SMC listening skills

What does it mean to listen as a social media professional? 

1. Research. Strategy. Execution-  This mean reading up, doing your homework before you jump right in. This phase is absolutely essential to any person or business looking to see any kind of return from social media, PR professionals included. This means learning about a site, learning about the main demographics that use it as well. 
2. Lurking-  "Lurking" means to read and observe, but not actively contribute in an Internet setting. Many lurkers purposefully do this to avoid poor netiquette, or other mistakes, and would be far more likely to bookmark a useful link than to post a comment or email the author. Many studies have found that more than 90% of Internet users do not actively participate in most of the locales they visit, including blogs and social media sites.

  How can we improve these skills?

1. How to deal with confidence- I find my conversations with people about social media are really about confidence. That happens to be a big issue for anyone who writes or performs in public.
2. Managing multiple channels- Everyone struggle with this. What I’ve noticed in the top ten of social media influencers is a tendency among top bloggers to use guest bloggers to write on their platforms. Take a look at how Liz Strauss has done this around Successful Blog.
3. Building circles and followers-  Social media complies with power laws that show people gravitating disproportionately towards a small number of nodes. Leaders get more followers. One statistic I’ll talk about later on is that people with strong networks follow people with strong networks.