Growing up, you may have been told that sharing is caring. When you go to school, it’s important that you share with your classmates. This helps to foster new friendships and develop the social skills in the little ones. However, moving forward, just sharing doesn’t really cut the mustard and this really becomes apparent in the world of social media.
I don’t recall exactly where I first heard the phrase, but I’ve been told that it is not enough to share; you have to engage with your fellow Internet brethren. Let’s take Twitter as a prime example. If you go ahead and share a series of links with your followers, that can be a good thing. You can guide them toward interesting content, great deals, and other stuff that they want to see. However, if that’s all you do, it’s not enough.
It’s very unlikely that people want to follow a Twitter account if it’s nothing more than a glorified RSS feed. If you are a real human being, it’s about developing a sense of online community. It’s about engaging with your followers in meaningful ways. Participate in fruitful conversations, making for a better online experience for everyone involved. The same thing happens with Facebook and it applies just as equally to blogging.
On Beyond the Rhetoric, I very much encourage my readers to leave their thoughts in the form of comments. You may notice that I reward the “top thinkers” each month with a speedlink session, for example. I share the links to my posts through Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz, but again, sharing isn’t enough.
That’s why I do my best to actively engage with the audience too. If a comment warrants a response, I’ll likely reply. If someone poses a question through social media, I’ll respond to them there. It doesn’t matter if it’s a positive or negative comment, but you can’t please everyone all the time. It’s much more fruitful to participate in a fruitful conversation than it is to disregard the naysayers altogether.
The idea of engaging, as well as sharing, stretches beyond the online realm too. If you really want to make a difference in the world, for instance, donating (sharing) to charity is good. Actively engaging in the issues that you care about in some way, however, is better. Sharing information with a colleague is good; engaging with the colleague to ensure they understand the information is better.
And you might learn something too.
It makes sense. I have one blog I go to regularly and i like it above all because the blogger makes a point to answer almost everyone. It really helps. He also is not shy about giving advice and good advice at that.
There’s a fine line to tread about that kind of thing. I’m a little annoyed when the blog owner replies to every comment, even when the comment doesn’t really warrant a reply. If someone thanks you for a good post, for example, you don’t really need to chime in with a “you’re welcome.”
I couldn’t agree with you more. Sharing without engaging is akin to lecturing without fielding questions.
I agree. You do have to engage yourself with your readers and community but also show them that you’re genuine and unique.
My original comment to this post got lost in hyper space. So, after much thought here is the revised version.
Sharing is a very important part of life and leads to a lot of great relationships, but engaging is even so much more important to our growth. A case in point is my early years of life when my father was in his early career in the Navy. We moved every two years to another state, another city, another set of people.
At the age of 4 I had a new set of friends, or should I say strangers to meet and get to know. My dad told me to go make friends, to engage the other kids. At the age of 6 we moved to another state and I had to start over and it happened again when I was 7, just one year later, while only to another part of the city 30 miles from my newly created friends.
If I had not engaged I would have been an introverted person, would have not had friends and would not have learned the social skills to make good decisions when working with others. These are all learned from socializing with new people as child.
I believe it has helped me in dealing with people throughout life and making friends. On the other hand it has also led to me liking to talk a lot because I had to engage ALOT as a child to fit in. Each side, sharing and engaging has it’s strengths and weakness. Used in balance and you have a complete set of relationships and life experiences.