3 Life lessons that led to social media success
May 1st
By Dr. Amit Nagpal, {grow} Community Member
Mark Schaefer gave me this advice on blogging: “Disclosing your own heart and your own story is hard but makes for the best blog posts.” I have decided to accept his challenge and tell my story today. It is not easy to tell a story of challenges and failures, but it has made me who I am today and led to what I consider the three components of social media success:
Mindful Content + Passionate Engagement + Heartfelt Collaboration
So how did I learn these lessons? Let’s begin.
Mindful content is the first step in the journey
I had been running in the corporate rat race for more than a decade. I was fed up with the pressure and decided to burn my boats and jump into the water. The only real positive I had going for me in this period was that my blog was gaining traction in less than six months of its launch and I was already gaining popularity among my social media connections (largely my ex-students). But my content was primarily motivational quotes from others. Not so great blog posts!
The stress in my life at this point was too high and meditation (along with attitudinal shift) seemed to be the only option to take charge of my story (and of course my mind). Thankfully, there was a keen desire for something which motivated me to meditate for an hour every day. After six months, I started to feel such clarity of thought and that was beginning to be reflected in my content. I actually started to feel proud of what I was producing.
The first lesson was that mindful, audience-centric content can only be generated with an uncluttered mind. It must add value to people’s lives by motivating, energizing or helping them resolve their current life challenges.
Passionate engagement touches hearts and lives
An uncluttered mind helped connect me with my deeper self and I began to realize what motivated and inspired me deeply. Once you discover your deep passion, passionate engagement happens naturally. You don’t feel drained and strained by putting those long hours on the computer.
I have never been a member of the group which plays the “victim” blame game and sometimes that’s difficult to maintain. After all, playing the blame game, makes you feel intelligent as you place fault with others and your circumstances. But looking within and taking responsibility also means you need to accept that sometimes you make a fool of yourself. Wisdom comes the hard way, when you are scratched with the sandpaper of relationships, which exposes you to your deeper weaknesses and the rough edges in your personality which need polishing.
But taking responsibility for your life improves your attitude, you become more positive toward people, even cynical people.
Heartfelt Collaboration comes through trust
Any collaborative effort requires risk. It requires you to look at situations with the explorative mindset of how they could be made win-win. We all have emotional baggage and I had plenty of it. After all, I had been a child with spectacles right at the age of four, who had been humiliated, kept out of outdoor sports teams and who had missed out on the childhood fun in so many ways.
Could I forgive, forget the past, and learn to trust people? Would I ever be able to collaborate straight from the heart?
Only through taking that risk of trust and working through successful collaborations that I was able to shed my emotional baggage. As I was becoming a genuinely positive person, I noticed more positive people coming in my life and through my example sometimes even cynical people began to see their positive side.
Nothing succeeds like passion-inspired success and nothing fails like the self-esteem’s failure. I had seen the latter already and now was gracefully welcoming the former.
In the not so great first innings of my life God was the villain, and I was the battered victim. I did not want to live that way. In the next innings of my life, I would rather let God be the Director of my life and my story. I do believe that God helps those who help themselves.
And I believe that through my content, in some small way, I am also beginning to write my next chapter, my destiny.
Dr. Amit Nagpal is a Personal Branding Consultant & Deepest Passion Coach. To know more visit www.dramitnagpal.com. You may connect with him on Linkedin too.
Original photograph (top) by Mark W. Schaefer
Five ways using “controversy” as a content strategy backfires
Apr 30th
I recently listened in on a webinar where a young guy was pontificating on the best strategies to build an audience for your content. A pillar of his presentation was “be controversial.”
This struck me as odd. Is “controversy” really a sustainable position for a content marketing strategy? The more I thought about this, the more I disliked this advice.
First, let me distinguish content that is “conversational” or “thought-provoking” from content that is controversial. A definition of controversial is “a state of prolonged, contentious public dispute or debate.” The keywords here for me are “prolonged,” “contentious, and “public.”
Sometimes controversy happens. Occasionally, it might even be unavoidable. But is this a tactic you should mindfully pursue as a long-term content strategy? Let’s take a look at five reasons why the answer is NO.
1) It is naive.
I have this image in my head. I walk into my boss and I say, “Hey, I just attended this webinar and I’m convinced that we need to be more controversial to be build our company’s blog audience.”
