Angela Crocker

Write. Teach. Organize.

Figure Out Your 3P

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Digital Cleanse Day 14:

Figure Out Your 3P

Your 3P is my solution to one of the most common social media objections.  People worry about sharing too much online and the resulting loss of privacy. I understand the concern.

If you’re using social media in your private life, nothing obligates you to share on a social network.  What stays offline, stays private.  It’s your choice to share with  family and friends or to interact with others who share your hobby.  What you share is your choice. However, if you are using social networks for business purposes, you’re going to have to share something. I recommend you divide yourself into three parts, your 3P.  These parts are professional, personal and private.

Professional

Your professional part is fully public. You share expertise, experience, anecdotes, details about your job and information about any products or services you work with. Sharing about your professional life can help your brand with sales and marketing. It can also position you for your next job or entrepreneurial venture. What you share publicly helps establish credibility, cultivate a network and demonstrate authority.

Personal

To be successful online in business, you also need to share another part of yourself that I call the personal part, the next third of your 3P. Your personal part might include a love of hockey, a passion for rescue dogs and commitment to tennis.  This is the part that humanizes you. It makes you a complete person not just a selling machine. It allows you to establish rapport and garner trust.

You share to find mutual interests as a lead into in-depth conversations. Your willingness to share more than just sales messages and marketing banter make you a whole person. This is really important. Who you are and how you related to people has to be more than shop talk. You can’t be all about business all the time.

Through your online posts, comments and interactions you must blend your professional part with your personal part. Remember this is SOCIAL networking, even if it’s conducted digitally, you are still interacting with real people. The personal things you share can make it more enjoyable to do business together.

Private

The private part of yourself stays offline. You decide to keep details of your hemorrhoids, money troubles and off-color humor private. Politics and religion are often kept private, too, just like at a dinner party with the extended family. If you’re not sure what to keep private, ask yourself two questions:

  • What do you want to hide from your Mom?
  • What would embarrass you if it appeared on the front page of a newspaper?

The answers to those two questions make up your private life. If you want to keep it private, keep it offline. You choose. If you don’t share it, it’s not online. You are in control. (Well, almost in control. Remember that others can quote your contentious comments and share photos or videos of other embarrassing moments.)

Divide and Blend

How to express the divide and the blend between the professional, personal and private parts of your life, is entirely up to you. Every person’s answer will be unique. As an example, here’s a snapshot of my 3P breakdown:

  • Professional: communicator, writer, instructional designer, teacher, speaker
  • Personal: parent, home owner, Star Wars fan, doodles with fine art supplies
  • Private: asthmatic, struggled with postpartum depression
    [Although, I have now made these private parts into personal parts in the interests of illustrating the 3P.]

Angela Crocker - 3P - professional, personal, private

Share only what you’re comfortable sharing. Don’t create an artificial self online. I’d rather you shared a minimal amount and were true to yourself. Faking it will not get you anywhere online or in life. Authenticity is the nobler path.

More on the 30 day #digitalcleanse tomorrow. Hope to see you then!

(If you missed yesterday’s installment, take a couple extra minutes to explore Schedule Digital Tasks and Digital Fun. For links to the complete Digital Cleanse series, click here.)

Why use iGoogle?

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When starting out in social networking, it’s important to listen to your online community and get a sense of what’s being said before you add to the conversation. I encourage everyone to gather a list of blogs that relate to their topic.

Some people still do this with the old school way with the “bookmark” feature in a web browser. This puts the onus on you to click to each site to see if anything’s new. You can waste a lot of time clicking on sites where nothing has changed while you hunt for new content.

Instead, it’s much more efficient to use an RSS reader. There are lots of options available but I find iGoogle to be one of the simplest and easiest to use. I also like that it’s web based so I can log into this reader from any computer or mobile device, not just my own desk.

You’ll use your hand picked list of blogs in several ways:

1) To observe what others in your field are saying online. You’ll get a sense of how they are communicating and how your shared target market is responding.

2) To assess what works and what doesn’t and then mimic the formats/frequency that suits your communication style and meets the needs of your community.

3) To increase your online visibility by commenting on other people’s posts. Every time you do this you have the opportunity to include a link back to your website which helps people find you and enhances your SEO (search engine optimization).

4) To fuel the “referenced” or “curated” content that you’ll share through social media. As I’ve said before, what you post on Twitter and Facebook shouldn’t be all about you and your company all the time.

5) Comments (#3) and sharing (#4) are also great ways to build relationships with the people behind the websites who are part of your community. They may be customers, prospects or peers .

All of this can be done much more efficiently with iGoogle or something equivalent. The time drain of social media is a huge concern for many people so I hope this strategy will allow you more time to do other things online.

One last thing … you’ll add blogs to your reader over time as you discover websites of interest. You may only find 3 or 4 a week and that’s fine. There may even be weeks where you add nothing new or delete some sites that are not longer of interest. It’s kind of like editing your perfect newspaper with only the sections you want.

I hope you’ll include my feed in your “must read” list. You’ll find the feed here.

Creating Original Content

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Success in social networking is all about content. You’ve got to consistently share information of interest to your community. What you share should be a blend of original content created by you and referenced or curated content created by others.

Photo Credit: Ch10 on Flickr
used under Creative Commons License.

Here are 9 ways you can create original content this week:

  1. Write about the product you worked on today. What will your customers love about it? What problem will it solve for them?
  2. Praise someone you work with – a colleague, a supplier, a support worker. Share who they are and why their contribution is so valuable.
  3. Share someplace interesting you’ve visited. It could be a retailer, a supplier, a restaurant or somewhere in nature. Tell your audience why you enjoyed it and include a photo if you can.
  4. Record a video. Show your product being made or your service in action.
  5. Take photos of people, places & things. Every photo has the potential to anchor a blog post or become a tweet.
  6. Write about related products that complement but don’t compete. For example, a dog food manufacturer might write about a line of dog toys.
  7. Remove the veil and share some little known facts about your organization.
  8. Create a contest. Include a “can’t be bought” experience related to what you do in the grand prize.
  9. Conduct interviews with executives, suppliers & customers. This can be done by email Q&A or as an audio or video recording.

Go create something right now.