t that Obama pulled the right strings, it’s that his team saw the possibilities of these online marketing techniques when opponents hadn’t yet. Never again will a serious presidential contender not have Twitter and Facebook accounts.

What about You?

Consider then, what this says about the future of social media marketing as it applies to your business. I’m assuming you don’t have presidential ambitions, but you can still relate. If no competitor is Tweeting or updating a Facebook status, why aren’t you? If they are, you need to right away. It’s going to be hard to compete against someone who can instantly notify their customers of sales when all you have are weekend coupons. Find an online marketing consultant who can help you get started. Once you’re active in social media, it’s time to utilize it effectively. Big announcements need to be made on it. Subscribe to competition and do a little (perfectly legal) espionage. These are important tasks to achieve when you’re getting your social network foot in the door, and consultation will help.

Television was perhaps the most important communications invention of the last century. People often forget that it wasn’t until the Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960 that the world began to understand the potential of its power to influence and persuade. The Internet will no doubt be the most important piece of communications technology for at least the first half of this century. Don’t wait to let its power start working for you.

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Riley Kissel is a freelance writer who covers many industries with style. You can find out more about him at RileyKissel.com

Thanks, Riley, for simply showing how great thinking has built great success.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Does Your Business Embrace Technology Meaningfully?

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A Guest Post by
Matt Krautstrunk

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As bloggers we understand how important interacting with a community on social media is for exposure. We tend to refer to social as “new media,” however when you think about it, some of the ancient social media channels (Myspace, corporate blogs) have been around for over 7-10 years now. The progress that marketers have made on social media channels has almost pushed the medium to maturity, it’s time for corporate structure to follow!

Building Social Media Into Your Corporate Culture

Social media is being used by more and more people to accomplish almost everything from a job search to answering common questions. Just to reiterate how fast social media is growing. See below: According to Econsultancy

  • Tweets grew 250% since January 2010
  • LinkedIn Users grew 100%
  • Facebook grew from 350 million users to 640 million users in one year

But in the B2B marketing industry, social media should extend deeper than just having a LinkedIn. It should be controlled internally and leveraged within each employee. Your employees can be used as vehicles to spread messages about your company’s products and services. With this obviously comes inherent risk, but since social media such a transparent vertical there should be internal social media policies in conjunction with your marketing strategy.

Social Media Policy

Companies are still trying to find a balance whether they should encourage or hide employee social media use. Everything from, the decision to associate your businesses name with employees on social media to governing social media use, social media policies can be laid out to leverage your marketing strategy internally.

For instance, some companies have requested their employees create a separate Twitter account that is strictly professional. This has two key benefits, one is the fact that businesses are able to gain awareness and engagement from each employee’s Twitter, and the other is minimizing the risks associated with standing behind an employee who tweets inappropriate personal material. Businesses should design a clear policy framework for how social media can be used to create synergies not catastrophes.

Improving Workflow

Embracing social media within your company may have some risks, but empowering employees with social media embrace can help your cause. For example allowing employees to tweet during workdays can improve morale and communication efforts. Strategically integrating tools to work within your business can give meaning to each of your departments, according to Charlene Li, analyst at Execunet (http://insights.execunet.com/index.php/comments/creating_winning_social_media_strategies/best-practices/more) , “Anyone can be influential with these tools. Salesforce.com has a new Twitter-like product and calls the people in the company using it, the “Chatterati.” “This internal social group is the connective tissue in the organization,” Li noted. “There is real value being created as people use these tools to get the job done.” Social media is a core element of these innovative companies communication technology, making their employees better, more informed workers. There is an opportunity here for collaboration in the cloud; your employees will have the ability to express opinions and suggestions easier than ever before.

One of the biggest challenges to embracing social media internally is letting go of control. Executives should embrace this technology meaningfully instead of fearing the repercussions.

