Yammer and Friends

I highly recommend another social media outlet I've started using called Yammer (www.yammer.com). It functions much like Twitter, where you give short updates that go to a network of "followers." The key distinction is that you sign up through your company's own Yammer account, and the updates are only read by people within your organization. T-Mobile USA has a Yammer, and I've enjoyed reading updates from colleagues spread across our 42,000 employee base and multiple lines of business.

In other social media news, I've noticed that my Twitter followers seem to grow exponentially each day. I've been on for a couple of months, and at first I'd have a few people per week add me as a follower. During the past few weeks I saw a significant increase in new followers, especially after pockets when I've started following several new people at once. Then, today, Oct. 29, about 25 new followers latched on to my updates. Of course, a couple I had to block because they were, well, not someone I'd want following me... 

A couple of people in my Twitter network have more than 60,000 followers. I'm blown away by that; they must do nothing else all day but add and receive followers, surely? Mostly, I'm thinking, "What a great marketing base!" Many of the people in my following/followers network are writers, coaches and speakers as well.

Another social media outlet I use quite a bit is LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), the key site for professional networking. I have a little more than 400 persons in that network at this point, and close to another 700 on the obligatory Facebook. There is some overlap between Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, but combined I believe I am able to reach well more than 1,000 persons now with my various updates. Of course, I'm just a tiny player in this social media universe compared to the person with 60,000 Twitter followers.

But I think something is key here. It's not about the number of followers, friends, colleagues, etc., but the quality of the social media relationships one is building. And the purpose behind them. There's no real sustainable value in being a "friend collector." My strategy is to leverage social media to not only stay connected with genuine friends but to build an ever-expanding network and audience of critically-thinking, motivated people to serve with the writing, coaching and speaking efforts around which I have so much passion. There is some amazing talent in this country and world that I could have never accessed before the advent of the Web and social media.

The world has changed so much since I was a newspaper journalist during the 1990s, cranking out story after story on a DOS computer and calling people on the (landline) phone all day long...