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.
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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 !
Continuing the Discussion