To help you lay down tracks for social media success, here’s a solid list of strategies from eight top social media experts. Take a look, ask yourself what tips you can use and start reaping the rewards of real success.

#1: Offer live events on Facebook

“To provide additional value and fresh ways for your fans to interact with you, periodically conduct live chat sessions or live webinars or teleseminars. My co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day, Chris Treadaway, and I recently conducted what we called a ‘flash chat’ in order to crowdsource content for version two of our book,” explained Mari Smith.

“We used the awesome webinar platform Linqto and within a few minutes we had a large group of people interacting with us. Linqto allows presenters to be on webcam and mic and take turns ‘on the floor’ while participants interact via chat,” said Mari.

Mari also said you can keep it real by simply conducting a live Q&A right on your Facebook fan page wall. You’ll get extra visibility in the news feeds of your fans!

#2: Help others who aren’t necessarily famous

“Don’t try to build your personal brand or company brand alone. Go out of your way to look for opportunities to help others and give others credit. This may seem like a lot of work in the short term, but it pays off in the long run. Plus, it’s the right thing to do,” said Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business.

“Easy ways to do this include recommendations on Twitter of others’ work, retweets and hot tips on the comment section of blogs,” Erik added.

“Heed Guy Kawasaki’s advice and select those not on the A-list. The Mari Smiths, Chris Brogans and David Meerman Scotts already are showered with love. Select an up-and-comer, as you will stand out more to that person,” explained Erik.

#3: Don’t over-focus on marketing

“All too often, businesses overlook the ‘social’ part of the phrase social media marketing and jump straight into the ‘marketing’ part… to their detriment. They forget that social media is dominated by a community of people who have expectations of the various social networks to which they belong. Very often, these expectations do not include having marketing messages jammed down their throats,” explained Hollis Thomases, author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Hollis cites INGDirect, L.L. Bean and Ben & Jerry’s as good examples of authentic brand voices that ‘get’ the Twitter community.

Notice the engagement in their streams.

Hollis added, “If you plan on delegating your social media activities to someone, ask yourself, ‘Does this person really understand our brand, the image we want to present and does s/he have the ability to communicate properly about these attributes?’”

#4: Research what your customers are saying

“Stop reading the success stories and best practices to model your social media strategy. Use them for inspiration, but my best advice to you is to go figure out what your opportunity is first,” said Brian Solis, author of Engage: The Complete Guide to Building, Cultivating and Measuring Success in the Social Web.

“Every business case is different. Your customers’ needs are different. Use a tool such as Research.ly to learn more about what your customers and prospects are saying, looking for and sharing. It’s here where you will find the insights necessary to inspire a campaign that’s relevant and meaningful,” said Brian.

Publish your time-stamped stream as an intelligent link.

#5: Meet people in real life

“I’m from Boston and we used to have a huge user group here called the Boston Computer Society,” says Steve Garfield, author of Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business. “They had monthly meetings where people could go out and meet each other and get help and learn about new products. Then, people started getting answers online. So the Boston Computer Society disbanded, thinking that people could just go online to get all their answers.

“The most critical thing that the Boston Computer Society forgot was how important it is to meet people face to face. That’s why I have monthly meetings in Boston with a group I founded called Boston Media Makers. At these meetings every person who attends gets to meet every other person. That’s the secret,” said Steve.

You can meet people online, but solidify these online relationships face to face.

“The meeting is set up to allow for mingling at the beginning, then we have a round table where everyone gets two minutes to talk about who they are and share some news or ask a question. Then the meeting ends with more mingling. What’s very important is that the meeting is free, and happens at the same time every month no matter what. We never cancel. Everyone is welcome,” explained Steve.

#6: Get your content read by being controversial

“We all know that ‘content is king’,” says Dean Hunt, a leader in high-impact buzz and viral content. “This is especially true when it comes to social media and social bookmarking. But what happens if nobody reads your masterpiece? There’s nothing worse than spending hours on an article, blog post, etc., only to see it gather dust in the Internet caves.

“So here’s a strategy I created to ensure that your content WILL get noticed… In fact, people will do a double-take when they see your content title, and will not be able to resist reading it. I call it the ‘negative slant.’ It’s very simple to do, and works best with informational or how-to content,” said Dean.

“An example is a recent post I wrote, ‘How to Work Really Hard and Make No Money.’ It was a big success. Now, I should stress that the content in that blog post was informative, positive and actually showed people how to make money, but I put a negative spin on the title, which gave it shock value,” said Dean.

