Two Methods for Building Contact Adhesion
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“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” –Albert Einstein
In our last post we talked about Contact Adhesion in Social Networking. The idea was that the greater your level of contact adhesion with a particular online contact, the greater the chances that that contact will take part in your next online promotion. In this post we are going to outline two different methods for building contact adhesion.
The first method If going to describe is the less powerful of the two, but I’m going to list it first since it has the ability to help with the second method. Horizontal Contact Adhesion refers to connecting with a particular contact across several different social networking sites. This is the kind of networking we discussed in our post, “5 Ways Linkedin Can Help Grow your Business”, and it has two distinct benefits.
First, the more points of contact you have with someone, the greater the chance that they will catch wind of your next online promotion. For example, let’s say that you network with a particular contact on Twitter and Facebook. If you were to tweet about a promotion on Twitter but your contact never gets a chance to see that message before it drowns in a sea of competing tweets, then you still have a chance to get them involved with a share on Facebook.
The second advantage is that once you have connected with your contact across several different social networking sites, you will get a better idea of what their online patterns are, and which social networking sites they use the most.
Our second method, Vertical Contact Adhesion, takes place after you have figured out where your contact likes to hang out online. The idea is to target you online interaction with this contact to the sites that they prefer.
Examples of this might include leaving comments on their blog, contributing as a member of their Facebook group, leaving @replies for them on Twitter, or posting a link to their most recent project on your Plurk timeline. The idea is to contribute anything that will help your prospective contact’s online efforts, and build you up in their eyes as a valued contact.
As we’ve mentioned before, it’s not possible to do this with thousands of contacts. What we want to start to build is a nucleus of online contacts that we interact with on a regular basis. Having this kind of core group in place is the starting point for gaining leverage in any social media marketing campaign.
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January 10th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Man, your blog is very informative! I am liking the theory part of Social media ! All along I have blindly been a follower! Keep enlightening me!