However, social media isn’t media at all—it is simply a conversation with two or more people. It’s an action. Not a site. Social media isn’t Twitter. Or Facebook. It isn’t the new web site flavor of the week. It’s the ability to have conversations online with others, whether it is your market, customers, colleagues, or anyone who happens to come across your conversation.

Twitter isn’t social media if you use it to just send out ads and blog post updates. That’s a glorified RSS feed in 140 characters. You have people every day talking about your market, your industry, and possibly your actual product or service. You choose whether to be part of it, but that won’t stop the conversation, and sometimes will make it worse if people view you as ignoring an issue. Out of the top 100 brands mentioned on Twitter, the majority don’t have an official account.²² Imagine a room of a thousand of your potential and current customers all talking about you and you choose to go somewhere else. Or even worse, you show up to the party and just hand out flyers, which is what you’re doing if you run a Twitter account and only send out ads. The existence of the account makes it look like you want to be part of the conversation, but your actions show otherwise.

Facebook isn’t social media if you just run a fan page and then don’t interact with the people who join it. Facebook is a 2.0 mailing list, and an ineffective one at that. Sure, sending out a request for someone to “be our fan!” on Facebook so they can be informed of discounts could grab you some people and may create a few sales, too, if you’re a known brand to them, but think of how much more you could benefit if you engaged with those new fans. What would that do to your reputation? People want to be validated, they want to be heard, and they want to feel they matter. You shouldn’t have to ask someone to be a fan—if you engage people, they become fans. Raging ones.

LinkedIn isn’t social media if all you’re doing is hunting down potential customers and trying to pitch to them through five different gatekeepers and asking, “Hey Scott, can you forward this on to your friend you’ve built trust with? I got a whopper of a deal!” The site has so much potential and yet is used properly so rarely. For an example of this, check out most of the LinkedIn Groups. They are full of “push” articles from people reposting the same thing, which are mostly sales pitches. No conversation, no comments, just crap. Start topics of conversations, help people out.

Writing a blog isn’t “using social media” unless you are social with your readers. A blog without the ability to comment by the readers is just an informal article that may as well stay in print. If you’re not open to conversation, why be in a channel where people expect it? You potentially do more harm than good by being there and not engaging than you would by not being there at all.

Company reps are scared to use social media in this manner, though, because they’ve always had the misconception that they can control the message. The press release, the well-spun message approved by three departments. They have to realize something very quickly: they never controlled the message, because it’s in the receiver’s hands to absorb, experience, and spread their own experience with your message in their eyes. You may have a wellcrafted press release about your new baby stroller, but moms will give you their own spin, which has no spin at all. They share the good, bad, and ugly.²³

If you want to be successful in social media you have to build up your social currency. Whenever I try to explain social media to a person or audience, I tend to get that dazed puppy look staring back at me. So I now relate it to money. Think of it this way: You wouldn’t open a business bank account and ask to withdraw $5,000 before depositing anything. The banker would think you are a loony. Yet people go on social media, open their account, send out a few pitches for their mediocre e-book, and then complain to me that this social media stuff “doesn’t work.”

You’ve got to invest in something before withdrawing. Investing your social currency means giving your time, your knowledge, and your efforts to that channel before trying to withdraw monetary currency. I tweeted 10,000 times before ever trying to pitch something on Twitter. But when I did, I sold it out in a day (UnBootcamp).²⁴ People don’t care about your business until they know you care about them. Look what gets shared on Facebook or retweeted on Twitter. It’s not ads or pitches. It’s knowledge. It’s stuff that makes people say “awesome” and they need to tell others about it.