“Imagine if the title had been ‘How to Make Lots of Money’ instead. We see these kinds of promises every single day, and we’re trained to not believe or trust them. So put a negative slant on your social media content, and watch it create buzz and get shared faster than ever before,” explained Dean.

#7: Invest in social media after you do your research

“Just as you would invest your personal finances based on your family size, age and market conditions, you should be spending in social business with the same industry knowledge,” said Jeremiah Owyang, partner of customer strategy at Altimeter Group.

According to Altimeter’s recent report, How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets, “Corporations should gauge their own social business maturity and prioritize spending decisions based on the industry benchmarks. Novice programs must focus on getting their internal teams in order; intermediate programs must scale customer-facing initiatives; and advanced programs must integrate social business throughout the enterprise.”

This chart matches spending priorities with an organization's social business maturity. Take a look and see where your business fits best.

#8: Share the knowledge of experts with your audience

“Get experts involved with your content. Determine who the experts are in your industry. Then go to them and offer to interview them about their hottest new project. During the interview, be sure to ask plenty of questions your audience would like to know the answers to. The result will be a great article, audio or video that provides valuable information to your audience AND forges a relationship with the expert,” said Mike Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner.

To see an example of this strategy, check out Mike’s recent interview with bestselling author Seth Godin.

Want to Learn More About Social Media for Business?

If you’re not fully leveraging the power of social media, don’t worry. You’re not alone.

There’s one easy way to take your social media efforts to the next level. By attending the web’s largest online blogging conference, Social Media Success Summit 2011 you’ll become empowered to use social media to gain more exposure, better engage customers and grow your business.

The great part is you’ll be learning from 22 blogging experts. Join  Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), Brian Solis (author, Engage), Frank Eliason (Citigroup), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Erik Qualman (author, Socialnomics), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Dan Zarrella (author, The Social Media Marketing Book), Andy Sernovitz (author, Word of Mouth Marketing), David Meerman Scott (author, Real-Time Marketing & PR) and experts from Verizon, Boeing, Intel, and Cisco as they reveal proven social media tactics at Social Media Success Summit 2011.

Check out this video from Michael Stelzner

It’s the web’s largest online blogging conference. Go here for a free sample and to learn more.

By the way, all eight of these experts cited in this article will be joined by 14 other social media pros at this year’s Social Media Success Summit 2011. Go here to learn more about this online social media conference.

Now it’s your turn! Which of these expert tips are you going to model for your own social media strategy? Share your comments with us in the box below!

During this interview, you’ll learn about his latest book, his views on the state of the publishing industry and about his new venture The Domino Project.

Mike: Let’s start with Poke the Box. What exactly does “poke the box” mean?

Seth: If you’re a computer programmer and you want to figure out how something works, the way you do it is not by reading a manual or following a map. You do it by trying something, seeing what happens, learning from it and then trying something else. That’s how we figured out how the world worked when we were 5 years old, and it’s the way we figure out how to do something new in a changing world.

The reason that I wrote the book is that somehow we’ve lulled ourselves into this feeling that we need to wait for someone else to tell us what to do and give us permission to do it, as opposed to taking action and doing it ourselves.

Mike: You mentioned in the book it was your uncle who designed the “box” and put it in the crib of one of your cousins?

Seth: My uncle has a PhD from MIT. We call him “the admiral” because he was in the Navy ROTC program. He worked with lasers and all sorts of technology.

I have this vivid memory of when I was just 10 or 12 years old. My cousin was born and my uncle built a box—it must have weighed three pounds—in gray steel with one of those big, thick, black electrical cords. It had on it three or four switches and dials, and when you flipped a switch, something happened. A buzzer would go off or a light would flash. You’d turn a dial and something else would change. He plugged this thing in and threw it in the crib.

His thinking was that it’s natural for a kid to play with things, to figure out how they work. In a stable world, we don’t necessarily want people to do that because we want them to work on the assembly line and do what they’re told. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this isn’t a stable world anymore.

Mike: Let’s talk about your new book and how it’s different from all the other books you’ve written.

Seth: Well, it’s like The Dip, in that it’s very short. I’ve started a new publishing company called The Domino Project and the book was written with that in mind.

The Domino Project is trying to make ideas easier to spread. I think books are important and book publishers are basically trying to kill books. They’re making them too expensive, too long, too slow, too hard to spread and too hard to find. So the public is just ignoring them and moving on to the next thing.

I wanted to make it easy for someone, if they’re moved by the idea in a book, to hand it to someone else or to hand it to five other people or 50 other people, and say, “This is the way we’re going to do things around here from now on.” That’s what books are great at, and I want to optimize for that kind of conversation.

