Leap of Faith

Each time you post a social update containing a hyperlink you are asking your prospects, customers and partners to trust you. They expect clicking your link will take them to information relevant to their business and valuable to their success. It's a tremendous opportunity and an awesome responsibility. Are you worthy of their trust? Should they take a leap of faith? I've been away from LinkedIn for two months recovering from a medical emergency. Yesterday I returned. I wish I could say absence made my heart grow fonder. It didn't. I visited one of my favorite discussion groups. It contains over 123K members, but less than 50 are active discussion leaders, Likes were in the single digits, Comments very few and social engagement was at zero.

Solving the Social Self-promotion Mess

When It comes to discussion groups, it's not about the size of the membership. It's just a retread of the same mass marketing tactics. Success is all about engagement. After my experience, I'm seriously considering reducing the membership by one. Whether you are a community manager, group member, or sponsor, here are some ideas to consider to fix this mess.

Social Community Managers

Curb Your Self-promoters. Grab a plastic bag and clean up after them. And would you please send them to obedience school so they stop jumping up in my face 5 times a day. It's like watching CNN for 2 hours only to realize there's only 15 minutes of news.

Discussion Group Sponsors

Don't let the kids run amok. I support having a, "Bring you kid to work day" but I draw the line at infants and toddlers. It's not age, it's about maturity. Would you invite these self-promoters to your corporate headquarters for a day? Your company page and sponsored discussion group are your virtual headquarters. Your community doesn't see a difference. Defend your brand.

Responsible Marketers

Stop asking your social community to take a giant leap of faith. Develop a platform specific destination, a company page or publish long-form posts. Close the gap between discovery and relationship building. Invite them to read your Pulse article then visit your LinkedIn profile. Your profile should read like your About page on your site. Share your news and PR on a Facebook company page to connect with your Facebook audience. Then you can extend an invitation to visit your site. They will decide if your content is valuable.

Social Self-promoters

Smartphones have become your prospect's TV remote. It's become much too easy to change the channel. It happened the day you decided to stop listening and started shouting. We are not hard of hearing, just hard of listening.

What's Next?

I think we can fix this problem. What do you think?