Rotary Club Speaker

I just returned from a Rotary Club meeting. The guest speaker was Professor Niklas Myhr from Chapman University. He is Assistant Professor of Marketing and the topic of his speech was Social Networking. I was familiar (Please note: familiar does not equal expert) with the topics he presented. I was truly impressed by his articulation of how the Social Network is used.

Professor Myhr presented the above chart to explain how one succeeds in the social media environment.  The first step is to Listen. He gave the example of President Roosevelt who would study the biography and interests of his guest before meeting them. In the social media world this can be done by monitoring tweets and Facebook postings, and LinkedIn postings. The next step is to Relate. This point was the most intriguing concept for me. He argued that working toward a short-term  "purpose" or "objectives" will fail. The key to success is to build a long term relationship. If one goes in with the objective "of selling a product" the objective most likely will fail.  The third step is to Engage. This is something that I do in my classes (I hope!). Professor Myhr argued that there are many choices out there competing for our attention. For example he does not place more than 3 points per slide in his lectures. This made me think about my own slides and how I should review them.