Mike: I also notice the book doesn’t actually have a cover title on it. It’s just this cool icon of a guy leaping forward. There were no chapters in the book either, so I guess it’s designed to be just one continuous read?

Seth: Sure. Because our publishing company is powered by Amazon, our main source of interaction is going to be online. If a book is shown online, it doesn’t need to have words on the cover because right next to the cover are all the things you need to know if you want to buy it. That wasn’t true in the bookstore, but it’s certainly true online.

Once you get it, if it’s sitting on your desk and it has words on the cover, then everyone knows what it is. But if it doesn’t and someone sees it, they’re going to say, “What’s that?”

Mike: That’s exactly what happened, Seth. Someone was in my office and they picked it up and started reading it because it just grabbed them.

Seth: We looked at every convention of publishing that’s out there and asked, “Why does this convention exist? Should we throw it out? Should we start over or should we do it differently?”

Last week we did a promotion to ask people to sign up for our newsletter.  As a result of the promotion, we ended up lowering the preorder price of this book to $1 on the Kindle. Why would we do that? Well, anyone who preorders it is already a fan because why would anyone spend $1 for something if they don’t know what it is? If you preorder it, and I can sell you the electronic version for $1, I’m not losing any money doing that, certainly. Now what I’ve done is seeded the book to my best customers—to the people most likely to talk about it.

Sure, I’ve lost the opportunity to charge those people a lot because they would have paid a lot, but on the other hand, what I’ve done is used that as my marketing effort. My marketing effort is if I can get 10,000 people in the world excited about the book and talking about it, then in March, I’ll sell another 50,000 or 100,000 copies because those 10,000 people spread the word.

Mike: In your book, you say, “When the cost of poking the box is less than the cost of doing nothing, then you should poke.” What does that mean?

Seth: When I started out in business on my own, I had to walk down the block to buy laser printing output because I couldn’t afford a laser printer. The world wasn’t filled with Kinko’s and it wasn’t filled with WordPress, and it didn’t have Google driving traffic to somebody who didn’t have a storefront. It wasn’t organized around individuals finding out how things worked.

That has shifted. If you want to do recombinant DNA research now, for $500 you can buy a kit and do it in your kitchen. You don’t need a whole lab. If you want to design a car, you can design a car using all sorts of off-the-shelf components. You don’t need a factory in Detroit. For that reason, the cost of finding out is much, much lower.

On the other hand, the cost of doing nothing is going through the roof because people who do nothing end up with “cog jobs.” They end up being told what to do and getting paid less and less.

We’re seeing this in our economy. If a job can be done cheaper somewhere else, it will be. As a result, you have to be the only person who can do it, and the asset that’s almost impossible to take from you is initiation—the idea that “I’m the guy who pokes and comes up with the next thing.”

Watch this video from Seth.

Mike: You talk about Google in your book. What can Google teach businesses about innovation?

Seth: Google is such a special case, like Apple in so many ways. Google has a fountain of money. Since we started having this conversation, Google made more than $1 million in profit, and they do that over and over and over again.

Most public companies just take the money and the problem is that three years from now, the money stops coming in. So Google takes a significant portion of the money and they do things they think will fail.

That’s the secret to initiation. Even if you’re not making $1 million every 10 minutes, the secret of initiation is simple. If you’re only willing to do things that will succeed, then you will fail. But if you’re willing to do things that might fail, you have a shot at succeeding. That’s the magic of Google.

Mike: Where do you think ideas come from and how should we act on them?

Seth: Everybody has ideas all the time. That’s part of being human. But the real question is where do they go? My answer is we have conditioned people to hide them or discard them or ignore them, and winning is in acting on them.

Steve Jobs didn’t really invent any of the products that Apple sells. Other people had all of those ideas first. It’s that Apple acts on stuff.

Mike: What do you mean when you say, “The person who fails the most wins”?

Seth: The statement doesn’t mean that you fail so badly you’re out of the game. What’s implied is you have to keep playing the game. The person who gets to keep playing the game and has the most failures has the better life, and likely has created the most value.

Take the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Who knows how many times he failed? He hit a jackpot in the end. Congratulations. But in general, what we see is that if you have this mantra, “I’m going to keep failing my way up,” it’s what we were born to do, and we’re great at it.

Mike: You talk about success being tied to defeating the fear that holds us back. How do we defeat the fear that holds us back?

