Knowing about politics is important if you want to develop a community online. You need to be genuine and as transparent as possible if you want people to really connect with your brand, product or service. There are good ways and bad ways to contribute to social media. Being shady, inconsistent or dishonest will get you no where fast.  As Lincoln said…

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)
16th president of US (1809 – 1865)

This post goes through the essential considerations and levels of engagement with social media:

I like to use this structure to think about levels of engagement in social media marketing:

  • Observation — monitoring of social media outlets such as blogs, discussion groups and YouTube channels.
  • Interaction — behind-the-scenes discussion with opinion leaders and others (basically, blogger relations).
  • Contribution — adding to the social media stream by creating your own content, such as blog comments, blog posts, Facebook groups and causes, MySpace pages and online videos.
  • Solicitation — encouraging others to create content, whether it’s text, imagery or video, by creating a blog submission process, a contest or another public outlet.

Please take a moment and check out this post: Online Politics 101 and download the pdf and read through it. It has some very valuable and in-depth insights into the social media marketing process you are endeavoring to master.

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