_____
Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on document management systems for Resource Nation an online resource that provides advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs. You can find him on Twitter as @mattkrautstrunk

Thanks Matt! Great case for taking social media seriously.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Why Your Request for Help Isn’t Getting A Response

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New Culture, New Thinking

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Whether you’ve been on social web from the beginning or you just got here and whether you work for yourself, for clients, or an employer, if your goal is to grow your business or cause — and if it’s not, why isn’t it? — being able to spread your positive message is critical.

Social business and social media can business development, brand awareness, and marketing so much easier because of the people-centered, networking nature of the tools and culture. What drives social media and social business is the idea that people like to connect with and talk to other people.

The messages we share are important and vital to the causes we care about. Often they’re urgent and vital to the success of the projects and campaigns that we’re working on. Yet we need the help of our networks — our communities of colleagues and friends — to get them out, hopefully to take them viral.

So we put together an idea to spread, a call to action that our advocates and evangelists might talk about and share. The problem is that everyone is trying to be subject of the hour as much as we are and true advocates and evangelists are few. So we reach out further to find volunteers in hopes that they will help us as well.

Why Your Request for Help Isn’t Getting A Response

The problem is that we can get so wrapped up in the value of the “goodness” of what we’re doing that we can forget to pass that goodness on it with our request for help. We use the time to detail the “ask,” without letting the people we’re asking know how and why it’s about them to follow through on it. As a result, the request to help us with our cause, our launch, our contest, and sound selfish and leave folks wondering why they should take time to do it.

We can’t ensure a message with take off like wildfire, go viral, with certainty. It’s a combination of timing, connection, resonance, and a perfect match to the audience. Here are three reasons why a request won’t get much attention at all…

  1. “Buy my stuff” / “help my cause” and “tell everyone” broadcasts. No one has time or resources to do something just because someone asks. It would be silly to do so and we’re not doing our work if we think just saying “buy now,” is enough. These days people get asked so much that lack of a compelling reason to act is enough to be an excuse to say “no.” And passing it on means that we’re only passing more “buy my stuff” noise to our friends.
  2. “Do this because I / we / need you” to share this messages. Research shows that using “because” will raise your odds. But will that raise your odds enough? We’re bombarded by “calls to action” that are really “calls to help” so much so that the nonprofit world has a term called donor fatigue. Our response to such messages is directly proportional to our relationship to the person, business, or the cause that is asking. We can’t give our everything to everyone, can we? And you can’t keep asking every week.
  3. “I’m shameless to ask / feeling guilty to ask / begging, so won’t you share this?” messages. Asking for a favor is a friendship action. If you feel shameless for asking, then you shouldn’t ask. If you don’t, don’t say that you do. Saying you’re shameless is asking me to be shameless with you. If we have a relationship of trust, you can tell me what you need and let me decide.

All three messages stop short. They literally leave out what’s need to connect in way that resonates. If we want the potential to go viral, we need that connection in a human to human way.

These messages ask the receiver to choose between helping out and interrupting, nagging, possibly irritating their own network of friends. That’s pressure that no one enjoys and it often backfires on the sender who may have had the best of intentions.

Very often when I get messages like these, I wonder whether the sender has considered me at all in what they’re asking. I want to reply with “Why should I promote yours and not the other ten I just got? I can’t spent my time or bother my friends promoting all of them.”

As they stand all three messages are missing one powerful piece that is crucial to taking a message viral – a connection to the person we’re asking to pass it on. To make it much more likely that your message will get a chance a long and viral run make the act of doing what you need about the people you ask not about you or your cause.

Be a hero by pitching in $1, http://hero.link [someone will sleep in a warm bed tonight]. Pass it on to heroes you admire.

When you make it easy and help folks like heroes for helping, they more often do.

How often do help and RT requests that make you feel proud to pass them on?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

I’m a proud affiliate of

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28 Telling Responses to 27 Things About Working in Social Media

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In traditional print, writer and reader have static conversation, a disconnected relationship. The writer set forth ideas; then later in another context, the reader reads and considers the ideas. In social media, the conversation is often immediate, sometimes fleeting. People on our blogs or on Twitter read what we write, think about (or not), and add their response, taking the original thought to new places.

