It’s not just that social media is about connecting and relationships, or that this is what business is about. It’s not just that social media has helped to facilitate that connection across borders of distance and penetrates through layers of “handlers” to get you in touch with people you admire and those who may admire you, customers and clients that do repeat business with you, or people you otherwise never would encounter.
It’s about that Moment.
There’s a moment when you’re getting to know someone that they turn from someone you know in passing to someone you want to interact with on a regular basis. If you spend enough time talking to someone, regardless of the medium, you click, or you don’t click.
And when you do, they will do or say something innocent that betrays their integrity, honesty, grit, humor, courage, passion, understanding, faith, depth or some other quality that you admire.
For an instant, just a smooth, slender, sweet second, you witness another person’s soul blossoming.
That’s the why of the hours spent attempting to make the connections to people. Regardless of whether you use social media or article marketing specifically, and Facebook or Google generally to make that link to another human, it’s of the utmost relevance.
No, it can’t be measured by science, but if you look at the companies that are weathering the economic storm with their dignity intact — or barely notice there’s a storm going on — their companies have it. If yours doesn’t, if your corporation doesn’t come across to others as an organization made of people that are connecting to other people, well, you need to get it.
Not just in the sense of acquiring this quality but of GETTING it. Understanding it.
Pursue those moments relentlessly. Open up and let people have them with you, let them see you as a person. It doesn’t mean you’ll have to reveal your whole self, though you needn’t be afraid to do so. It just means you’ll expose what’s authentic about yourself and infuse it in all your marketing, your copy, your emails, your articles, blog posts.
Even if you outsource, you can make sure your voice is not lost.
Pursue those moments relentlessly. Make an effort to find the people you believe you’ll have those moments with, for no other reason than the fact that you’ll make another connection to another human being. And if you have trouble trusting that this will add up to some specific hard number of currency in x number of days, then make it an activity you invest a minimum amount of time in.
No one says you have to be on Twitter all day. You can go for 15 minutes and leave, if you like.
But do it.
Do it.
Pursue those moments relentlessly. Enrich your online life as if it were part of the rest of your life.
Because guess what?