Seth: By not being held back, everybody has a different way to defeat his resistance. Steve Pressfield’s brilliant book, The War of Art, talks about this in detail. I can’t tell you how to do it. Everyone does it differently. Picasso did it differently than Dali who did it differently than Jackson Pollock.

I don’t know anyone’s answer. I just know it’s the problem. Once you acknowledge that it’s the problem, it’s much more likely that you’ll seek out and find the answer.

Mike: What’s wrong with traditional book publishing? Can you elaborate a little bit more?

Seth: It’s filled with really smart people whom I like, who don’t get paid enough and do good work. The problem is that they think their customer is the bookstore.

The other problem is that bookstores demand a very slow cycle of a year to bring a book out, demand books that meet a certain expectation and demand full return privileges on those books. At the same time, that industry is stuck paying big advances to big-name authors, most of which lose money.

When you add all these together, you end up with an industry that has a lot less flexibility and doesn’t realize that its real job is bringing ideas that spread to people who want to hear them. If they embraced that as their job, I think the industry would do far better and the readers would benefit as well.

I’m not going to be able to change the industry all by myself and I have no illusions that we’re going to dominate anything. But I think that a lot of people are going to copy some of the notions that we’re trying to lay out here, and if they do that, I’ll be really pleased.

Mike: Let’s talk about The Domino Project. It’s a publishing company, correct? How do you describe what it is exactly?

Seth: Yes it is. The goal is to reinvent the way publishers think about authors and readers and distribution and pricing and packaging, and the very notion of the relationship between the author and the reader.

We have a really wide mission. We’re starting with Amazon as our backend, which gives us an enormous amount of leverage (Amazon hasn’t done this arrangement with anyone else) that lets us understand who’s buying what and how they’re buying it, and play with different formats.

We’re starting with a series of short books we call manifestos, which are about 100 pages long. There are five or six in the pipeline already. This is an experiment and I have no idea exactly what’s going to come next.

Mike: When you say Amazon is your backend, do you mean as far as distribution and that’s where people buy the book?

Seth: Yes, and they can buy it at a bookstore. Amazon owns a company called Brilliance that makes audio books, and they have a salesforce that regularly sells to bookstores.

We’re also going to sell our books around the world because what we’re discovering is bookselling isn’t local. It’s worldwide and it’s not right to tell someone in Hong Kong they have to pay $85 to get a copy of something.

Mike: So you simultaneously release a print book, an ebook and an audio book every time you do one of these, or at least that’s what you’re doing with Poke the Box, right?

Seth: Right, and a collectible. The collectible is because sometimes you want to treasure the book and touch the book and know that you have a special one. The collectible for Poke the Box costs $75 and is hand-signed with a bookplate. The cover is hand-printed on a letterpress and it comes with a hand-printed letterpress poster as well. We only made 400 of them and they’re on their way to selling out.

Mike: If people want to learn more about your book and The Domino Project, where do they go?

Seth: Just Google “The Domino Project” and there we are.

Mike: Seth, I really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy day to talk to me, and I wish you the absolute best with your new book and your project.

Seth: It’s absolutely a pleasure to talk to you, Michael. Keep up the great work.

Listen to the complete interview below…

Click here to download MP3.

What do you think about Seth’s ideas? How have you poked the box? Leave your comments in the box below.

During this interview, you’ll learn how Seth employed new media to promote his latest book and his thoughts on marketing and social media.  Note: Be sure to listen to the complete interview at the bottom of this article.

Mike: What exactly is a “linchpin” and how do I know if I’m one?

Seth: A linchpin is the person we can’t live without—the indispensable person who does work that matters, the person who is trying to stand out as opposed to fit in, the one who’s not easily replaceable, the low-paid cog in the giant industrial machine but, in fact, the person whom we seek out.

If someone says, “We’re going to see Bruce Springsteen,” you know that it isn’t going to be someone who’s like Bruce Springsteen performing. It’s going to be “the” Bruce Springsteen.

I guess the question is, “Can someone put the word ‘the’ in front of your name?” You are “the” Michael Stelzner. There isn’t anybody else who could be doing this interview about this topic because you’re him.

Now, thanks to the Internet, Google and the way the world is changing, anybody who chooses to become a linchpin can.

Mike: Do you think most people who are linchpins know it?

Seth: I think that anyone who is at the edge of what they can be doing is doing that on purpose. They are going through the pain and the difficult work and the risk necessary to do their art, to stand out, and to not just be a noisemaker.

Mike: Do you think anyone has the potential to become a linchpin or is this something that only a small percentage of society will ever achieve?