The beauty of this dynamic social interchange is that it the original thoughts can be developed, become deeper and broader through community participation.

This week I published a thought piece called 27 Things to Know Before You Work in Social Media, an audience, thoughtful, intelligent, experienced readers — you — contributed thoughts and taking the original to a higher level. Those thoughts deserve a discussion of their own.

Social Media for Business Is Still Business

Though the ROI isn’t always initially apparent, it’s naive to assume that it’s a no return endeavor. Just as a trade show, sales call, or lunch with client can appear to be something else, the relationships forged through social networks serve customers, solve problems, and develop new business. They also require strategy, experience, expertise, execution and customer care — internal and external, online and offline.

… the uncertainty of it all–it’s sometimes the hardest part of trying to convince people of the value when things are changing at the speed of light. …
— Successful-Blog who is @MikeCassidyAZ on Twitter.

I would add that there is nothing virtual about social media. It is in fact grounded in real business application and acumen. Understanding what you are trying to achieve is always the first step. Keep that in mind, be transparent, true and efficient and the rest will follow.
The other truth is to set expectations and practices according to how well you are resourced. If you are committing yourself to an online profile, ensure you have the resources to maintain, manage and effectively meet the expectations you are creating.
— Alasdair Munn who is @ajmunn on Twitter.

My biggest issue is convincing people it’s worth it. There is ROI just like any other form of customer satisfaction has ROI- not always direct.

Another issue is that people think that because they don’t ‘get’ social media that it’s going to disappear.
— @brashley on Twitter.

There is such frustration when walking into a room of “traditional” business professionals and advocating for “social” media…and such potential too. It’s tricky using the potential as enough motivation to battle the frustration. …
— Shayna Walker who is @weddlady on Twitter.

Managing Vocabulary and Expectations.

As we bring this all together, we have the disadvantage of speaking the same language — our conversations rife with hidden assumptions that set conflicting expectations. We straddle two cultures with two similar, but not equivalent vocabularies.

As time passes, we gain experience, our words get clearer and closer. Two years ago, when we said “community” offline, people thought “church” or “Omaha, Nebraska.” Aligning our vocabulary and our expectations can solve problems, decrease conflict, and lower negative perceptions.

I agree with the desire to lose the Social Media title. I tend to look at the process with a wider lens. It’s just part of the digital puzzle that includes optimizing your web site, paid search, integration with non web properties, location and mobile. …
— Gordon Phillips who is @gophillips on Twitter.

One of the things I ponder recently is how to describe what I do when so using the phrase “social media marketing” is considered by people within the social media and marketing to be inaccurate and yet people from outside (current and potential clients) use that phrase to describe what they want help with.

The fast pace of e digital world and the constant arrivals of new tools and changes in the landscape make it a compelling and exciting place to work. But bridging the gap can be confusing and knowing what words to use to convey has me tied up in knots at times.
— Allen Mireles who is @AllenMireles on Twitter.

I think people need to be careful about false expectations. Also, if you’re not flexible by nature, this might not be the right area of work. Being able to roll with the punches and adjust at a moment’s notice are definite temperament requirements.
— Keri Jo Raz who is @KeriJoRaz on Twitter.

Personally investing and detaching really hit home, and Nos. 17 and 19, too. We are in uncharted waters here and it’s nice to know we are all experiencing the frustrations and rewards together.
— Susan Young who is @sueyoungmedia on Twitter.

That no matter how many times you explain it, social media is not free.
— Mike Cassidy who is @MikeCassidyAZ on Twitter.

The Opportunity Is What the Tools Can Do

Explaining that the tools aren’t the end game is the first goal and problem. Simply picking up the tools doesn’t get us anywhere, any more than routing through a huge red chest of workman’s tools. The tool chest isn’t the end game, the opportunity is what a craftsman can do with the tools. Not everyone is ready to see the house that a gifted team might build, but those that do have the advantage.

