Viralogy

The second installment of Social Media Tactics is called “Being Transparent”. If you’re a social media marketer, influencer or just someone who wants to add a following to your blog, transparency can be crucial to your success. The first installment of Social Media Tactics was called: Engaging Your Community.

It’s understandable to want privacy in this digital age where anyone can know anything about you. Type Jaremy Rich (or even Jaremy) into a search engine, and you’ll find my blog, twitter and even some baseball games I pitched in college. Each and every person you meet can search for you easily on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. There’s no longer any barrier to “friend”, “follow” or “connect”, and there’s certainly no barrier for someone to “Google” you. So what’s wrong with wanting a little privacy in a world where privacy is scarce? Well, nothing, unless you’re interested in creating an engaging and influential social media presence.

However, if you are looking for people to trust you online, you have to trust them right back. Hiding details and omitting truths creates a barrier between you and our community. Being transparent is the fastest and best way to gain trust and respect among your community. The internet is no longer a place where you can hide behind your handle/avatar and still expect to receive a great deal of respect, or omit details about your personal/professional life and be taken seriously. There’s a reason why most of the most influential social media users on Twitter have their face as their avatar and boldly display their full name. Confidently displaying your information builds trust. Trust builds respect, and respect creates connections.

Social Media Tactics discusses various ways social and new media users build relationships and add value to their audience. Each week, we will look at one social media influencer that has managed to use web marketing successfully. In Social Media Tactics, we’ll show you some of the best ways to enhance your own brand and social media presence while demonstrating how some smart users employ social media tactics.

How Transparency helped Andrew Warner and Mixergy

Andrew Warner is a great case study for the importance of transparency in social media. He runs a website called Mixergy, interviewing entrepreneurs to ask them about their stories and to spread tips and information from all sorts of successful startup founders. Yet for a long time, he never once talked about his own story. Though he was always moderately successful with Mixergy, sharing his life story helped to add greater credibility to his writing and increased his community following.

Andrew was a startup veteran; he launched his own business in his early 20’s earning revenues of over $38 million dollars. Not wishing to brag about his past and tell stories about his own success, he tried to keep that previous work private from his community. He believed it was unimportant and knew that his friends and family already were aware of his story. However, for his readers were much more interested in his own story than he even knew. In April 2009, The Andrew Warner Story was posted on Neil Patel’s blog, QuickSprout, causing Mixergy’s following to broaden and grow. The story got over 300 comments on QuickSprout. His story created instant credibility among entrepreneurs, and posting it caused a new influx of people to watch his interviews.

Transparency created trust for people who had no idea who Andrew Warner was (or what his company, Bradford and Reed did). It’s actually the reason that I was first introduced to Mixergy. Though modesty and business practices tell you not to share personal information for risk of alienating yourself, Andrew proved that an interesting story truly draws people in and creates connections. Even if you disagreed with his business’s practices or hated his interviews, you couldn’t deny his success and his insider experience. He was the quintessential example of a bootstrapped entrepreneur, and his story was the only one not being shared on Mixergy.

Are you transparent with your social media profile? If not, what doors can your transparency open for you?

Jaremy Rich writes a technology, marketing and gaming blog called Techshots, and you can read about his life, career and passions on his blog and many social networking profiles.

Photo source: Jdlasica’s photostream on Flickr.