Seth: The first four words of my book are “You are a genius.” I honestly believe that.

When you were 3 years old and painted something with fingerpaints that had never been painted before, you were a genius. You solved the problem in a way that no-one else ever had.

Everyone has the capacity in some way to do the work of genius. I am not saying that everyone can build a profitable company, that everyone can start a Google, or that everyone can fill a stadium with screaming fans.

What I am saying is if you pick the right endeavor, you ought to be able to do work that matters.

Mike: I love the fact that you regularly talk about how you could even be a linchpin in your “day-to-day” job, like the guy behind the deli counter who’s smiling and greeting the customer. You can play a linchpin role in almost any endeavor, isn’t that true?

Seth: That’s right.

I got a note yesterday from a guy who has a fast-food pizza chain. His pizza is better than any other pizza in the chain. The people who run the chain are giving him a hard time, saying, “We want it all to be the same.”

The reason they want it all to be the same is because then everyone is replaceable. Then all the power goes to the person who writes the manual.

But if you look at your job as a platform for doing art, for being generous and for making changes in people, then you’re both getting paid and stretching yourself to become indispensable. When they hire someone to take your place when you move on to the next job, the place won’t be the same, because you won’t be there.

Mike: Let’s talk about you now. When was the first moment in your life when you realized you were a linchpin?  What was the turning point where you recognized that perhaps you were unique?

Seth: It was in 1976. I was on a lake in Algonquin Park, Canada, teaching a 12-year-old girl how to paddle a 17-foot-long canoe all by herself.

As I was sitting there I realized that I had a tremendous responsibility because I could either just do my job, in which case this girl would go back to her day unchanged, or I could take a chance—I could lean forward. I could connect. I could do something that wasn’t asked of me and maybe, just maybe, I could impact her life and help her deal with her bad temper and help her see a different way of navigating through her day. I did it and it worked.

Mike: What happened next?

Seth: It was an extraordinary feeling. Joanna went from slugging people several times a day—anyone who disagreed with her, boy or girl, she would just deck them—to being somebody who was smart and generous and connected and kind and enjoying her life a lot more.

Fifteen years later, she contacted me and it had stuck. In that moment, I got the chance to matter. That’s sort of addictive.

Mike: Was there some sort of resistance going on in your head, like, “Should I do this? Is she going to snap at me? I’m just going to do this?”

Seth: In the book, I talk about the resistance, which was a term coined by Steve Pressfield in a book called The War of Art. The resistance comes from the lizard brain; the part of our brain that is afraid, that doesn’t want to get laughed at and doesn’t want to make a mistake.

If we look at the people who are reading Social Media Examiner and we look at the huge momentum to fit in and follow the standards, as soon as someone does something interesting on Facebook or Twitter, a hundred people copy it. A thousand people copy it. There’s a lot of desire to not get laughed at and to not be the one who did that thing that everyone talks about. That’s the lizard brain. That’s the part of us that wants to fit in.

What I’m arguing is that the last person in on anything happening on the Internet never profits. The people who win are the ones who figured out how to win before anyone else was even paying attention, before there was a manual, before there was a Dummies book and before it was the standard operating procedure.

Mike: Thanks Seth.  On another topic, did you promote this book any differently than your other books?

Seth: Every time I write a book, I try to take my own advice. With Permission Marketing, I set up a website, www.Permission.com, which cost $400. You give me your email address and I send you one-third of the book for free. That led to 200,000 people giving me permission, which changed everything for that book.

In initiating the Ideavirus, I gave the whole book away for free because it was a book about giving stuff away for free. If you Google the words “idea virus,” it’s still there. It’s still free.

With Linchpin, what I said was, “The mainstream media is clearly dying.” The number of book critics is diminishing.  So I’m going to ignore all those people. I’m not going to send out one piece of mail. I’m not going to send out one review copy to the mainstream media. Not one.”

Instead, I reached out to bloggers and people with followings online and said, “Let me do an interview with you, if you’re interested, because you are the new media.”

The second thing I did was go to the people I have permission to talk to, readers of my blog, and said, “If you make a donation to charity, I’ll send you a review copy of my book a month before anybody else gets it. No strings attached. Review it and share it when you’re done if you like. The only reason we’re asking you to donate money to charity is because we can’t give one to everyone. We just want to give one to people who really care.”

Almost 3,000 people took me up on that offer. The book has been reviewed online probably more than any other book I can think of. The day the book went live and Amazon opened its doors, more than 110 people gave it a review.  All of them had read it. None of them had any other incentive to review it.

