I was meeting with clients today on a social media refresh course - we were talking about Twitter and Facebook and blogging, and they were holding themselves back about expressing what they were doing. This is the story I shared about sharing personal experiences.
My wife, Franki, the lovely and talented writer for LifeInAVentiCup.com, is a website designer. She's much more than that, but when she first started blogging, she hung with the designer blog crowd online, sharing tips on CSS, HTML, fonts, and clients. One of the best bloggers out there was writing tips on CSS. He was amazing. He gave away incredible training expertise, and one day he writes about laundry troubles. It was his highest rated post, and the comments were overflowing. A couple of months later, he writes about his wife baking chocolate chip cookies, and again, the comments are ridiculous.
He asked his readers what was going on. Here's he providing top notch design advice, but they were most excited about his cookie posts? How crazy is that?
What had happened was his audience was thrilled at his expertise, but they wanted to get to know the person behind the great information as well. The cookie and laundry stories gave them that glimpse, reassuring them that a real, live likable person was behind the content. If all he wrote was cookie stories - well, that gets old, but the occasional personal anecdote is reassuring in the online world. It humanized him.
I tell this story all the time, and explained to my clients that they were interesting, lively, funny, successful people. Yes, we wanted to hear about their work and business, and yes that was the purpose of being involved in social media, but it's also okay to give personal details every once in a while. The female client had just spent three or four minutes making small talk with me, mentioning that she had just been at her kid's school, eating lunch and playing Capture the Flag. The story was funny, and it made me jealous of her having fun on a workday, and it was something you could actually Tweet or write about.
Too often we hear social media is about what you have your lunch, but in this case, the story was interesting enough that she shared it with me live, and I assured her that it was unique enough to share with her followers. After all, who gets to play Capture the Flag when you're over 18 and not playing an XBox?
Tell your stories, but tell them sparingly. And to make your audience care, you of course have to have good content. But humanizing yourself online is important when people can't see, hear, and touch you. Sharing personal details bonds your audience to you, if done in appropriate amounts, and with a point.
It's a small thing you can do to stand out.
