Social Aikido Lesson 1: Tapping Limitless Energy for Effortless Buzz

Earlier this year  I wrote a piece on “chilling out” about social marketing called “New Rules of Social Marketing.”  A lot of people had a hard time believing the guy who wrote Authority Black Book, with zillions of social accounts all over the web, would be so casual with social marketing today.  Those same people are really going to freak on this post!

Using Aikido To Explain The Difference Between A Social Junkie And A Buzz Master

“Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on. This requires very little physical energy, as the aikidōka (aikido practitioner) “leads” the attacker’s momentum using entering and turning movements.” -Wikipedia

The way I’ve heard others interpret Aikido’s style is that, instead of using your limited energy to defeat a much larger attacker, you turn their energy on themselves.  Aikido throws and joint locks look effortless when performed by a master.  The amount of energy expended on the part of the dominant fighter is nothing compared to the energy the attacker uses.

Using all your own energy to try and grow a massive buzz about yourself and your site is not only a waste of energy, it’s a waste of time.  You’ll never get popular and really, really big on the web if you think your relatively meager energy alone can move massive crowds around the web by itself.  It doesn’t work that way.

This is why people who promote themselves, to the point of getting kicked off social networks, fail to get anything significant going.  They are trying to move a force much larger than themselves like pushing a boulder uphill.

On the flip side, there is virtually limitless energy on the web, in your niche, to  harness for your purposes.  Energy you, by yourself, could never generate in a lifetime.  Using the energy produced by social junkies, the millions of social networking and community members all over the web, to create an avalanche of buzz for your brand is the correct way to get real big, real fast.

Today I say stop using social networks just to make friends and move a few people to your site yourself.  You don’t need to buzz yourself all over the web and have a million accounts with social communities. In fact, you are wasting a lot of energy doing it that way.  And for little return.

How Most of The Big Blogs Got Big…

Great big blogs, for the most part, didn’t become great big blogs by spending 25 hours per day being social.  Surprised?  It’s absolutely true.  Big blogs, like Mashable.com and others, only signed up for Twitter and other social account after their blogs were already big.  Social networks just helped them get bigger.  But by the time they started getting their own accounts on many social sites, everyone else was buzzing them on social networks anyway!

Whatever Pete Cashmore, owner of Mashable, does in social media today, he does because he wants to.  Not because he has to.  So many people read his massive blog and submit his and his staff’s posts to Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Twitter, and Facebook (and so many people are blogging and linking as well) that nothing he or his staff could do on their own social accounts could make a dent in their overall traffic.

So how the hell do sites almost completely skip personally networking as their main traffic and link  source?

They don’t skip it.  They just use it completely differently than most people do.  They put their time into content.  And they network “creatively” to get their content noticed by power players who, in turn, get the word out to hundreds of thousands of readers all over the web for them.  Those readers then bookmark and buzz the stuff they like and gargantuan amounts of social and search engine traffic follow.

Individual social sites are for social junkies more than publishers.

The biggest complaint among users of social networks is publishers coming in and “spamming” the networks with pushy, self-promotional posts and junk.  No one has to spam a social network to get heavy buzz generated for their site.

As publishers, our job is to provide social communities something to talk about.  That’s it.  The Authority Black Book tactics are meant as a short-term “boost.”  It’s to help you get in front of the masses via important thought leaders in your niche who can place links to your content right in front of their massive readership.

And I’m not just talking about bloggers doing this for you.  I’m talking about the millions on Twitter who are always looking for great stuff to share with their followers.  I’m talking about the many millions of people on all social networks passing around URLs and recommending stuff to each other.

Learn from a buzz master…

Another example of someone who plays the online publisher role well is Dean Hunt.  He wasn’t in the top 100 in Digg users when his creative content made it to the front page, driving a quater of a million people to his site.  He published the information, fed it out to some key people he knew could grab the attention of thousands of others, and it took off on Digg.

If you think about your content strategy harder than your personal social marketing strategy, and you start networking with key people who have the attention of large groups, you’ll inevitably get “picked up” and get hit with server-busting traffic.  You tap into the energy of social networks via your content and that massive energy will turn your content out to countless people in your market.

That is if you allow yourself to think deeply about primo content ideas that will rock your market.

Call it linkbait or whatever you want.  But many now full-time bloggers can trace their current level of success back to a single post that just took off and made them a houshold name in their niche overnight.  Literally, overnight.

If you haven’t had the chance to listen to Dean Hunt’s fantastic webinar from a few weeks ago, please do so ASAP.  it will change the whole way you think about doing your own buzz vs. getting tens of thousands of social junkies to do it for you.

Your job is to use social networks to make friends and contacts with the power to push your content to the top of social sites by merely mentioning your latest post on their blog, Twitter or Facebook updates.

Seem easier now?

It should.  Especially if you’ve been running around trying to be your own bullhorn on the social sites and getting nowhere.  Turn that energy toward your content and use social networking to make friends with other larger voices in your niche.  If they like your stuff, you can skip an entire year’s worth of work on link building and social networking at a lower level simply by them publishing your link on their network.

Tagged as: blogging tips, social communities, social marketing, social power linking