If you go into a bar and try to sell SEO services how do you think people will react? If you go in a park and stop people that jog to present your product how do you think they’ll react? If you see a group of people sharing stories about their latest vacation and you interrupt them to promote your service/product how do you think they’ll react?

These kinds of actions based on interruption are the worst things you could do on any social network. You may think that since so many people use social networks for business it’s natural to expect a direct sell interruption. Wrong! Indeed many people use social networks for business but the word social makes all the difference.

The idea is to interact, build relations, let people know what you do by using your bio. When they go out to scout for new clients people are interacting first and present a business card later. When a person enters a company office or visits a business blog, there is the place where they expect to see direct sale.

You don’t have to tell people what you do. They can read your bio, visit your blog, see what you tweet or post on Facebook or what kind of videos you create. The only thing you have to do is think about how to establish a connection. How to gain their trust? How to build authority around you? How to brand yourself?

You, as a human, know very well that everything you do in real life is what defines you as a person: the way you dress, the way you speak, the things you read (or the things you don’t read), how is your house (clean, dirty, organized), what kind of friends you have, what movies you watch, what music you prefer and the list could go on. If you ask a kid on the street he knows that depending on what he does people will see him differently. Even a kid knows this stuff.

Then, why grown up people don’t realize this when going online. And I think that there is a place where this kind of things are most obvious: Twitter. It must be because of the way Twitter is build: because of the way you interact with your friends/followers. The possibility to interact almost in real-time with people around the globe makes us loose the sight of our goals sometimes. Now, I don’t want to get me wrong here: I’m not saying that you have to be a robot and tweet only technical stuff or your-niche-market-related-stuff. But I’m suggesting the fact that to much of side-talking or not-relevant-to-your-profile-tweeting can affect your presence on Twitter.

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You know, this social media thing is not that complicated as some may think. Of course you need to approach it strategically and by that I men you need to know your audience and what social websites to use. But as far as I’m concerned this is the most difficult part. The rest is just common sense and many make mistakes simply because when they’re typing in front of the computer don’t realize that they’re talking to real people. We all seem to overlook this at some point and the sooner we realize it the sooner we’ll be able to correct it.

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Everyone wants to benefit from social media tools : blogs, social networks, social sharing, microblogging. All these social tools have become the instrument we all can use for free to market our selfs and our products or services. It’s a great step forward because now television, radio and newspapers are no longer in control. You can have your own video channel on YouTube or Viddler and you can publish anything you want on your blog and share it with the whole world.

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It’s happening to me everyday : something goes wrong and for a moment I stop and wonder what did I did wrong. But sometimes I found out that sticking to my initial plan could be the best thing I can do. And even if in the short term this can cause me to lose some followers on Twitter (or associates as Jim Connolly likes to call them) or maybe get some bad responses on the forums I have to think at the big picture and realize what my objectives are.

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Web design and web content are related to each other. The reason is both the design of your website and the content you provide on your website talks about you and about the product or service that you wish to offer on your website. For example if you would be a poet, people would expect to read poetry when coming to your blog, if you are a photographer you have to offer both good images and good description or maybe you are a web designer. Then you should talk like one. At least on your website. People need that. They need to see you are good at what you do. They need to trust you before buying. And you can’t do it without trust. It’s like when you’re going to a rock concert and you don’t expect to see the lead singer dressed for opera and sing like Frank Sinatra.

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