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You don’t have to be everywhere

Everyday somebody asks "are you on ……?" 

Not drugs, but yet another social network, blog community, or web 2.0 tool.

TechCrunch and Mashable are the blogs that chronicle the rapidly-exploding universe of social environments that want your time. Between them, they sometimes introduce 20 new sites a week. 

Don’t panic! 

You don’t need to join everything!

 

I decided to focus on LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, my blog, and a weekly email newsletter.  Second Life, Twitter, etc. just don’t add that much more.  If it changes, I’ll give them a try.

How to handle pressure to join the latest-greatest social media network:

  1. Go deep. Have a deep presence in a few places where you can make a real impact instead of spreading yourself thin and getting nothing out of it. When you commit to a platform, do it well. Create rich profiles, contribute a ton of content, look great, make friends. You get out what you put in.
  2. Target.  Find out where your customers are. Go there.  Just like old-fashioned marketing.
  3. Wait. Give it time to shake out.  New communities will prove themselves vibrant and useful. Or they fade away.  Either way, give it time before your invest your time.  You’ll know it’s ready when a ton of your customers start inviting you in.
  4. Cheers.  As in the TV show. Be a regular, "Where everybody knows your name."  Be a member of the community, get known, earn respect.  That’s what gets people to really give back to you.

It’s more important to be credible than be everywhere 

This is Andy Sernovitz, signing off from my old-school blog, which works just fine.

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