So let’s talk a little about the power of Social Media. And then I’m going to dive right in to what of each Six Steps are; so one of the core powers of social media is that you can form one on one relationship with thousands of people at once. If you are not so familiar with social media, you might be familiar with email marketing which is a kind of a similar mode of communication where I am able to write one email that feels like a one on one communication, but I can send it out to you 50,000 people at the same time.

Social media is the same way except it’s even stronger in forming a relationship; A true relationship with your audience and with your prospects. So a lot of people will say “Ugh, social media is a huge waste of time” and social media can be a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong; if you use it in a wrong way. But I actually see it as a huge time saver because I can sign on Twitter and I can talk to 3000 people at once and I can make everyone of those 3000 people feel like I’m having a conversation with them and of course it make it really easy to facilitate actual one on one conversations with the people who follow me on Twitter. To write messages and @replies and things like that. So as far as I’m concerned I can’t think of a faster way to talk to thousands of people and a faster way to relationship build with thousands of people than social media. I mean I think it is a little bit bunk when people say it’s a time waste or if that’s how you want to use it to waste time. But I don’t want to use it to waste time; I want to use it to save time. That’s how I see it.

So the next powerful element of social media is building a community and creating connections between your followers. This is something that is really often overlooked and I don’t see a lot of social media expert, social media people talking about. If you read the book Tribes by Seth Godin which I highly recommend, and really all of this stuff that he talks about in this book is the same sort of core concepts that I’m going to talk about today.

In Tribes, Seth Godin says that you have really formed a true lasting community when it’s not just a relationship between you and the person but it is relationship forming between the people in your community. And that used to be really difficult to do because it used to be that the only way you could do that have some sort of an in-person event especially if you have a national business, where your audience and your community are all over the place. It used to be that you have events that people have to fly out to. And of course you have to come up with some creative sentences to make them actually come but now that is really easy to do.

I saw an example of this drafts with my, I taught a Twitter webinar, you could find that at Twitterwebinar.com; it is a class now that it was pre-package but was a live seminar that I taught. And it is the side effects that I noticed happened and it’s actually not even something that I consciously facilitated. But when the webinar is over; one of the people in the class said “Hey, I want to connect with all the other people that are in the class. I want to know them and talk to them because if they have the same interest in this webinar we would probably have similar interest and get along. You know we are all entrepreneurs or people who are interested in furthering our business using Twitter and using social media and so I sent out that list and see those people talking to each other on Twitter all the time.

They are people who are in my community, but now they have made their own community where they don’t need to just talk to me, they can talk to each other, but even when they are talking to each other it’s somehow furthering my branch power because I’m the one who brought them together and I am what they initially had in common if that makes sense. And they started doing that even before someone had suggested that that happen. I saw people just doing it on their own, kind of figuring that is funny because I could see the conversations on Twitter where people would be like “Are you on Laura’s webinar? I kind of figure that you might be from that Tweet I saw you send her the other day.” Then they say ‘hi’ to each other and introduce. It was so cool and that happened just as a side effect you know without me even consciously trying. So if starting consciously, trying to do that as you can imagine, you will see it happen really well and really quickly.

So the next thing I want to talk about is how social media shows people the real, the real side of you instead of a boring business bio. It is my opinion that the era of pretending that we have no life outside of our business; pretending that we’re just going to work and that’s what we all think about and talk about for our whole lives, I think it’s over. I personally want it to be over and I run my business and so it’s over and it is something I see more and more where people want to know about your whole life which makes sense because that is always the connection that we have made with people.

I mean the cliché is kind of the idea of the sales guy who has those notes on the back of his roll of decks like if anyone watched The Office recently they just had that on office where Michael, Michael has got his roll of decks where he had ‘he has a gay son’ written at the back of the card that’s kind of the sales man cliché where you know little tidbits about people’s personal lives and you say “How’s your wife? How’s your kid?” So people always connect to that way but it’s always like this thing had to be very careful with you want to reveal about a little bit about your life, but not too much.

And now with social media you can let people know you as a real person and that attract people much more powerfully to you than just knowing you as a business person and happening to know that you’re married. But they don’t know anything about that and in social media we got to see pictures of the trips people take with their families and that’s the kind of stuff that really increases that know-I- can-trust factor that really makes people feel like they are really in your world and that they are part of your world and they want to get to know you better.

The last really important thing about social media is kind of a different set now; is that it is easily and instantly trackable. So when you compare it to a traditional PR, where you’re showing up on a TV show, when you’re showing up often in a magazine, you usually have no idea if that really does anything. Because it is sort of vague, brand awareness thing someone kind of see you in a magazine and they kind of Googled your name, but you never know if those things are connected. Most of the time you have no idea of that kind of process in any effect or not and you certainly, even if you notice, maybe an increase of traffic on your website; we aren’t able to directly track it to your sales.

What is really cool about social media is that you can go nuts tracking absolutely everything. I mean I don’t do this because, I probably should, but I’m just not a huge tracking person and it’s not very fun for me. I mean if you have been a tracking person which you should be because this will be very valuable for your business; I mean you can track how many dollars every single Tweet with the link to your website brings in. That’s easy, it’s very easy to do and that makes social media, this argument I think that some people, this idea that some people have that social media is all laugh and all fun I mean it’s really easy to disprove that. You just start tracking, and either you see the traffic coming in and the money coming in and you see the opportunities coming in or you’re not. So if you think that social media is fluff, try out and track it and see because I don’t think it is fluff at all. It works pretty well for me.