I was reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog the other day and he pointed out this video by Lewis Howes on good practices in using social media sites. It’s about 6 minutes long.
Now he’s got a number of great points here, but two in particular stood out to me:
#6. Promote others. This is the nature of all good networking, whether online or offline. The connections you can make for other people are what make you the “go to” person. Also, each connection you make earns you the gratitude of both sides of the new relationship.
#7: Connect face-to-face. I’ve heard people say that with these new social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, we no longer even need to meet. We can do all of our networking from the comfort of our computer.
Horse Hockey!
Much as we reluctant networkers would like it to be that way, nothing replaces actual face-to-face meetings. Depending on who you believe, more than ninety percent of communication is non-verbal. The rest is all tone and body language. That being the case, the written word, which is essentially what these social media sites depend on, is clearly an inferior mode of communication. It’s a great tool to use in addition to face-to-face networking, but it cannot replace it.
Check out the rest of what he has to say. He’s got some great points on effective use of social media. The is an area that I am continuing to work on myself. In fact, I’ll be taking a four-week training course from the Whole Brain Group on the use of social media in business. I’ll be sure to let you know about what I learn.