28. Just because you use the tools personally doesn’t mean you have a grasp on how to leverage them for a business.

29. Unless you start at a strong brand or within a strong community it takes more offline work than online work to be great at your job. If you don’t have offline skills then don’t bother applying to do online work.

30. You will need to engage, interact and drive your businesses community to action; not the “social media” people you follow and talk to all day. There is a difference.

31. That your awesome/best idea in the world will get less traction than you thought.
— Chris Theisen who is @cjtheisen on Twitter.

The unfortunate issue I see with [legitimate] social media experts and those who truly are knowledgeable in the field is that, like real estate, too many people are able to claim to be experts. How do you raise the bar so the many wannabees do not dilute the vocation?
— Susie Blackmon who is @SusieBlackmon on Twitter.

Learning, Evolving, and Adding Value Is the New Expertise

Learning, evolving and adding value with the speed of the Internet is the new expertise. Those who are able to capture, filter, translate, curate, package and deliver valuable resonating messages; those who connect people, content, and context matching urgency to situations will win the game. They will attract both loyal communities and easily enlist crowds of two-minute volunteers to pass on faster, smaller messages when they need them.

Social media sometimes feels like you’re in a partially lit tunnel going at lightspeed with things coming at you to catch, handle and pass on whilst also battling against a strange crosswind of resistance and misunderstanding. all the while, you’re commentating on yourself for the benefit of others…
— Serena who is @serenasnoad on Twitter.

… no matter how many hours you spend doing SM, you can never know everything about it. SM changes so rapidly and constantly that it is next to impossible to keep up with each new idea, blog, platform, service, etc. …
Nicole Ott who is @nicolelynnott on Twitter.

Learning what is meaningful and significant is more important than saying or following the meaningless and insignificant 🙂
—Jay Deragon who is @ConversCurrency on Twitter.

… I have had a few internships where I am the go-to person regarding the social media strategy. And I love that. Although many people may still be skeptics, I am embracing everything I can, and hopefully when I do go into the working-girl world I can bring something new and different to the table.
— Selena Larson who is @selenalarsonpr on Twitter.

I have two possible additions –

– that it takes about a year of listening, watching, absorbing and doing it before you really having any idea what it is you are doing

– that, at any given moment, the vast sea of ‘things needing attention’ or ‘things to work on next’ or ‘things I want to explore’ is so great, focus and traction can be the biggest challenges of all.
–Judi Young who is @ohyesshecan on Twitter.

Think Community Not Skillset

Social business is about the people, not the message. It’s a philosophy of business — way of thinking and seeing — that can’t be contained or fully realized in a single campaign or a single department. These new tools make the pace faster and easier. They also allow us to connect with more people. Our challenge is to fill those connections with meaning — to meet where our values align and use those connections to build better businesses together.

Social media is an interconnected, symbiotic organism comprised of flesh and blood people – people with hopes, goals, fears, dreams, and a need to be heard.

That’s too big of a job for just one person.
— Molly who is @mckra1g on Twitter.

Social Media is a community, not a commercial. Just as one wouldn’t show up to a party empty handed, you don’t show up online with your hand out. It’s permission-based – you have to earn respect among followers. The old adage remains true, ‘Seek first to understand, then to be understood.’ Listen, share, engage, then speak.
— Tami Belt who is @1bluecube on Twitter.

I really hope more people will “get” social media soon, as these 27 make it a very difficult job. I too tell my family something else and my friends from university seem to think I “play with facebook” for a living.
— @Simpli_B on Twitter.

I believe Social Media is a journey, not destination! And the more you’re open to the twists and turns, the more possibility and excitement there are. It’s just that when a majority of an organizations people don’t use SM, you have to then rethink who is SM for and how to reach those younger folks. And that requires energy back on their end “offline.”
— Elizabeth Doherty Thomas who is @MarriageKids on Twitter.

