The primary goal of your social media activities—whether for your personal brand or your organization’s brand—is to establish yourself as a fascinating subject-matter expert. The only exception to this is if you are a household name celebrity like Lance Armstrong, Oprah or Barack Obama. If you are this level of celebrity, then tweeting or updating, “I’m at Starbucks on the way to fly VirginAmerica to Vegas” is cool.
For the rest of us, the challenge is to achieve a consistent level of fascinating information about your area of expertise. The answer is simple. First, it helps if you actually know what you’re talking about. If you don’t, it may be better to let people wonder if you’re clueless rather than participating in social media and removing all doubt. But let’s say you’ve crossed the Rubicon.
Then it’s all about finding good stories, videos and blog posts about your subject and providing links to these sources. For example, if you own a restaurant, then you could post a link to The Second Annual New York Foodie Photo Scavenger Hunt, Cilantro Haters, It’s Not Your Fault, andCheck It Out: Get Your Groceries At The Library. Do this for a few months, and people will recognize you as a food expert. And guess what? They’ll come eat at your restaurant.
Then the next question is how you can find these stories, videos, and blog posts. I have four methods for you to use:
Read more of this article as well as other interesting articles by Guy Kawasaki here.
Written by Guy Kawasaki on the American Express Open Forum for Small Business
Editor’s Note: The Pictage Community Team enjoys reading articles written by Guy Kawasaki, posted both on his blog and on the American Express Open Forums. After reading this article we felt that it was especially applicable to professional photographers and for that reason wanted to share it here on the Pictage Blog.
Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an ‘online magazine rack’ of popular topics on the web. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.