Hello everybody. Mickey Griffith here with the Referral Institute in the North San Francisco Bay area and I’d like to talk to you a little bit about social media today.
I’m not a social media expert. I use a social media expert when I need to refer somebody to a social media expert. It’s not what I do. I use Sarah Giometti at Provaro Marketing. When I talk to her about social media, usually I’m talking about how it exists in a referral marketing sense. And so here’s my admonition to you and social media people will tell you the same thing. You’ve got to watch what you do. The things that we post on social media never go away and people see them and it does incredible amounts of damage to your credibility.
Or it can really work for you. There’s a guy that’s connected to me loosely through a network that’s in another county, nearby enough, but knows who I am. Really nice guy. I’ve met him several times and he sent a friend request to me on Facebook and I friend request just about anybody, so I said, “Sure”. And I didn’t know whether or not it would impact anything until I heard back just a few weeks ago from somebody who knows him and they said, “I want to tell you something. I followed Mickey as a friend on Facebook a little while back and I gotta tell you, following him on Facebook, I’m really just beginning to like him more.”
First of all, what a cool thing to hear from somebody, right? Second of all, it was a good reminder of why I’m careful about what I share on social media. Flaming people, all kinds of touchy subjects, you absolutely have a right to your free speech. You also have a right to maybe not use it all the time. Your credibility is always on display and social media is a very broad area for people to be able to see you in. So how are you managing your credibility and your community through social media which directly affects your referral marketing. Take a good look at it. I promise it’s in your best interest.
I’m Mickey Griffith with the Referral Institute.