There has been a lot written about various aspects of social media: what tools to use, how disruptive it is, how to develop and/or demonstrate expertise. Here are four rules of thumb we follow.
- To establish a reputation you have to be visible or reasonably well known, but it’s more important to be known for meeting your commitments and giving good advice.
- Active participation in a community should be with a view not only to making yourself visible but also allowing you a chance to demonstrate appropriate expertise. “Less is more” is a good guideline here, in that it’s better to have folks asking for your opinion than asking for you to stop repeating yourself.
- You should be making these same assessments of expertise and reliability of potential customers and/or partners, which means far more listening than talking.
- Focus is on narrowcasting information to select groups, sending appropriate information to different sets of recipients.