Social Media Is Community Amplified

Anyone in management, communications, or a business that serves people has experienced more than a few of these frustrations. Most of them are seated in the naturally occurring communication issues that humans have when we interact. Any interdepartmental team could make their own list that would be similar to this one. Any community would be easier to manage if it didn’t involve people.

I’m pretty sure that in order to comprehend this list and be able to comment means that I must work in the same environment. I do.

Social media is still so new and still in a state of constant evolution. People don’t understand it so they assume and believe misinformation as truth.

To understand the community, you need to live in the community. When you spend more time online than you do off, the lines get blurry. Those of us on the inside still understand and relate.
— Chris Eh Young who is @Chris_Eh_Young on Twitter.

… I confess that by the time I reached #7 I was thinking that most of these insights describe my career in public relations. the person who creates, buys, places an ad is easily understood. The behind-the-scene nuances of massaging a message and crisis management are often (deliberately) opaque.
— Karen Malone Wright who is @KarenMW on Twitter.

… Social media is all about relationships. … you have to be personally invested and detached at the same time. Social media is more than just a tweet or a Facebook post; it’s about building lasting relationships with people. For people that don’t fully understand social media, it can be a difficult concept to understand.

Yes social media is your job. Yes you sometimes seem more interested in your online friends than your offline ones. But the real reason for this is that if you are doing your job well, then you have built a relationship with these people that you can’t just turn off at the end of the day.
— Sean Clanton who is @parallelic on Twitter.

I might also add that sometimes being social 24-7 can feel very lonely since you have each foot in a different world, you technically belong to both and neither. Also, your online friends might lose any sense of personal loyalty and publicly bitch about your company as if they were a stranger to you.

You’re right though — it is totally worth it when you see things start to work well, when you can actually see lightbulbs go off in other peoples’ heads and they share good ideas that weren’t even on your radar. Social really can make everything we do as a business better and more meaningful and it’s nice to be someone working on that side of the equation.
— Shannon Paul who is @ShannonPaul on Twitter.

Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

Lead with relationships not the tools. If you wonder what that means listen more. When you hear a sentence with the words, social media, inside it. Replace “social media” with the word, telephone, and you’ll have idea where we’ve been and we’re going. The tools are what allow us to connect. It’s our minds and our hearts that get us to the core of the matter where we agree – where we can align our goals and work together on something we can’t build alone.

Like this blog post, we are building this social media culture together …

It was like you were reading my soul! Thanks for the reminder that I’m not the only one with these experiences and ups and downs.
— Vanessa Williams who is @williamsvanessa on Twitter.

Wow. Jumping on the bandwagon to agree with everyone else… just wanted to take the time to let you know lots of people are paying attention. My one response probably covers about 23 others that didn’t take the time to respond.
— Jason Terry who is @JasonTerry on Twitter.

Special thank you to these folks who contributed their support and encouragement. Danielle D. Ali ( @DanielleDAli ), Christina Rigby ( @@cjrigby1 ), LisaDJenkins ( @LisaDJenkins ), Dave Delaney and chris bartlett ( @followcb ).

Jay Baer and I are marking our calendars to meet next year at the same to see what’s changed.

I’m putting this in the time capsule and plan to look at it every year on this date, to see how the industry and its participants evolve.
— Jay Baer who is @JayBaer on Twitter.

Now it’s your turn … What will you do online or offline to continue and extend the conversation? Do you think we’ll still be saying the same things in a year?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

I’m a proud affiliate of

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27 Things to Know Before You Work in Social Media

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Let’s Be Honest

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Every day, I’m immersed in social business. I spend as much time on my computer as some people spend in their shoes. I rarely talk about “social media” except with clients, because to me that’s like talking about “pencils.” I’d rather be using one than talking about what they do.

