Mitch Joel over at six pixels of separation asked his readers to identify their best practices for social media.  Ari Herzog tagged me to respond with my one social media best practice, along with Max Gladwell, Gillian Swart, David Bradley, and Kim Woodbridge (of course it’s not easy to just pick one!).  However, if I had to pick one social media best practice it would be this:

My one best practice is actually a shift in mindset

Meaning instead of people thinking about what they can “get” from their communities they need to think about what they can “give” to their communities.  I’ve talked about this many times before in relation to the roi from social media.

Here’s a good analogy (again).  Think about all of the friends you have in your life right now, how much would you be willing to PAY to keep them in your life?  My friends and contacts have essentially shaped who I am today and that is priceless.  The career I chose, the experience I have, the ideas I share; all of that has come from the collective experiences and interactions with my friends and connections, without them I would not be where I am today.

Coming up with social media best practices is like asking someone to give you the best practices to living life.  There are going to be tons of them and they will differ from person to person.  They aren’t all right or all wrong, in fact a lot of the best practices can be applied using simple common sense.  That being said, I think “giving” instead of “taking”, is a mindset that not many people think about or address.  People are too interested in ROI, analytics, advertising, etc. when it’s really the relationship that matters.

There are all sorts of fancy and cheesy names to describe social media roi such as “return on interaction, return on participation, etc.”  Personally I think it’s all just a lame way of hiding the fact that people do expect some sort revenue.  My question is, “why does the revenue have come from a dollar amount?”  Can we look at revenue in terms of attention, interaction, participation, etc?

Once we change the currency we will change our mindset.

What is your one social media best practice and why?

thanks for reading

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