The end result of this is that it was the biggest launch of any book I’ve ever done and one of the most successful book launches of the year.

Mike: I’m looking at your book right now and on the back cover, there are a thousand little pictures. Tell me what that’s about. Note: That’s me holding the back cover up…  See any subliminal messages?

Seth: Last year I put a post on my blog that said, “If there’s someone you can’t live without, someone indispensable in your life, send me their picture.”

Flickr has a feature that gives you an email address where you can email pictures to yourself and they show up in your Flickr account. I published that email address. Everyone was sending me pictures that ended up in my Flickr account.

I downloaded those pictures and put them into a mosaic. Here is a gallery of people—ordinary, everyday people like you and me—who matter. That’s the essence of the book.

Mike: I thought that was really brilliant.  In your book you talk about gifts.  Can you explain what gifts are and how social media plays into the whole gifts concept?

Seth: A gift is not a gift if you give something to someone hoping they will give you something back. That is sort of an unequal transaction. It is not a gift.

A gift is what Pablo Picasso did when he painted a painting and you get to see it in a museum. He knew you’re never going to be able to buy one of his paintings. He wanted you to see the art. The point of the art is to change people.

When you help somebody out who asks you a question on Facebook or Twitter because you hope one day they’re going to become a consulting client, you’re making a mistake. While that might be an interesting marketing strategy, it is not a gift.

My argument is that linchpins make art. Art is a generous gift that changes other people.

Mike: If I’m a marketer and my goal ultimately is to market a product or service, can I still give a gift even though my intention is to try to sell something?

Seth: I don’t want to call that a “gift.” I want to call that an opportunity to put ideas in front of people so that you can up-sell them after they trust you. That’s fine, but let’s not get confused.

There are plenty of people who read your site who are happy to respond to a pop-up window: “Welcome to my blog. Sign up for my free newsletter.” That newsletter is designed to have valuable content but also to up-sell people. That’s all good. But that’s not a gift.

What I’m talking about is somebody who gives $100 to charity and doesn’t sign his or her name to the letter. There’s no opportunity for anything to come back to the giver, except for the fact that he or she now feels closer to the mission.

Mike: At the end of your book, you mention Frank Eliason from Comcast as a great example of a linchpin. Why?

Seth: Frank works at one of the most hated companies in America, a cable TV company called Comcast.

On his own, without permission, he started searching Twitter for mentions of the word “Comcast.” If you mentioned Comcast in a tweet, he would get back to you, sometimes within five minutes.  He would tell you who he was and ask you to call him directly, or he would try to troubleshoot you right then and there so that you could get back online or back to TV.

It worked. It worked because it was so out of the box, so generous, so remarkable, so opposite of the way people felt about Comcast.

As a result, Frank’s standing at Comcast goes way up and so does his career.  That’s not why he did it. He did it because he clearly loves the company and he wants to help people. The side effect of his generosity is that he’s set for life now because he’s “the” Frank Eliason.

Comcast then hired a whole bunch of people to sit next to Frank because once the word got out that this was the shortcut to customer service, lots of people started tweeting the word “Comcast.”

The lesson from Frank is “do something that hasn’t been done before.” Do it out of sheer generosity. That’s the lesson.

Mike: One of our Twitter followers asks, “What is the catalyst or tipping point that pushes a follower to be a leader?”

Seth: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a great book that I recommend.  It’s about social movement. I don’t think there’s a tipping point for an individual to go from follower to leader, but I do think there are plenty of catalysts.

The real catalyst, in my experience, is no-one goes from being a follower to being president of the United States. There are lots of kinds of leaders. You can be the president of the safety patrol in fourth grade and you’re doing a little bit of leadership.

What really shifts is if you decide that you’re going to take tiny steps toward leading. Those can be leading in your family or leading in your community.

I really believe that this is a path and not an event. The path starts with leading a few people, volunteering at your local animal shelter and then leading a corps of volunteers to make a change happen.

Mike: Talk to me about your time working with Lester Wunderman. He’s the marketing guru behind the American Express Card and Columbia Record Club. What did he teach you about marketing?

Seth: Lester invented the term “direct marketing.” What Lester understood is that it’s not particularly difficult to hire people to follow the manual. His firm, Wunderman Cato Johnson, grew to be a multibillion-dollar firm, with lots of people doing direct mail and direct marketing for lots of companies.

You don’t need Lester to do that. What you need Lester to do is sit down and invent the gold box on the Columbia Record Club so they can go on TV, or invent the American Express Card as a charge card, not a credit card. These sorts of insights and innovations are what he does for a living.

