Currency

Now that I have expounded on transparency and accessibility, I will write about my third pet peeve for effective social media- currency. When I first got into social media many years ago, I explored thousands of blogs and noted people would often lose steam after a couple months. Lack of recent activity has become a tell-tale sign of dead social sites. When I got into Ning in 2008, I found the same trend. Critics of the platform made a good argument that a social network with only a handful of members and little current activity didn’t deserve to be a qualifying metric of success for Ning. When the freemium service where anyone could create up to 10 networks for free was discontinued, paying users then had more incentive to be active and promote activity on a primary site. I personally wrote a blog about 3 times a week for a little more than 3 years. People that encountered it would find fresh updated material usually reflecting current events in social media and my story. Once I started my first Ning and had more than a couple hundred members, I featured the Latest Activity with the same idea in mind. Ning’s Help Center may still have an article suggesting how using your main page to reflect your community’s activity is a key to fostering new membership and engagement. For the most part, I agreed then and still will recommend this approach to new network creators. What you can do with a Ning network is really showcase transparency, accessibility, and currency. People can see a frequency, volume, and diversity is happening on your site, get a good look at your profile and individual activities, and are invited to be an active participant.

If you were to look at my site today though, you would find it rather counter-intuitive on first impression. I no longer have Latest Activity on the main page. In fact, I no longer have any of the site’s modules feeding into the main page. I’m really not using it as a social network right now. It’s a different concept entirely, but eventually will be released to the public. I use it as a model for presentation to my social media consulting clients- mostly real brick & mortar business owners in my geographic region. This is a reflection of my evolved understanding of currency. I still have these things, but now I present them differently. I focus what I present, how, and when to be more of a direct value to my target audience. Often, I’m talking to people before they ever see my site, sending them links to content I have specific to their interests, and walking them through the experience of my network offsite.

So I used to look at currency as a matter of recent content production reflecting an active social media environment. This was very time consuming for me when I had a lot of the other aspects of my business R&D to attend to. In fact, by streamlining my social media development and distribution, I can afford the time to actually get out there and network both online and off. I found more success by discovering what was hot and relevant for people at a given time. It changed my perspective of currency from frequency to more a matter of timing. Basically, I aimed more toward timing productions around current events, especially those I identified were of interest to people I happened to be researching or networking with.

Following the same logic, my concept of currency has become closer to the meaning of value- you know “currency” as it is used to say “money”. I’m no longer so concerned with periodic content, nor producing media where I’ve identified popular interest. Value is a two way exchange. You can have all the physical currency in the world, but if you are in a desert and what you need is someone else’s last drink of water you may very well be out of luck! I had success getting attention to my media and even engagement- but what I wanted in qualitative behavior and interest in doing business with me was not happening. I was wasting my time, and the success was causing me to waste even more time as I followed through with people to dead ends. This can give you an idea why I’m not entertaining a community of people on my network and why I don’t have site activity reflected on my main page. I don’t necessarily want people to just come in and do what they want. My interest is mainly business right now, so when I had members posting content about say religion or politics, that wasn’t reflective of the theme I needed to get across to those members that might pay for my services.

Now I operate with a new view of currency that I consider more event-sensitive. I do still have aspects of periodic production and timing of recent popular content, but what I’m doing now is developing an inventory that I can use to make presentations whether they be in general or specifically to a particular contact. For example, I now use my blog to capture and present video media that pertains to my regional theme, but also businesses that are putting out shorts about their companies. It’s easy and doesn’t require a lot of my time to search YouTube for interesting videos pertaining to my niche, and along the way I usually find a handful of picks from companies in my locality that are starting to integrate social media. It’s basically a channel covering my geographic audience. I can do this frequently, the subject matter is current, it relates directly to businesses I contact, and it’s a demonstration of my products and services according to what I rate as mutual value.

Everything I do now integrates currency for the event of talking business with my prospects, but when I have enough clients onboard and finally release the site to the public, the work will serve an entertainment value, set a precedence for the theme they can engage on, and afford them an easy process they can apply to position themselves with social media. Currency is no longer just what I can do regularly, in the moment, for a specific audience, or to a specific end. I now view it in terms of how doing one thing now can be an ongoing value on multiple levels.

Best, Anthony

FOLLOW UP: Interested in learning more about my thinking on currency in social media, how I'm applying it to my network, and perhaps how it can relate to what you are doing with your Ning site? I just posted a discussion to expand upon this article on my Ning Creators group A Social Media Dojo- http://creators.ning.com/group/a-social-media-dojo/forum/topics/cur....

Favorite

0 members favorited this

▶ Reply to This