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Social Media Reality Check: How Deep is Your Brand?
By Tiffany Monhollon | October 28, 2008
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In case you missed the news, social media is officially mainstream! OK, so the announcement may not have you jumping up and down or ringing up everyone you know – not even grandma – because it hardly constitutes news. In fact, research shows that 60% of web users access social networks at work. Social networking is arguably ubiquitous, as it transcends generational and social lines on a growing basis. In fact, Ning.com - one site dedicated to helping users create their own social networks is itself increasing exponentially and predicts to have over 4 million social networks by 2010. On almost a daily basis, another major corporation announces jumping on the bandwagon to create their own social network.
The Appeal and the Problem
In the era of personal branding, one of the most widely-acclaimed and accessible tools you can have in your toolbox is apresence is social media. The logic behind this is simple: social media has the ability to connect you to some of the most influential, popular, and interesting people in the world. The problem behind how many people apply this logic is also simple: simply having the word “friend” or “follow” between you and someone else doesn’t mean a real connection exists.
You know how the story goes. A friend sends you a link to a new network or tool, you join up – just in case it becomes popular so you can tell everyone you discovered it first. Or, someone really cool online starts a new social network, so you join too, hoping to bump digital elbows. But before you realize it - or even if you are so “connected” you never have time to really notice - your presence in the majority of these social networks is the metaphorical equivalent of taking a cardboard cut out of yourself to a cocktail party.
And since, let’s just face it, the number of social networks is not likely to slow its course expanding toward infinity, the strategy of winner-joins-all is no longer a relevant way to participate in social media. So, now’s a great time to stop haphazardly joining every social networking site you can put your digital fingers around and evaluate your social media presence before it totally overwhelms your online persona. Here are five tips for conducting a personal social networking check up:
1 - Quantify Your Current “Involvement”
Start of by creating a situational analysis summary for yourself. Look at the following:
- Sites you have a user name for. Include everything from your senior class’s social network on Ning to your Digg profile. From the frivolous to the basic. Any and everything social. List them out. Even if you’ve forgotten the password. If you can’t remember them all, do a Google search of your name or preferred user name(s), and you’ll probably uncover a few you’d forgotten about.
- Now, see if you can remember (or find out on profile activity) the last time you were active on that network. Active means more than just lurking. The last comment you posted, the last photo you shared, the last article you tagged. How long has it been? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years?
- Figure our your profile to activity ratio. The number of profiles you have compared to the number of sites you’re active on
- Now, let’s take a look at that ratio. Make a list, and evaluate it. Chances are, the side with profiles is a lot bigger than the side with activity. Good to know. Now, let’s move on to the next step
2 - Evaluate Your Passion and Interest
It’s easy enough to understand that belonging to more sites than you can manage to stay active on is not really a benefit to you or your digital personal brand. It’s harder to say goodbye to the places you may have invested a lot of time in. But before you rush out and delete every profile you’ve created, evaluate them first. There may be some you need to ditch. But by doing so, you might just create enough excess time to invest more in those you should. So, take a minute and think about the following in regards to your list:
- Which ones am I passionate about? Where are the topics that interest me? The people? The opportunities?
- Which sites have the greatest potential for you.
- Where am I adding value?
- Where do I wish I could spend more time?
3 - Analyze Your Goals
Whether or not you’ve ever sat down and written formal, SMART goals for your social networking profiles, chances are, you had at least an inkling of an idea what you expected out of them. So take a few minutes an think about our overall goals:
- Why are you involved in social media to begin with? Maybe it’s a goal to build your business, perhaps you want to educate yourself about social media, maybe it’s a personal goal to meet people with common interests, or perhaps you’re interested in professional development. It doesn’t matter what your overall goal is. In fact, it doesn’t matter how many goals you have! Just enumerate them, because that will make the process of prioritizing easier.
- What are your personal branding and networking goals? Online, offline, at work, everywhere.
- What are your goals for each social network?Entertainment? Relationship-building? Knowledge? Networking? How do these relate to your other goals. Which social networks will help you advance the first two sets of goals?
4 - Assign Value for Relationships
Now comes the Personal PR factor of your self analysis. This is the part you consider the relationship-factors for your social networks, undeniably the most critical component – the words social and network are both inherently relationship-based, after all.
- Where are my most important and valuable relationships?
- Do these relationships move across social networks?
- What sites offer the most relational potential - via conversation, sharing, debate, etc.
- Where are my aspirational contacts active?
- Where are my readers and fans active?
As Seth Godin points out, fake networking is worth nothing, and no one cares about you. Deal with it. The word “friend” in social media hasn’t meant much since the MySpace glory days. What is important is relationships. Real, authentic, I-could-crash-on-your-couch relationships. This really is the heart of the matter when it comes to evaluating your social networking situation. Think about the value of your relationships. Which social networks help you build new relationships? Which ones help you strenthen or deepen others?
5 - Decide: Am I Deep or Wide?
Now that you’ve taken time to analyze your involvement in social media, it’s time to look at the overall narrative your involvement paints. The best way to describe your overall situation is to answer the following question:
Is my presence in social media across all the sites I’m a part of deep, or is it wide?
The Wide Mentality thinks like this: I will be everywhere and have a more robust personal brand because wherever one can go online, I will be there. I will friend thousands of people and therefore increase my perceived social capital on sites like Twitter but only relate with very few users I already know and care about.
