Social Karma (Part 6)

In Part 5 of this series: We continued discussing the basics of developing your social media strategy by reviewing some recommended best practices and general guidelines for engaging your community, as well as the basics of social media ROI.

In Part 6, we will discuss some of the books that have been the most helpful to my social media education.

The following list (in no particular order) includes links to and quotes from five of my favorite social media books. The last book is actually about social networking in the social scientific sense, but does contain useful material for social media discussions.

The Whuffie Factor

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt.

“Whuffie is the residual outcome—the currency—of your reputation. You lose or gain it based on positive or negative actions, your contributions to the community, and what people think of you.”
“Whuffie flows from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation that moves quickly within social networks.”
“Turn the bullhorn around: Stop talking and start listening.”
“Become part of the community you serve and figure out who it is you are serving. It isn't everyone.”
“To truly become part of the community you serve, you must add value.”
“Instead of being concerned with quantity, you need to become more concerned with quality of relationships. This doesn't mean that quantitative measurements disappear, it just means they aren't your most dominant measurement.”

Crush It!

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk.

“Your business and your personal brand need to be one and the same. Your latest tweet and comment on Facebook and most recent blog post—that's your résumé now. It's a whole new world, build your personal brand and get ready for it.”
“Can you think of any business that isn't in some way dependent on human interaction?”
“If you're not using Twitter because you're in the camp that believes it's stupid, you're going to lose out. It doesn't matter if you think it's stupid, it's free communication. That in and of itself has value, and you should take advantage of it.”
“You're in business to serve your community. Don't ever forget it. Don't betray their trust.”
“The other thing you're going to do is accept that just having good content and Internet access is not enough to take your business to the top. Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they're willing to work longer and harder than you are.”
“Creating community—that's where the bulk of your hustle is going to go and where the bulk of your success will be determined. Creating community is about starting conversations.”
“Building and sustaining community is a never-ending part of doing business.”
“Don't get obsessed with how many friends or fans are following you—the stats are only marginally important. What's important is the intensity of your community's engagement and interaction with you. The quality of the conversation is much more revealing than the number of people having it.”
“Making connections, creating and continuing meaningful interaction with other people, whether in person or in the digital domain, is the only reason we're here.”

Trust Agents

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

“Focus on connecting with the people—the human stuff is far more important than the software.”
“The Web and social media give you the opportunity to reveal the human side of your business.”
“Building any kind of following online is difficult enough. It requires solid leadership skills, the ability to create a sense of belonging, a gracious attitude, transparency about who you are, and empowering the community to feel important.”
“Trust agents build networks almost reflexively by being helpful, by promoting the good work that others do, by sharing even their best stuff without hesitation, and by finding ways to deliver even more value on top of all that without asking for anything in return.”
“Attention is and will continue to be our scarcest resource.”
“Social networking is not about getting attention for attention's sake, but rather about being a part of the network, making other people aware that you are there—and that you'll be there in the future, too.”
“If you are to learn how to be a trust agent, the skill of being a Human Artist—someone who understands how to communicate with people in a real and thoughtful way—is very important to what you're doing.”

Six Pixels of Separation

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. by Mitch Joel.

“It's no longer about how much budget you dump into advertising and PR in hopes that people will see and respond to your messaging. The new online channels will work for you as long as you are working for them by adding value, your voice, and the ability for your consumers to connect, engage, and take part.”
“This new economy is driven by your time vested—and not by your money invested.”
“Networking online is core to success because it's not blatant sales and marketing.”
“You can't have a strong business without a strong community.”
“The digital social spaces are built on trust and trust alone.”
“Your ability to leverage true ROI is going to come from the level of trust you have built and the community you serve.”
“Nothing stinks of insincerity more than using these new digital channels and not listening to the other conversations.”
“The more human, honest, and transparent you are, the quicker you will be able to build trust and leverage it to build community and your business.”
“You're not looking for sheer mass numbers of people for the sake of traffic. Traffic has levels of quality that only you can measure. Focus on building community and not traffic.”
“The long-term game of sustainability in the online channels is one of quality versus quantity.”

Connected

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD and James H. Fowler, PhD.

“Six Degrees of Separation: We are all connected to everyone else by an average of six degrees of separation (your friend is one degree from you, your friends' friend is two degrees, and so on).”
“Three Degrees of Influence: Everything we do or say tends to ripple through our network, having an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends' friends (two degrees), and even our friends' friends' friends (three degrees). Our influence gradually dissipates and ceases to have a noticeable effect on people beyond the social frontier that lies at three degrees of separation. Likewise, we are influenced by friends within three degrees but generally not those beyond.”
“Just as brains can do things that no single neuron can do, so can social networks do things that no single person can do.”
“Social networks have value precisely because they can help us achieve what we could not achieve on our own.”
“Since information flows freely within a close circle of friends, it is likely that people know more or less everything that their close friends know. We might trust socially distant people less, but the information and contacts they have may be intrinsically more valuable because we cannot access them ourselves.”
“Networks with a mix of weak and strong ties allow easy communication but also foster greater creativity because of the ideas of new members of the group and the synergies they create.”
“Although social networks may help us do what we could not do on our own, they also often give more power to people who are well connected. As a result, those with the most connections often reap the highest rewards.”
“Social networking fosters strong ties with groups that optimize trust and then connects them via weaker ties to members of other groups to optimize their ability to find creative solutions when problems arise.”
“For thousands of years, social interactions were built solely on face-to-face communication. The invention of each new method of communication has contributed to a debate stretching back centuries about how technology affects community. Yet, new technologies just realize our ancient propensity to connect to other humans, albeit with electrons flowing through cyberspace rather than conversations drifting through air.”
“The recent surge in mobile phones, the Internet, and social networking sites has shifted our ability to stay in touch with one another into overdrive, causing us to become hyperconnected.”