Like Me: Creating Your Social Networking Footprint - Penny Power

The previous chapter covered the importance of building a wide network of people who will be aware of you and know you exist. They may read your blogs, see your videos or notice your contribution in groups and on Twitter. The upside of ‘know me’ is that it is about using the technology to distribute your thoughts and knowledge. It is more like a broadcast so it is easier to take on board and execute if you are a task oriented person.

The downside of staying in ‘know me’ all the time is that people won’t know you well enough to really trust you and to know what help they can give you. It is easy to be a closed person if you stay in the ‘know me area’ all the time, you don’t have to reveal much about yourself.

‘Know me’ is more about ‘what you are’ whereas ‘like me’ is much more about ‘who you are’. ‘Like me’ is about leveraging the social networks and creating depth in your network. Here you will create followers who will have conversations with you. ‘Like me’ is about ‘sharing and collecting people’.

Who are you?

Who you are encompasses the whole you, not just your knowledge, skills and the way you make your money. It is about things that matter to you – your family, where you go on holiday, which causes you support. It is also about the journey you have had in life that has enabled you to be the expert you are. It is about why you like what you do.

In this chapter I want you to think in broader terms than marketing. Your business is about you. People will work with you because they like and trust you; they will talk about you if you are reliable, caring and help others. This is about your integrity, your values, your friendship and your ability to be part of a community.

Ecademy features in this chapter as it is the site I know best that has its focus on community. While it provides tools for visibility and marketing yourself, its most powerful aspect, unique to Ecademy in the online business networks, is its sense of community.

‘Like me’ is about taking your connections to a deeper level; it is about building depth in your network by revealing yourself and being interested in others. While ‘know me’ is about width, ‘like me’ is about depth in your network.

The Playground Trap

This scenario makes me think back to the first seven years of being a mum. I went to the same playground for five years to collect my children from their infant school.

I was well known. I ran the parents’ group for a while, I helped in school listening to children read and I knew most of the mums in the playground at pick-up time. ‘Networking for mummies’, it was wonderful, often my sanity. There were about 100 mums at the school. I knew each one as ‘Jack’s mum’, ‘Emily’s mum’, and they knew me as ‘Hannah, Ross or TJ’s mum’. The amazing thing is that we were familiar with one another, but in many cases we knew nothing about each other. I could have been about to buy a new conservatory for our garden and the ‘mum’ next to me in the playground could be the best supplier for that, but our conversations never actually moved on to what we did for a living. We stayed in another world of familiarity around the subject we had in common, children.

I see this a great deal when I go to networking events.

People share a laugh, talk about their day and get so used to chatting at a certain level that they forget to ask, or perhaps are too embarrassed to ask, ‘I am sorry, I forgot, what is it that you do for a living?’ People’s lives move on and what they did when you first met them may have changed, or your needs may have changed, and what they do now could be exactly the knowledge you need.

This is why it is very important to combine ‘know me’ and ‘like me’ in your marketing. ‘Know me’ reminds people what you do, ‘like me’ continues to build the trust and the bond. I said that ‘know me’ is about using the technology, in effect the tools/utilities that social media provides – it is about ‘using’. ‘Like me’ is about community, about becoming a member in a community where your reputation can spread. It is abut ‘belonging’.

• Extract 1:  A Changing World - The Individual Capitalist

• Extract 2:  Contribution Currency

• Extract 3:  Building Attraction and Being a Magnet

• Extract 4:  Leveraging Social Networks For Your Business

• Extract 5:  Know Me, Like Me, Follow Me

• Extract 6:  Know Me: Creating Your Social Media Footprint

• Extract 7:  Like Me: Creating Your Social Networking Footprint

• Extract 8:  Follow Me: Creating Social Transactions

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