Some "experts" recommend you specialize when it comes to building a web presence. If you are capable of completely connecting with many people on a single social media channel, then it's probably worth your while. But my contrarian instincts and personal experience has been that unless you are famous outside of a social circle, it's unlikely you will dominate any single media. That's fine, because winning in social media is a completely different animal than standard competitive games.
Gratitude is the key facet of virtual currency. Many "kings" of older media channels are not only vulnerable to losing all their influence in an instant, but often fail at the most vital feature of social media, engagement. Without doubt media has been a disrupted industry.
We should instead strive to be unbiased in our selection of the social channel we converse in. Being courteous and gaining familiarity with local community customs is a necessary aspect of building repoire. Independent of the channel, our trust is earned
- by recognizing other active participants
- sharing quality content on a consistent basis
- to be a recognized thought leader we must continually share valuable insight over a long period of time
As to sharing, this is especially true for an undiscovered source. Be it a band, a would be tech company, or an unknown author, others value your shares based on the content you link to. Your "super human filter score" is built unconsciously as potential followers explore your virtual discovery portal (they experience what you share). Crowd sourced communities have built visible scoring systems as a measure of "influence" or contribution to that service. It is odd for me to associate a number with trust, as one big mistake or poor judgement share, should nullify existing trust, and rarely do any sites use this strong penalty system outside of directly banning policy breakers.
The advantage of getting involved in several communities is connecting common idea groups within each. They can rally about or unify around your creative input, shared information, or message. Most communities are made up of members that interact in several social channels. A friend on digg may also be a reddit, HackerNews, and Twitter friend. In addition to the potentially larger network of friends, you will also have much greater sources of information to share across communities. A fantastic email link from one friend can be share on Twitter, which gets retweeted (reshared) and gets you recognition. Just make sure to give credit to your friend and share proper referring sources. People value quality link sharing and often express their gratitude, at the very least I do.
If you need further convincing, just look at pros like Fred Wilson, Louis Gray or Robert Scoble. These gentlemen are active in many different media channels while using their blogs as a focal point of information distribution and conversation hubs. They are also incredibly generous with their time, and marketing juice.
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