I use social media tools to work on SOBCon with @Starbucker, to build communities and brand visibility for clients, to write blog posts and to curate content for people with similar interests. Social tools are business development, customer service, marketing, pr, community building, change management, and leadership — all at the speed of the Internet.

So I guess you could say I work in social media. If that’s your reality, your goal, or even a possibility for you, I’d like to point out a few things about working in social media worth knowing. This is not a rant, simply a set of observations which are quite similar to the challenges of any communication-based, people-centered endeavor.

The purpose of this list is merely to share that most people who are in this new and quickly changing area of business are finding that the work often has more nuances and challenges than we expected.

The problem with working in social media is …

  1. that, when you start, no one will believe you know anything useful — and you might not.
  2. that you’ll have to be multi-lingual, speaking and translating between two vocabularies — that of the social media culture and that of the people who’ve little to no experience with it.
  3. that you’ll have to figure out how to measure something that traditionally hasn’t been measured and to explain why those measurements are valid — you’ll have to have goals, tools to match the goals and reasonable expectations — without history that’s hard to do.
  4. that some folks will believe that impressions, eyeballs, and broadcasts are the best use of the tools.
  5. that, though you were enlisted to bring about change, the very folks who enlisted you might be the most uncomfortable with changing — one friend advises you might take care if you’re hired to be the “heretic” because heretic stories don’t end well for the heretic.
  6. that some people won’t be able to see the value of making relationships to growing business and keeping satisfied customers — even though relationships have fueled the businesses based on decades of trade shows and sales calls.
  7. that, when you do social business well, it looks easy, but it’s not — and no one will care how hard it was.
  8. that some people will misread safe responses as dangerous ones and dangerous responses as safe ones — understanding the culture of social business online is a learning curve that most folks acquire incrementally.
  9. that you’ll find most folks have a different sense of urgency — their sense of urgency will change some as they experience the speed of the Internet.
  10. that social media work isn’t glamorous.
  11. that the pay for the hours worked is even less glamorous.
  12. that, if you build a strong public presence, your mistakes will be public too.
  13. that, if you build a strong public presence, some folks will think you are all about making yourself “internet famous” — and that could be true.
  14. that some folks will be confused when you promote what other folks are doing — you might accused of “going native.”
  15. that you’ll need to personally invest and be detached simultaneously.
  16. that you’ll be critiqued by people who don’t know how to say things nicely.
  17. that you’ll be critiqued by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
  18. that you won’t have resources to bring all of your strongest ideas to life.
  19. that some of your ideas will be out-of-sync, out-of-reach, or out-of-date before you have them.
  20. that only other social media advocates will “get” what you do — you won’t be able to explain the thrill of a ReTweet from someone you admire.
  21. that your significant other may think you care more about your online friends than your offline friends — your significant other might be right.
  22. that being social online means you’ll have to be social offline too.
  23. that no one human is good at every aspect of social media interaction.
  24. that no matter where you sit, stand, listen, or talk, you’ll have to change your point of view to see and respond to the whole picture.
  25. that the second you forget that social media is about the people, the people will find a way to remind you — sometimes they’ll remind you even when you haven’t forgotten.
  26. that each day will require that you focus fiercely, that trust yourself so that people can trust you, and that you learn more things faster than ever before.
  27. that, if you’re the person introducing social media to a business, you face the challenge of getting people to imagine the possibilities of something they’ve never experienced.

So there you have 27 things to know before you work in social media and here’s the one that makes those 27 worth it.

Inside each frustration is a chance to be a leader, to reach out and invite people to help build something we can’t build alone. The effort, the explaining, the energy can transform a a business by enlisting and celebrating customers, employees, vendors, partners who help it thrive. The first connection occurs when we show folks how these new tools make what they do faster, easier, more efficient, and more meaningful.

Soon enough, I hope we lose the term “social media” in the same way that we no longer have classes in “computer” or people who teach “email.” In the meantime, I tell my family that I write spy novels. It’s easier.

Bet you could add to this list. What do you think people need to know about working in social media?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!