Like Me? Follow Me.
When you blog, you get sent a lot of requests - link requests, emails about affiliate marketing, people looking to promote their products, and other local bloggers asking you to help them promote an event. I received one recently through my personal blog from another local blogger asking me to post information about an event he's promoting. As it is an event which I'd probably attend if I were in the country when it occurs, I told him to remind me closer to the date.
We didn't hear back from him but posted the information anyway, when said we would. 24 hours later we received an email reminding us we'd promised to blog about his event and giving more details - details we'd already found on his blog. He got a rather surly response pointing out that regular readers of our blog had already seen our post about it.
This same blogger had received an email from me sometime last week asking if he wanted to write a guest post (which would have provided a nice, juicy, PR4 link back to his very new blog). He has yet to acknowledge the email, but he expected a favour from me - despite the fact that he, quite obviously, doesn't actually read my blog and does not have the courtesy to respond to emails from people from whom he wants favours.
If a business associate behaved this way, would you be inclined to do them favours in the future, knowing that you'd receive no benefit for your work?
Yes yes, so some bloggers are rude. But, is there a roundabout moral to this story?
Well, yes - manners, I suppose.
The moral, really, is in the name - social media. It's social. It means, "living together or enjoying life in communities or organized groups". In other words, you're not a hermit living in a cave - you have to participate in a community before you can expect to receive something in return. It's like paying taxes - you contribute your money to your community and you get the benefit of services like policing and rubbish collection.
When blogging, and when using blogging as part of a social media marketing campaign, this contribution to the community comes not just from providing interesting and useful content on your blog or website, but also from linking out to your peers and from actually reading other blogs and responding to them. If you're making use of somebody else's blog, whether to get links and traffic from their comments, or to ask them to blog about your website, you need to offer them something in return - thoughtful comments on their posts, a link, or, in the case of a business asking for a product review or plug, even a freebie. At the very least, you need to at least read the blogs of the bloggers you contact first so you know whether their blog is appropriate for your purposes and to know how to approach them.
If you think of the people with whom you interact online as part of your community and you treat them the same way you'd treat your friends, colleagues and neighbours then you're more likely to have success with social media marketing.
