apollo gonzales

Photo Credit: ryancr

I’m willing to bet that this post from Ben Parr over at Mashable will be one of the most shared posts he’s ever written. I highly recommend it, and suggest you share it, not just with other folks in the business of social media, but with your colleagues too.

I’m as guilty as the next social media professional of sharing just about everything Social Media that interests me. I do it in Twitter and Facebook every day, and when I’m really moved I share things at Digg, Delicious, Current, Flickr and few others. As social media professionals we know that we are resources for others in the business, and we share with one another as often as we possibly can. This is what keeps this business moving at a breakneck pace. I love it and I’m thankful every day to have thousands of giving professionals out there.

There is another side of sharing though – sharing the work of our colleagues. In my organization a select few of us give many of the blog posts our bloggers write the full treatment. We take the steps that Parr outlines every day, sometimes several times a day. That extra work pays off, and we don’t do this just out of a habit of process, but because the work our colleagues is doing it truly exceptional. For that reason, I can’t imagine a time we will not do this. If you work for an organization that has bloggers, and you really believe in the work they do, you should be doing this too.

Parr’s post is a great outline of 20 easy ways to promote the blog posts you find interesting, and I’m going to take it a step further and say that these are 20 easy steps for self promotion too. These are all fairly simple things to do, and as Parr points out, if you don’t want to take the time to visit all of the social media sites, Ping.fm is a fantastic platform for saving time. If you’ve got bloggers at your organization, you should be sharing Parr’s post with everyone there, and add an offer to help them get set up in the social media spaces mentioned. This last part, offering help, is key. Without it our colleagues who don’t live and breathe this stuff can easily feel overwhelmed and may even abandon the most basic forms of sharing. For some time now, I’ve been considering offering brownbags in my office covering social media sharing, but it has always seemed too dense to cover in an hour. I think Parr’s post actially created a great outline for these events. Stay tuned, and I’ll post my slides once I’ve got things worked out. As always, I’d love it if you’d share your thoughts, especially on putting the brownbags together.

Make Parr’s post the first thing you email to your colleagues on Monday morning, and don’t forgeth the offer to help. I don’t have to guess that you’ll see the return on the investment of your time pretty quickly, I see the results every day.