Social media is about people, and about interacting with those people.
I’m featuring some here…
Meet Charlie Robinson from Adelaide in South Australia.
Charlie is one of my favorite people on line, and I have run into her on a number of sites, most notably Facebook, Plurk and Twitter.
Bright, bubbly and engaging, she comes across as being very real, which is one reason she is so popular, and why her network has grown very quickly.
Charlie is different to the run of the mill social networker for another reason too though.
That reason is something that the present ‘A’ listers of social media might find quite stunning.
The fact is that if you want to network with this girl, you need to be just as real as she is, and that takes relationship…
Charlie has taken the bold step of weeding out members of her network who don’t engage with her.
As a result she has cut her network at Facebook to 400 members.
What does this mean at a time when the big names of the social networking world are boasting of huge numbers of followers on Twitter and FriendFeed?
To my mind it means that people are sick and tired of being treated like idiots, forced to consume every word these self styled gurus utter.
They can find stuff for themselves now, and the A Listers appear to be becoming more irrelevant as each day passes.
Fellow Share2Grow member Christine Taylor reminded me yesterday of a quote from a book by David L. Steward.
The book, Doing Business by the Good Book goes into how different industries have come and gone over the years.
The author mentions the trauma that the movie industry went through as the populararity of television grew during the 1950′s.
A quote in the book comes from an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1960.
That article, “Marketing Myopia” included this snippet, paraphrased by both Christine and I:
…buggy whip manufacturers went out of business because they failed to realize they were in the transportation industry, not the buggy whip industry. In other words, they didn’t adapt to change..
From: “Doing Business by the Good Book” by David L. Steward Published by Fine Communications
This post was in part inspired by Jim Kukral’s post The Death Of The A List!.
Whether the A List is dead or dying is a hot topic at present, and one that I will revisit tomorrow.
