Imagine Your Reality: Talks on Social Media
Following up on my "bully beatdown" of the social media expert meme, I wanted to examine some of the business practices and ideas of an actual social media consultant: life coach Taylor Ellwood of Imagine Your Reality. Taylor is a noted author and speaker who a few years ago opened up a consulting service to help people through life coaching. Most recently, he has been consulting with businesses on their social media initiatives and training people and businesses alike on the advantages and practices of social networking and social media.
From his web site:
I teach businesses and writers how to use social media to market themselves and how to automate their social media marketing presence so that they spend less than two hours a week on social media sites.
I was talking on the phone with Taylor yesterday about the various pitfalls of social media consulting, and we discussed a bunch of ideas and practices (both good and bad) that can be seen in the industry today.
In discussing his business practices, Taylor was quick to point out that social media surrounds the idea of networking. To him, social networking is an online extension of networking in the real world - whether by phone calls or meetups. Social media, therefore, are tools used to help with this networking.
Imagine Your Reality's services focus in on two key components often misunderstood by get-rich-quick supposed social media "experts:" consistency and authenticity. Taylor stresses consistency in your social media offering, having seen too many companies and individuals who start for a little while, but then quickly tire of the work involved. In regards to authenticity, Taylor's practices remind me of a sections in Joshua Porter's book Designing for the Social Web, in which he discusses the importance of "authentic communication" when dealing with customers and potential clients. Taylor agrees that it's not simply a matter of posting a bunch of links to your products or services. It's about establishing an authentic line of communication between yourself and those that befriend or following you on the various social networking web sites.
Taylor's services and understanding of the new ways of the web are very refreshing during a time when merely mentioning social media on Twitter gets you immediately followed by 5-10 user accounts of spam links with descriptions of how they're "experts" when it comes to the Internet. Very refreshing indeed.
