How do you keep focused on Social Media? Is social Media something you have born with? or otherwise, something you can learn and develop? Have you ever thought if Social Media has an adoption stage?
As you – I suppose – Scarcely have we learned through all this thing called Social Media by chance or casualty, nor at the University or by attending a Social Media Masters course.
I learned by:
- Leaning forward
- Taking the lead
- Challenging assumptions
- Questioning everything
- Failing dramatically
- Using “their” glasses, not mine
- Making mistakes – minors and majors
- Saying YES, where everybody said NO
- Reinventing myself over and over
- Having the right attitude
- Being Irreverent
- Exploring new paths in search of adventures
- Taking risks
- Having thousand of arguments
- Reversing how people use to see things
- Agreeing and disagreeing (most of the times)
Social Media Adoption Process
However, beyond all these learning I realized that I’ve followed a singular path to learn how to focus, approach and engage my understanding about Social Media.
I summed up in a procedure I called the Social Media Adoption Process
The Process
The process starts as follows:
- You get insights and perspectives by reading, listening and commenting – basically feedback – that is to say, by being an active player in the Social Web.
- These insights and perspectives lead you to create an idea.
- Then, you move from thinking to doing when you put in practice the idea. However, you don’t know if you’re going to succeed with the first idea – hopefully – Therefore, you experiment with the idea.
- During the experimental phase there’s 2 possibilities: A. You succeed, then you’re done, congrats! B. You fail – I love this one – this leads you to another different step.
- When you experience failure, best thing to do is laughing at yourself – Yes, laugh at you – don’t take things seriously, think about it as a new opportunity to learn something new, share your failure with your community, make it part of your story, and more important, celebrate it!
- When you laugh and rest importance, you distress yourself from the failure, so you’re more open and eager to receive sincere feedback from your community, followers, subscribers or friends – in this case, true friends –
- Undoubtedly, good feedback (note how I use the word good) steps you to a new level of understanding and learning – there’s no greater experience that sharing for improving – The key resides in how you ask for feedback, to who and where, but this is another adventure…. So, taking what you learned from failing, laughing and from others’ feedback, you correct your first idea. Let’s say a blogging approach focused on your community: the tone, subjects, message… instead of what you wanted to publish – your initial idea –
- All those steps you’ve taken when you failed have changed – either slightly or radically – the way you approached the idea for first time, so what you’re really doing is trying different – in my opinion, the key reason –
- Once you get here, it gets easier, if you try different, and succeed – not you’re not done – try different again and you’ll succeed again, and for the sake of Social Media, keep trying different. Nevertheless, should you fail, keep trying different. Because, when you’re trying different you’re leaning forward, and the person who is leaning forward the most, wins the race.
With me? What’s your take?