Seeking Inspiration
by Kyle Flaherty on Sep.03, 2008, under Social Media
How do you find inspiration? Is it something that you seek outwardly or wait for it to hit you like a brick?
The best source of inspiration, for me, is when I sit down, online or off, with people I’ve known for a long time. It might be a conversation concerning their jobs, politics, their family, the weather…it really doesn’t matter. The reason it doesn’t matter is that I have a track record with these folks, whether for decades or a couple of years. They feel free to share their thoughts with me openly because we have a trust built on a mutual relationship.
Inspiration comes down to a measure of trust, which comes from a solidly built relationship. The same goes for your marketing. A trusted brand has an easier time inspiring because they have created a relationship with you over a period of time. When a company enters social media they, of course, need a strategy, but the idea of building trust must be in conjunction with building relationships.
No relationship=No trust. No trust=Zero inspiration.
September 3rd, 2008 on 8:47 am
Fully agree that building trust is a very interesting objective for companies engaging in social media.
We’, as a team of 2 people :-) are doing it on our own and we measure success using the following formula:
- we’ve collected a huge number of blogs (800+) written by the influencers in our domain , people with whom we want to build relations, get feedback, exposure…
- we analyze our networks in LinkedIn and Facebook and look at how many of the 800+ influencers we can reach directly.
It’s clearly not perfect but since you can only manage what you can measure :-) this helps.
So far, it’s growing slowly but steadily !
September 18th, 2008 on 9:30 am
[...] in online conversations, providing value, and earning trust. In a recent post he wrote called “Seeking Inspiration†Kyle [...]