It only takes a minute to come up with one. The other eight hours a day are spent going to lunch and walking around and smiling at people. But in one minute a day, he’s creating billions of dollars worth of value.

We get so hung up, particularly in a tweetified, Facebooked, blogged world where there’s always one more email to answer. We get focused on how busy we are or even how measured productive we are, as opposed to saying, “What did I do today that was important? What did I do today that no-one else can do?” If you spend a little bit more time on that work, you’ll discover that you have enough money to hire people to do the other stuff.

Mike: So what Lester taught you is to focus a little more of your time on coming up with innovations?

Seth: He helped me see that that’s my only job.

Mike: To the aspiring future linchpin, what would be the best piece of advice that you would give him or her?

Seth: Ship. Fight the lizard brain. Fight the resistance. Whatever it is you’re working on, ship it out the door. Ship often. Put things out there and fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The person who learns the most wins.

Mike: Seth, thank you very much for your time. You’re an incredible fountain of knowledge.

Seth: It was my pleasure. Thanks for doing the great work on the site.

Listen to the rest of this interview (below) and learn a lot more about Seth and marketing…

What do you think about Seth Godin and his marketing ability? Have you read his books?  Did they leave a mark on you?  Leave your comments below.

So what better way to understand social media than by looking at the fundamental principles of influence as taught by Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University? In his seminal book, Influence, Cialdini covers six “weapons of influence”  that are hardwired into our social and cognitive minds.  In other words, we can’t help but behave in accordance with these laws of social interaction.

Does this sound like something useful to keep in mind during your social media engagements?  Well, let’s take a look six powerful persuasion techniques:

1. Reciprocation

In Cialdini’s words, the rule for reciprocation “says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. If a woman does us a favor, we should do her one in return; if a man sends us a birthday present, we should remember his birthday with a gift of our own; if a couple invites us to a party, we should be sure to invite them to one of ours.”

And so it is in social media: we’re more likely to retweet someone who has already retweeted us.  We link to people who have linked to us.  And we tend to give a business far more trust after it has provided us with a lot of free value.

Used manipulatively, this turns into autofollow bots that help you amass thousands of followers in a breathtakingly short time—none of whom may actually care what you have to say.  Doh!

Used more positively and constructively, if you focus on initiating reciprocity by providing no-strings-attached value to those in your network, you’ll ultimately wield far more influence.  Not because the gift economy is a new fad in marketing, but because following the law of reciprocity is how we’re wired as humans.

2. Commitment and Consistency

“Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.  Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision,” said Cialdini.

Chances are, you follow too many people on Twitter.  And you’re signed up for more RSS feeds and newsletters than you can really read.  Objectively, purging your list of followers and unsubscribing would eliminate distractions and increase your social media signal-to-noise ratio.

But most people never make that purge and hardly ever unsubscribe.  Part of it goes back to reciprocation, but a larger part stems from consistency: you’re loath to admit that following and subscribing to those people and newsletters was a mistake.

On the positive side, how much more likely are you to comment on a blog that you’ve already commented on before?  Especially if you’re now “signed in” to comment on the blog during future visits—and if your Gravatar or Disqus headshot shows up next to the comments?

According to the principle of consistency, you’ll want to remind people of their previous positive commitments through perks, public displays, an elimination of friction for increasing their commitment, etc.  It works for Amazon prime, Amazon’s 1-click ordering, and Amazon’s reviewer system, and it will work for fostering blog comments and a blog community, too.

3. Social Proof

One method we use to determine correct behavior is to find out what other people think is correct. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk

Just watch this video to see this in action!

Whether we admit it or not, most of us are impressed when someone has a ton of blog subscribers, Twitter followers, YouTube views, multiple blog reviews for their upcoming book, and so on.

Yes, people can game the system (autofollows and such), which can jade our intellectual response, but our core and initial emotional reactions stay the same.

On the positive side, creating a lot of value for others can help companies and individuals gain social proof via reciprocation: writing engaging content for guest posts, offering to interview authors and subject matter experts, and so forth.  Not only do these activities provide social proof in themselves, but they can help you gain a support network capable of “salting” your blog comments, your retweets, etc.

And when it comes to social proof, tribes matter.  It’s not just about what the mass of people are doing on social media that constitutes proof, it’s what other like-minded people and peers are doing.  So according to the principle of “social proof,” you should concentrate your social media efforts on finding and building social proof within your tribe.