The Wide Reality is simply this: You are spread too thin you can’t adequately manage your digital brand across all sites. The amount of time you have to dedicate to building and developing relationshiips is diluted to the point that you’re not building relationships with anyone.
The Deep Mentality thinks like this: I will spend my time online wisely by limiting the number of places I’m active and even, perhaps, the number of relationships I seek. I realize that social networking is not a numbers game, and the real power of the social web comes through relationships, no matter how few I begin seeking to build. Relationships are not collected, they are build.
The Deep Reality demonstrates the transformational power of authentic relationships to change a person’s life. Developing deep bonds through social networking takes time, consideration, conversation, thought, and sharing - of information, ideas, and your identity but through persistence and dedication, it is possible in ways never before possible. There’s another reality that the rockstars of the web will share: Deep also has the ability to widen your reach.
The Next Steps
What you do with this information now is up to you. You may realize you have over-extended your personal brand and that it’s time for a social networking overhaul. Or, you may choose to invest more time in some social networks and less time in others. You may take this information and think about it, as I have been doing for a while, as you ponder your next moves.
If you’d like to chat about it, meet me in the comments section. If you’re wondering what I’m up to, feel free to subscribe to my daily updates on Twitter, or sign up to recieve Personal PR for free via RSS or e-mail.
Topics: Authenticity, Networking, Personal Branding, Personal PR, Social Media |
October 28th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Tiffany - Solid post. I love how the entire post is very actionable for someone looking to re-evaluate their social media presence.
I am pretty active in the places that I’m invested, but I also don’t operate in a lot of places. As far as business goes, it’s mostly LinkedIn and Twitter. My facebook account is solely for personal use.
I have neglected two places though, and one in particular is tough because it’s a monthly subscription and I just keep paying it even though I haven’t had time to visit and/or participate much. I know I should cut it out, but I paid $10 for a $50+ subscription, so I’m having a tough time leaving it in case I ever want to come back. The content is great, I just don’t have the time (right now) to participate. Though I’m still probably one of the top 25 contributors (staying power - whoo!) in terms of posts.
Any advice for that one?
October 28th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Hey, Ryan,
Great question. First off, how do you feel about the network? It seems like you perceived some inherent value there especially since you are paying to play. Since it sounds like it’s a content-based site, this also makes things interesting, because content often serves as a proxy for conversation in social media. Is there any way for you to evaluate how people are interacting with the content you already have there? Is the time you’d already invested helping you build new connections now?
October 28th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
I’ve been smelting out the networks that I don’t actively use over the last few months. Like Ryan, I try to limit myself to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the handful of local groups that are easy to keep track of through the three aforementioned services. I’ve declared social bankruptcy on all other networks, and I outright refuse to log into them unless the service notifies me of something that needs my direct attention.
Life is better when kept simple.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
@ Jon - I find myself fluxuate back and forth - crossing some networks off the list and then haphazardly adding others.
It’s hard to think of time on social networks in terms of opportunity cost, but it’s true: the more time you have to spend in fewer places, the better your connections will be!
I’m finding Twitter particularly useful right now at the daily participation level, LinkedIn and Facebook are more weekly endeavors for me.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Tiffany, This is a brilliant post! I especially like item 2. Personal branding is not about being all things to all people. It is about focusing on your passions and interests and thought-leadership. Being a part of too many communities not only steals your time, it dilutes your personal brand such that people don’t really know what makes you YOU or how to decribe you. Foe effective personal branding, focus is the key and that goes double for social media involvement. Thanks for your insightful post.
Best.
William Arruda
October 29th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
William - So glad to know you enjoyed it. As for point two, I think it’s so easy to get caught up in the latest things when it comes to social networking that it’s easy to overextend way beyond your own interest - so sometimes just taking time to think about whether or not you’re even interested in the site, what it offers, what it’s based around helps…
That said, sometimes you have to take the dive into something you’re not sure about, test it out, and then - the point most of us forget - actively choose to remain and stay active or quit and delete a profile. I avoided Twitter forever because I was afraid of adding one more thing to my plate, but once I started, I realized how closely aligned it is to my personal mission and goals, so it’s now a part of my daily routine!
November 7th, 2008 at 12:57 am
This is a fundamental organizing procedure that would be great to go through for people that have a part of their thought processes invested across a superfluous amount of social networks. Clearing out items that we are not actively taking part in frees up much mental space for those items that we could use extra energy for.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:33 am
I’d love to see this put together into a social media portfolio worksheet. Checkout http://davidseah.com/ for some of his CEO-templates. There’s a lot of debate, thoughts, and opinions on how social media can be used for branding and other purposes. I think you’ve taken a big step toward refining that discussion.
Hope you continue to refine this topic further.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
@ Daniel - Thanks so much - that’s a great idea, to have this in a functional format/tool for people to use. Love to hear your ideas on that.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:33 am
[…] an online presence, or more accurately, an online brand through these social networking sites. See Social Media Reality Check: How Deep is Your Brand - Tiffany Monhollon. The logic behind this is simple: social media has the ability to connect you […]
November 26th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Tiffany, Very good thinking here. Big take away for me was the wide and deep reality/mentality analysis. Excellent re-structuring and new lens. Thanks for sharing your insights. Just followed you on Twitter.
Steve
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:41 am
@ Steve - Thanks! And I followed you back