When you are doing "social media" what exactly are you spending your time on? My current "social" make up.
- Research and Data Mining (20%)
- Writing (40%)
- Connecting - Personal (15%)
- Discovery and Exploration (15%)
- Connecting - Business (10%)
The question is response to most requests for participation is WIIFM? (Or What's In It For Me?) And what this usually means, is "what's the business proposition for this particular interaction and how will it benefit me, cause I'm busy and I've got to make a living and there's a lot of stuff out here to pay attention to, so get to the point, and quickly." But there are certain connection points in social media that have ZERO WIIFM value. ZERO.
Examples: gaming online, facebook groups, facebook causes, open social projects (wikipedia et. al), tagging photos of others, poetry, inviting FB friends to music events, blip.fm, 80% of twitter content (and I'd argue that about 50% of the WIIFM Twitter traffic is really about the ME who is tweeting the info rather than What's In It For You. But that's where I am moving my own participation a little bit to the left of the WIIFM scale.
So I propose, WIIFY (What's In It For You) as the new standard by witch to judge your own "SOCIAL" media participation. How do I provide YOU-centered content?
What do I create that might make you SMILE. Not buy something from me, or promote me, but merely a smile on YOUR FACE. That gives me energy and ideas for 1000 more WIIFY engagements.
And personally here's how I have been implementing it (not consciously until just now) on Twitter. My Tweets fall in two main categories.
- Links and Information that YOU can use. (Because I am into social media I try and make my learnings available to everyone I come in contact with. In fact I would guess I am overly enthusiastic about social media and I want to share EVERYTHING rather than miss that one little spark that might light you up.)
- Links or thoughts that might make you smile. Beautiful images, random thoughts, Twitter Joker stuff, jokes (but not really the kind you forward around in emails to folks), songs that have struck me a certain way (and I try to add how the moment or music resonates with me - blip.fm), poetry (see haiku 2 twitter, songwriting (ways that I express myself both positive and negative sides of life experience), RTing stuff that resonates with me, promoting other's ideas, and finally just simple serendipitous joy! (and no I did not spell that correctly the first time, but WordPress didn't know the word either... so there! AND if I can't spell it I'd better do a good job of explaining what I mean. Oh heck, let's let the social mob do that for us, Wikipedia says "Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely."
And here is my serendipitous add to your information today. The wikipedia goes on to say, "The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company.[1] However, due to its sociological use, the word has been imported into many other languages (Portuguese serendipicidade or serendipidade; French sérendipicité or sérendipité but also heureux hasard, "fortunate chance"; Italian serendipità; Dutch serendipiteit; German Serendipität; Swedish, Danish and Norwegian serendipitet; Romanian serendipitate)."
Now if that isn't of value to YOU today, we might be on different planets. And that's okay too. Cause if our circles connect, even in a few places, we will find value in the "relationship" a some point. And that value, in my mind is more about hearts and sparks and inspiration than making sale.
That's it.
I don't sell myself on Twitter. I don't ask you to RETWEET or FOLLOW me. I have not get 50k followers by the weekend strategies and I earn my followers by providing something of value to THEM.
If you are just going for the numbers, have fun. If you are acutally participating in the "social" web you will find that there realy is NOT ENOUGH TIME FOR BS! So if my Whuffie is too low and you feel my tweets are boring, then by all means, follow me no more. But if I provide enough WIIFY juice, then I hope you have the prowess to RT or comment or DM me somewhere on some platform about something.
@jmacofearth
permalink on Uber.la: http://bit.ly/WIIFY
Related links:
- The author Cory Doctorow created Whuffie in a book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, about a bunch of folks who were employed maintaining the holographic rides at Disney World in Orlando.
- Tara Hunt, of HorsePigCow Marketing fame, is publishing a book about Whuffie, the concept of karmic value as currency. [Well, I think Tara takes it into the business side, but the original Doctorow value holds either way.]
Unrelated but serendipitous links: [I had to check the spelling of serendipitous again, and eventually I copy-and-pasted from above.]
- The Wiffle Ball: “Wiffle ball” should probably be written with a registered trademark symbol (®), because that’s what it is. Corporate headquarters are in Shelton, Connecticut. According to company lore, wiffle ball originated in the early 1950s when a couple of kids, short on players and space, developed a scaled-down version of baseball using a plastic golf ball. Holes in the ball made it easy to throw a curve and the curve was hard to hit, resulting in many strikeouts, or “wiffs” – hence, wiffle ball." -- Play With Them, by John Kelin, Red Room - Where the Writers are blog.
- Resume of Dave Olson who wrote about wiffle balls. And Dave's tags are listed as: Create, Write, Think, Speak, Produce, Brand, Podcast, Blog, Promote, Plan, Listen, Market, Strategize, Manage, Outreach. [And that's WIIFY enough for me.]
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