Hard Work.
No, let's turn that around, work hard.
A couple of summers ago my wife and I ventured to Grand Lake in St. Marys, Ohio.
We were looking for an adventure and discovered the worlds largest man made lake that was dug out with hand tools, in the 1800's.
Creating a social media brand or persona, or business is much like digging that lake.
There are some automation tools available, but most of them are scams if you really check them out and I doubt they will produce worthwhile, lasting value.
Most of what you need to do is going to be done by hand, using legitimate tools, like scheduling blog updates, or scheduling updates to Twitter or Facebook.
And the most magic of all the secrets is: Be Real. There are enough scammers and spammers out there that if you start acting like one, you lose.
Seth Godin is a very successful marketing expert who grew to fame and fortune as an author and then via his online presence.
Seth has a blog that is updated at least once a day. I know that he writes ahead and schedules his blog posts. He does the work.
Seth announced last year that he was going to stop writing and publishing traditional books.
He wrote about doing the work recently on his blog:
No knight, no shining armor
"Sure, Seth can do that, because he has a popular blog."
Some people responded to my decision to forgo traditional publishers (not traditional books, btw) by pointing out that I can do that because I have a way of reaching readers electronically.
What they missed is that this asset is a choice, not an accident.
Does your project depend on a miracle, a bolt of lightning, on being chosen by some arbiter of who will succeed? I think your work is too important for you to depend on a lottery ticket. In some ways, this is the work of the Resistance, an insurance policy that gives you deniability if the project doesn't succeed. "Oh, it didn't work because we didn't get featured on that blog, didn't get distribution in the right store, didn't get the right endorsement..."
There's nothing wrong with leverage, no problem at all with an unexpected lift that changes everything. But why would you build that as the foundation of your plan?
The magic of the tribe is that you can build it incrementally, that day by day you can earn the asset that will allow you to bring your work to people who want it. Or you can skip that and wait to get picked. Picked to be on Oprah or American Idol or at the cash register at Borders.
Getting picked is great. Building a tribe is reliable, it's hard work and it's worth doing.
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