What do you think the reaction would be?
Can you think of any respected, successful company that pursues a prolonged dispute as a social media marketing strategy? Of course not. Companies are built to avoid controversy. Most brands are not built on a negative emotion.
2) It is exhausting.
Have you ever been in the middle of an online controversy? Nothing can suck up more time and energy from your day. Do you really want a strategy with that impact on productivity?
3) It is not sustainable.
Reading “contentious” content is like watching a train wreck. In short doses, it might be gruesomely compelling, but it is not something you want to expose yourself to every day.
Study after study shows that positive, uplifting content gets more views and clicks over time. Who wants a steady diet of prolonged disputes?
4) It drives the “wrong” traffic.
Let’s say you’re the playground bully. Every time you start a fight, a crowd might gather to see what’s happening, but then they walk away when the fight is over. The people who watch might even pretend to be your friend and say the right things but they’re never going to totally trust you because if the bully is chronically contentious, it is only a matter of time before they turn on you too.
Controversial blog posts are like a schoolyard fight. It might drive a short-term spike in traffic through the “fascination” value, but is it going to make somebody want to befriend you? Become a customer? Or, are they just going to stay on the sidelines and walk away?
5) It’s inauthentic.
Adopting “controversial” as a strategy is kind of like adopting “angry” or “love-struck” as a theme. If you are forced to aim for the same emotional tone every day, how do you avoid becoming a character instead of an authentic person?
So I hope some of this makes sense. I am NOT saying that you should never be controversial. If you bring your humanity to your blog, occasionally you may strike a chord in others that results in a dispute.
About 2-3 times a year I write a post that results in controversy. But my content strategy is not to purposefully churn up a dispute. My strategy is to be honest. And sometimes being honest requires the courage to say things that go against the grain of popular opinion and to take the heat that comes with it.
I’d love to hear your take on this in the comment section … at the risk of being controversial, of course. : )
How does controversy work for or against you?
How do you develop a strategy when the target keeps moving?
Apr 28th
I was watching a basketball game between a bunch of 8-year-olds the other day. The “red” team was winning 18-0, an insurmountable lead at that age. The “blue” team was exhausted and disheartened from the pummeling.
But within a heartbeat, blue’s luck changed. A speedy player intercepted a pass and steamed down the court, for a wide open lay-up.
The crowd held its breath as the young player effortlessly flipped the ball up and into the hoop. Of the wrong basket.
The crowd gasped. Tears welled up in the stunned player’s eyes as he realized his team’s humiliation was complete. He had scored a basket for the other team.
This sad little episode seems an apt analogy for one of the costliest mistakes you can make in a business: Having brilliant execution against the wrong goal.
When I first started out in business, my company actually required us to create five-year plans. That seemed like a difficult exercise back then and today that is simply impossible. And yet, it is easy to get locked into annual goals and work beautifully against them, never realizing they’re already out of date.
Business today is not like a basketball player trying to shoot at the right goal. It’s like a basketball player shooting at a goal that is moving.
I think this problem is especially acute for small companies and start-ups. I once had an entrepreneur tell me that the nature of his company changed every three months. It’s true. Simply adding a new employee or a new customer can radically alter the direction of the company. The nature of my work has changed dramatically in the past 12 months.
If you are still heads-down, working like crazy without taking the time to assess the world around you, you might be making a deadly business mistake. Here are five questions to reflect on:
- How am I spending my time today compared to a year ago? If there is a dramatic change, why? Is this a sign that the market is changing or have I lost focus on what makes me profitable?
- What is the biggest internal threat to my business? Is it resources? Keeping up with change? A lack of focus? Turnover?
- What is the biggest external threat to my business? New competitors? New expectations? Problems with the economy?
- How have my competitors changed? Do I even know who my competitors are right now?
- What are my customer’s under-served or un-met wants and needs? Do I think I know, or have I really asked them?
Spending just a little time reflecting on these questions could save you months of heartache down the road. What do you think? How are you coping with the constantly moving target of your business?
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Tree S(app). A {growtoon}.
Apr 26th
Join the growtoonists each Friday for a humorous take on marketing, social media, and current business events.
Joey Strawn is a social media strategist who loves enjoying a good book and then drawing in it. Check him out on Twitter: @joey_strawn
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
Groups We Believe In
