Are you creating signals? Or are you creating noise?

If you run a social media campaign you probably feel like most of the time you are talking to yourself because no one is listening. Have you ever considered that your campaign may not be so much different from that person you know that does nothing but talk about themselves? Think about it this way, if all you do is talk and never listen then you probably aren’t making a connection with anyone. If you aren’t making a connection then you aren’t creating a signal and all your doing is creating noise. And the Internet is rife with noise.

If you go, right now, to a group on LinkedIn that you are a member of you can see what I am talking about. Plenty of people making noise, plenty of people posting links to their blog posts and offering to trade “Likes” on Facebook. Go look at some of the small business pages you “Like” on Facebook. Is anyone posting to them besides the small business themselves? More likely, the page is filled with randomly posted promotions, links, and other noise.

I’m not writing this post, typing away on my Mac, with my hands entirely clean myself. If you checked out my page on Facebook you’ll see a lot of noise there as well. At least I don’t advertise myself as someone that does social marketing. I’m not very good at it and I don’t pretend to be. I don’t play a social media expert on T.V. and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night either. But social signals (not social noise) are playing a much more important part of SEO.

One of my goals in 2012 is to learn how to create more signals and much less noise. I hope you will join me.