Finding Your Social Media Balance – Part 2

This is the second part in a two-part series about communicating on the social web. In part 1, I talked about four variables that help you control the depth of your interactions and relationships with people.

In this post I’ll be discussing four ways to classify your interactions/relationships on the social web:

• Community Building
• Entertainment
• Self-Promotion
• Self-Service

The purpose is to understand the structure of your interactions/relationships as it also affects the image you’re portraying.

In part 1, the diagram below illustrated how you can find the balance between the four variables Motive, Focus, Resources and Value. The balance line represented optimal control over the four variables depending on who you communicate with, what and how you’re communicating, and what you’re trying to achieve.

Now let’s add an overlay that divides the graph into four quadrants.

What this tells us is that the quadrant you’re in will have implications on how your communication style is perceived.

Community Building

This involves engaging with people based on quality by providing high value and using many resources. You’re building a community instead of merely talking at an audience and you’re engaging with people who support you and can help you spread word about you, your organization or your products/services.

The result is a community sense between you and your communication peers. This also puts social media at work because it allows the people you communicate with to spread the message to the people they think it’s relevant for. Moreover, people trust you and will be more inclined to listen.

Entertainment

Here you’re engaging with people based on quality but using limited resources and providing low value. The result is that you’re building a good relationship with quality people but you’re not following through with high value communication. Instead, the communication consists of small-talk or irrelevant topics.

As a result, people will think of you as entertaining. You’ll take some time for them to engage but the low value of the communication also degrades the relationship.

Self-Promotion

This refers to the low-effort distribution of low-value distribution of messages to a high number of people. This is purely focused on promotion and has a “spray-and-pray”-type nature.

It’s appropriate when you’re looking to bring something to the attention of a large group of people who aren’t your key influencers. It can also act as a filter to elicit interest and potentially upgrade people from the quantity group to the quality group.

Self-Service

Here you’re burning resources to reach out to many people with high-value messages. The reason why this is called self-service is because you’re doing all the work. You’re seeding the message, spreading the message, following up on the message, and doing all that in different places so your message reaches the masses.

However, this is poor utilization of the social web. You’re not leveraging the connectedness of people and the distribution of content based on value and that connectedness. In addition, you could be spreading yourself thin with the conversation being more focused on reach rather than depth.

Tools

So far, when discussing this communication framework, I’ve not discussed tools. And I’m not going to. Tools play a secondary role to the communication framework. Tools only play a role in determining how to best approach the people you’re looking to reach with your communication objectives.

Re-examine your communication on the social web. Look at whether you’re straying off your balance line and whether your results resemble one of the four quadrants. Also consider how tools can help you improve your social media balance once you’ve decided what to do with Focus, Motive, Resources and Value.

If you have comments, experiences or nuggets of wisdom to share, feel free to leave a comment!

Photo credit: Philip and Karen Smith