4. Liking

“We most prefer to say yes to people we know and like,” says Cialdini. Extensions of this principle are:

1. Physical attractiveness creates a halo effect and typically invokes the principle of liking;
2. We like people who are similar to us;
3. We like people who compliment us;
4. We like things that are familiar to us;
5. Cooperation toward joint efforts inspires increased liking;
6. An innocent association with either bad or good things will influence how people feel about us.

How does this work for social media?  Well, to start with the virtual equivalent of physical attractiveness, we give extra credence to attractively designed blogs, messages contained in videos with higher production quality, and corporations’ landing pages displaying a better sense of social media savvy in their overall design and layout.

Similarly, individuals involved in coordinating joint ventures for the common good are associated with—and therefore “haloed” by—those efforts, while at the same time invoking cooperation toward a joint effort, which further increases “liking.”  Think of Seth Godin’s efforts at compiling free and thoughtful ebooks and then using the compilation to raise funds for a non-profit.  Bryan Eisenberg’s Trick or Tweet efforts from a year ago also come to mind.

As for complimenting others, what else is a retweet, a trackback, or a positive blog comment than a social compliment?  And yes, those are all activities you should participate in authentically, sincerely, and liberally if you wish to leverage the principle of liking to your advantage.

5. Authority

Cialdini talks about “The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of authority…”  In his book, he examines how authority can be conferred by (and also manufactured by) titles, clothes, and trappings.

In social media, authority is less about titles and clothes than about virtual trappings.  In his (fantastic) report, “Authority Rules,” Brian Clark talks about how perceived expertise can frequently differ from real expertise.  Meaning that the guy known for blogging about and offering intelligent commentary on a subject will likely have far more perceived expertise (and therefore influence as an authority) than a genuine but unknown non-blogging expert.

But perhaps the most direct measure of authority is the number of people who will buy or download a recommended resource based on little more than an authority’s endorsement.  How many people would buy a copywriting book simply because Brian Clark said it’s a must-read?  How many people will download a free PDF on nothing more than Seth Godin’s evaluation that it contains important insights?

But one thing social media has seemed to spark is a dawning understanding that authority is (or should be, at least) limited to a legitimate field of knowledge.  So when a relatively famous figure like Robert Scoble states on his website Scobleizer that search engine optimization isn’t important for small businesses, he’s “taken to task” on it rather severely.

6. Scarcity

Apart from reciprocity, this is perhaps the most used tool in social media.  When bloggers open up a class or inner circle membership or subscription service, it is never for an unlimited number of customers or for an always open/unlimited time.  Smart bloggers either create or fully leverage already existing scarcity by limiting seats available, length of time to buy, etc.

Laura Roeder has rather famously made scarcity a centerpiece of a signature technique,  wherein bloggers hold competitions with free services as a prize.  When contestants don’t win, they then value the prize more highly precisely because of the newly perceived scarcity.  This makes them more likely to accept a consolation prize of getting the services at a slight discount.

Parting Recommendations

While the six principles of persuasion started out as “weapons of influence” that were used against us by “compliance professionals,” I—along with Cialdini—would encourage you to practice the positive side of wielding influence. To sum up many of the recommendations from the post, here are some very positive ways to leverage the principles of influence to increase your social media success:

• Focus on creating value and initiating the reciprocity principle by gifting your social media contacts with high-value content, insights, reports, etc.
• Sincerely flatter your subscribers, friends, and commenters by responding to them and nurturing your growing community.  Actively reach out to people you admire using social media and pay them the compliment of commenting on their blogs, following their tweets, linking to their content, etc.
• Commit to consistent engagement on the social media platforms you chose to use, to the point of staying away from new social media platforms that you don’t have the resources to actively participate in.
• Use social proof as credibility cues where appropriate.  Show off your number of subscribers next to the Subscribe button.  Possibly use colleagues to “salt” your comments on important posts, build up your network by guest posting, commenting, and retweeting.
• Coordinate within your community on larger efforts for the greater good.  You’ll probably be psyched at what you create or accomplish, you’ll do good and feel good about it, and you’ll likely become associated with the effort.
• Put the extra effort in on achieving professional and inspiring design.  Dress for success on your blog, website, and social media landing pages.
• When creating a contest or trying to spark immediate action, use the scarcity principle to positive effect.  But be honest about it—no changing “last day for” dates, no miraculously replenishing supplies, etc

But, hey, I’d be THRILLED to add to the list if you recognize any of your tried-and-true techniques as falling within—or totally falling outside of—these weapons of influence.

What are your secret weapons of influence? Let’s engage.  Please comment below now.