A friend of mine sent me the following video. It offers a great lesson on the actual mechanics of building a movement. It has an interesting perspective on leadership. Would welcome your comments and your opinions on this topic.

One of the three pillars of building an effective Social Networking strategy is increasing your credibility. When people trust you they will listen to you. So I’m always looking for ways to increase my credibility online.

ReallyWho.com can help you increase your credibility online. They have a pretty slick system that allows them to verify that you are indeed a real person with a real physical address. This greatly reduces the chances that spammers would use their service – since the last thing that they want is for people online to know their real name and/or location. As you can see from my picture below, they add a verify banner to your image that you can then place on your Social Media sites to increase people’s trust in you.

Remember that trust and credibility are built over time and in little increments. This is one step that will help you. I highly encourage that you at least check them out.

I received the message below in response to a connection request on LinkedIn:

Hello Rick – I’ve always been torn about whether or not to link with someone I don’t know. It seems to defeat the purpose – to refer or introduce you to others in my network. Just yesterday I called a friend to ask about someone in her network and she said she didn’t know the person. That makes the connection useless, don’t you think?

I believe this person’s perspective is quite common. She found my response useful and so may you. Would love to hear your comments.

Jim (not his real name),

I fully understand your feelings. When I first started using LinkedIn and other Social Networking sites, my approach was to only accept invitations from people I knew personally. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who have hundreds or thousands of meaningless connections.

I then started realizing that with this approach, my networking was going to be extremely limited – and mostly useless. This is because I would be networking with people I was already networking with. Not a lot of growth potential there.

Back then, I also started doing some article writing. Whenever people commented on my articles, I would write them an email thanking them. This led me to having conversations with many of these folks. And before long I started adding those people to my network.

Social Networking is all about relationships. However, the value of our network is based on both the QUALITY (depth) and the QUANTITY (reach) of our relationships. It is not an “either/or” but rather a “both/and” proposition.

While you and I don’t know each other, we do share several things in common. We are connected to some individuals we both know, we are both in BNI, we participate on LinkedIn and we belong to some of the same LinkedIn groups. That’s a good start to our relationship.

Now we’re having a conversation (albeit by email.) Who knows where this will lead? However, if you fail to accept my invitation, it will certainly lead nowhere.

Does that mean I personally know every person my network? No, it doesn’t. However everyone in my network has the potential to contribute something to someone else in my network. Take you for example, you have knowledge in Reverse Mortgages, something about which I know very little. If someone in my network were to ask me for a question or recommendation in this area, I wouldn’t hesitate to tap into your expertise. I might contact you asking you for information or I may offer your name to my contact and have them contact you directly, etc.

Bottom line, Social Networking is about a mindset. If you are connecting with people for the exclusive purpose of “what can I get?” then numbers are quite useless. However, if your purpose for growing your network is so that you can offer more opportunities to “give” then numbers do matter.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted much lately is that I’ve been very focused on publishing my eBook. I’m thrilled to announce that I finally finished it. The book is called Social Networking for Business Profits – In 30 Minutes a Day or Less and you can click on the image in the sidebar to purchase it.

When I first started this project, I figured I would write a 6-8 page eBook. However by the time I was done, I had partnered up with Mike Hayden who is an excellent technical writer and the finished product is a 45 page book. The purpose of the book is to help the Social Networking newbie get started in this exciting arena. Based on the feedback I’ve gotten so far, I accomplished my purpose.

If you find value in this blog’s content, you will definitely find value in the book.

Now that this part is done, the most difficult part begins – the marketing of the book. My guess is that this will lead to another eBook.

In the meantime, this whole experience is like Rubik’s cube. Every time a piece is completed, it affects several others. Exciting stuff!

If you have read my book would love to hear your feedback.

This is a short video by Lee LeFever from Common Craft that provides an excellent explanation in plain English as to what exactly is RSS and the value to you in using it. Once you finish watching it, you probably want to subscribe to this blog using the RSS feed.

In addition,  this blog post by Charles Helfin is also very useful to help you see more uses for RSS

If you are considering using Twitter, you can read this 10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners article by Darren Rowse.