On Tuesday night, I started going to a four day workshop on social media and business. Run by Jennifer Kane and her associate Kary Delaria, this workshop focuses on creating a unified strategy on how to promote awareness of a business (my business) using 21st century technology: blogs, business webs sites, social media sites, and twitter.
The first two classes have transformed my world view and removed a creative block that has been hindering my work on both this blog and my store.
I realized that I was looking at my relationship with my potential customers as the traditional Push variety. If I build it, they will come; here it is, take it or leave it. Please note that I said my relationship with my customers. A one-size-fits-all mentality. This is an old-fashioned paradigm that does not address the rich variety of interactions available now. (If you’re interested in my interpretation of the evolution of the web to where we are now, check out the section Background: Push, Pull, Interact towards the bottom of this post.)
The Information Age has also become the Age of Social Media.
Jen and Kary (http://www.kaneconsulting.biz/) have presented me with a different view. Now there are numerous ways (blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) to connect with people and it is important to form a strategy for using, or not using, these communication opportunities.
Jen has repeatedly emphasized two common sense rules. No matter what media I choose to employ, it needs to fit my personality and I need to be respectful of the norms of the media. If the media matches my personality I am more likely to maintain the interactions (read interaction to also mean relationship) on it and my voice will be more authentic. Question — what if my authentic voice is stiff and long-winded, hmmm?
Being respectful is best described with Jen’s example for using Twitter. I paraphrase,
“Twitter is like a cocktail party: a room full of personal conversations. You don’t walk into the room and yell ‘I’m here, buy my stuff.’ You spend time getting to know people. You listen, converse and build relationships. Eventually, if it is appropriate to the conversation you might say that you can help with something or that you have a business that might help.”
What I’ve taken away so far is that, in the case of Twitter or other interactive media such as the Comment function on blogs, it makes sense to me to do what I already do when socializing: enjoy the conversation, listen, show interest by asking questions, interact freely. In addition, have patience to let the issue of business come about naturally. In many cases it won’t. That’s okay, I’ll have had a chance to meet someone and learn a little more about this amazing world.
There is a way to improve opportunities for business without being crass, go to cocktail parties where the conversations are interesting and i can contribute. Photography and writing are the crafts with which I want to to make a living. Thus, it is doubtful that I will actively cultivate interactions with people involved in quilting because my native interest is low. On the other hand, I’ve started to follow the twitter accounts of other photographers and print makers that I admire. As I become more familiar with the environment I’ll add more people and topics to follow. The same goes for Facebook and LinkedIn, explore and enjoy the numerous connections that I already have.
Removing the weight of doing business in a traditional way has freed me to be me. Yes, my blog points you towards my store and my store is a method to make a living, we live a capitalistic society after all. But FWIIW is more than a sign post. It is a vehicle that I can use to explore the world and to build relationships with people near and far. Business will take care of business.
How cool is that?
Background: Push, Pull, Interact
My generation grew up and worked in an environment where information was pushed out to be consumed, very much in keeping with the industrial revolution paradigm. In essence, information like all manufactured goods conformed to the thinking of Henry Ford who, when asked what colors his Model-T autos would be painted, “The customer can have any color he wants, so long as it is black.”
This wasn’t as arbitrary as it sounds. The decision to make only black Model-Ts was based on the industrial efficiencies of the time. Adding another color meant adding more complexity and cost. The same thing applied to information.
Until the mid 1990s when eBusiness was launched and the web became a fixture in a growing number of homes as well as in businesses and schools. Information publishing and distribution had the same physical and economic constraints that the rest of industry faced. Regardless of the type of information manufactured, books or mailers or newspapers, it was bound to a physical medium that had to be prepared, printed, and distributed.
By 2000 a rapidly growing number of people around the world become comfortable with eBusiness and eInformation and began to question the old Push paradigm. At first eCitizens asked, “Why can’t I select the information content I get? I only want topics about economics and politics and don’t want to be bothered by arts or sports.” The answer came in two forms: search engines and cookies.
PULL Search engines, which had been around since 1990 and Archie(1), quickly evolved and provided the eCitizen the ability to pull select content from the web at will. The development of the search engine continues at a rapid pace. Armies of more and more skillful ‘Bots spread throughout the web, providing the data needed to catalog the content of billions of web pages. Algorithms that began as simple text searching functions have become sophisticated logic machines that process plain language questions then locate and rate related content. Users can now search enormous amounts of content for very specific types of information which they extract or Pull for themselves.
Push Cookies and related technologies evolved to help eBusinesses to gather data about the people visiting their sites. Like the search engine technologies, these analytical tools became much more sophisticated and are now able to track the path of a visitor as they go about on a given web site, record visitor preferences, determine corresponding content to match visitor preferences, and deliver it. Thus, information creators, under the guise of better serving customer needs continue to develop powerful Push mechanisms.
Interact With the addition of the ability of eCitizen to comment about the information she consumes on the web or the quality of a product/service purchased, the Pull paradigm gathered strength.
Throughout the evolution of the internet there has been the guiding principle of interaction. From the start, the internet was developed to meet the information needs of the user. This basic premise remains strong.
Today there are three categories of information users on the web. The typical eCitizen who gathers, Pulls, content from the web and processes it for her work, education, entertainment, or consumption. The typical eBusiness who, understandably, wants to make money as quickly and efficiently as possible, uses analysis and Push technologies to present consumers with a formalized set of products. And then there is the Interactive, who can be either eCitizen or eBusiness or both. The Interactive looks for a give-and-take relationship in which she can contribute input and then receive a personalized response. On the surface this may look like a common Pull-Push exchange. The eCitizen looks for specific data and the eBusiness analyzes her statistics and presents what they think she wants. This can be news, entertainment, consumer or goods. The result may be close enough to satisfy the eCitizen which in turn meets the needs of eBusiness.
However, an Interactive exchange goes deeper. As an example, The Interactive reads an online news story on her favorite blog. It raises a question about data presented without identification of a source. The Interactive feels comfortable using the article’s Comment function to send her question directly to the author. In turn, the author who is an interactive responds. The quality of the response reinforces relationship with the eCitizen: content — did it answer the question, tone — was it respectful, and was it timely. The Interactive exchange offers both information but also personal connection.
The same applies to an Interactive eBusinesss exchange. If purchasing a product or service, the eBusiness provides the consumer tools by which they can personalize the product by going beyond selecting a color from a limited list or standardized sizes. In the case of reporting a problem, the Interactive eBusiness provides a variety of methods by which the consumer can contact the service department and interact in real-time with a person who immediately seeks a solution.
The Interactive exchange seeks to personalize what has become over the last several hundred years impersonal interactions between sources of information and goods.
Footnote
(1) Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing
