Listen to Advice on Social Media

Reflecting on my recent series of articles about selected Web 2.0 heroes, I’d like to share with you an important piece of advice for learning about social media:

Listen.

Listen to my words. Read them aloud. Think about what they mean as one person’s perspective.

Listen to other people’s words. Click on links. It doesn’t matter where the links go. The more you read how different people and organizations show themselves on the web, the more educated you will be.

When you like a link, bookmark it. Add it to del.icio.us. Digg it. R-igg it. Twit it. Twine it. Stumble it.

Blog about it. Make a whole page about one link you like or a series of links. Share the love, participate in the community.

Don’t confine your writing to your own blog. Social media is about the conversation with others, so write on other people’s blogs.

Add comments when you are inspired. I suggest for every 20 minutes you spend writing your own content, spend 80 minutes writing content on other people’s blogs.

We come together on the World Wide Web to create and share advice on the best music, videos, cartoons, and stories that make us better people.

Through dynamic relationships, we collaborate and corroborate on best practices to improve online productivity and interpersonal communication, and participate in a social experiment that changes every day.

One of the neat things about evangelizing the benefits, risks, and drawbacks of using social media, whether to replace your static website with a blog, enhance your keywords for search engine optimization, transform your press releases into RSS feeds, install your business as a viral marketing widget, extend the conversation from emails and comments to linkbaits and trackbacks, and so much more, is nobody knows where it’s going.

We plug on. We amplify each other and provide advice on this, suggestions on that, to create a googolplex of knowledge, in our own ways, on social media.

Here are 14 heroes, arranged in alphabetical order by last name, who I’d like to share with you their proven advice for using social media to make your life better.

Some people talk about building profiles on social networks, some explain the benefits of driving website traffic, others suggest syndication services.

Take away what you will.

We are here to help you navigate the waves of the web so you don’t have to do it alone.

• 9 Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts – Chris Brogan
• 8 Ways to Use Social Media for Branding and Marketing – Chris Brown
• 7 Secrets to Successful Business Blogging – Paul Chaney
• 40 Tips to Promote Your Website – Chris Charlton
• 12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media – Chris Kenton
• 15 Methods to Optimize Search Engine Links – Ravi Kesarwani
• 5 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Blogging – Madiha Mushtaq
• 10 Ways to Use Social Media for Business – Shauna Nicholson
• 16 Important But Distracting Blogging Tasks – Darren Rowse
• 5 Rules for Social Media Optimization – Alka Shakya
• 4 Ways to Identify Social Networkers – Liz Strauss
• How to Use Social Media Successfully – Lynn Terry
• Using Social Media to Grow Your Business – Doug Williams
• Best Practices in Social Media Marketing – Rebecca Zwar

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll write about some of what they provide, and I’m sure they’ll write about some of what I provide. That’s how it works online: a constant battle to see who can share the most without it looking like spam.

I hope this is helpful to you. Is it?

Photo credit: Niclas Lindh

Related posts:

1. How to Connect Your Mother to Me in 5 Random Steps
2. My 20 Most Popular Blog Posts on Social Media
3. Why Social Media is a Fad

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