SOCIAL IMPRESSIONS

To ensure the success of any social media marketing campaign, it is important to have a strong network of friends who support you. When you build up connections and friendships online, you establish credibility as a user. User-generated content encouraged by companies typically garners more trust than traditional advertising. Brand evangelists develop their presence by establishing friendships online. Their content recommendations hold more weight and are considered incredibly valuable.

This network of relationships will help push content across many platforms. Simply, these friends will twitter posts, Digg submissions, stumble stories, and provide support to the brand evangelist. This relationship should always be mutual and reciprocal. I have always advocated that people you connect with shouldn’t be considered as “contacts” but as friends. When you invest the time to build that relationship, it will be rewarding on personally and business-wise.

Muhammad Saleem, social media marketing maven known as “msaleem” online, has been gracious enough to discuss the concept of community building and the importance of maintaining a strong network.

You have established a strong personal brand online. People know who you are and strongly respect your opinion. What do you think have been your most important steps towards achieving the status you have?

I think most of it lies in genuine passion. Passion for social media and a passion for meeting and talking to new people and not just sharing my insight with them but learning new things from others.

Community means something different to everyone. What does it mean to you?

It means that I have a massive network of friends that also serve as a priceless information resource. Whenever I have a question or concern, whenever I write commentary on something, basically every action I take online, I can get tons of valuable feedback from the communities I take part in online. It also means that I’m exposed to dozens of different viewpoints on anything that I am curious about. Ultimately it means that my online existence and my presence in the social media space is not one man’s perspective, rather it is the result of hundreds of different people’s unique perspectives and insights and as a result is more well-rounded and comprehensive.

How do you integrate yourself into a community and become a well-recognized participant?

As far as the social media space is concerned, you can check out the social media manual I wrote as a reference for anyone entering the space as a newcomer. More generally, I believe that it is important to study the unique dynamics and implicit rules of any community before you start participating in it. Once you participate keeping the code of conduct in mind, you can’t go wrong and over time your valuable contributions in a community will help propel you to a respected position.

Lee Odden provided an overview of the Free Traffic: SEO/SMO 101 (Search Engine & Social Media Optimization) presentation you gave at Web 2.0 Expo in San Fransisco. You said the second most crucial step to take in order to optimize your site in social media is Community. Why is that important?

I mentioned that there are two important aspects to any social site. The first is content and the second is community. Community is important because you need to participate to understand what the community wants and to be successful in providing exactly that kind of value. Participating in the community is also important because it helps you build relationships with other like-minded individuals and help yourself grow as a participant in the space.

Do you think having strong relationships has a business value? If so, why?

I certainly think so. It really depends on what your goals are. For example, you can leverage these relationships for many different purposes beyond using them as excellent information sources. Take the example of someone trying to pitch a story to me. If you say something to me, I am much more likely to listen to you, blog about it, put it on social media. Whereas if it is someone I don’t know at all, I am much less likely to pay a lot of attention.

So you believe that your personal brand will ultimately benefit and help your company. So, how can companies leverage these relationships during a social media marketing campaign?

Certainly. One thing that I would keep in mind is that you should use your fans and not abuse them. Don’t just build one-way relationships for business purposes. That said, there is a lot of potential there simply because a network of 100 friends turns into a network of 100,000 if you start going to the second and third degree. And that is a network that you can leverage to your advantage. For example, every time you write something, you can run it by 10 other people to make sure it is comprehensive and that it is viral enough or sticky enough to propagate through social media. You can also increase engagement with your content by sending a message on Twitter, sharing content on social networking or social news sites. Who hears what you have to say is somewhat dependent on how well you network. For example, I have gone from 200 to 1000 followers on Twitter in the past few months, largely because of word of mouth from my core group of friends. Now every time I send a message, it is heard by exponentially more people than it would have if I didn’t network at all. In fact, one of the most important (and my favorite) parts of my job is precisely meeting new people.

What are the three most important codes of ethics you believe are important to abide by online?

I think it is incredibly important to 1. Create value for others, 2. Participate in communities and build relationships, 3. Reciprocate and engage with other people’s content and services.

How many hours do you spend online in creating strong content, establishing a community and promoting content? Do you think it will decrease or increase as time passes?

With the exception of explicitly promoting content, most of my time online is spent on participating in various communities and creating strong content. I would say about 50 hours a week? I think from a purely business sense people do tend to decrease the amount of time they spent online because the more visibility they have the less they have to do. But for me specifically, I don’t see that time decreasing. There are too many people that I still haven’t met.

I am sure you have many online “groupies.” What is the funniest thing someone said to you once they knew you are “Msaleem: Social Media Maven”?

It’s really funny. A lot of time people come online and message me and are actually shocked when I reply to their message or their email. And it’s funny to me because I try to get back to everyone, that’s the only reason all my access information is freely available online.

Thanks to Muhammad for the interview and to D’Arcy Norman for the image.