Claudia the Panda

At Social Media Breakfast 4, there were many conversations and discussion going on. But I remember one point which was being brought up several times. That is the building of relationship.

My take on Social Media… we need to first build the social relationship among the people within the environment. Anybody from the industry who wants bloggers or anyone online to participate in their event, outreach program or any benefits has to first build some form of relationship. Or at least try. Especially if they’re reaching out to individual people instead of a mass community or anyone in a big community. I’d blogged about this before. If you simply can’t be bothered about having any form of relationship, than I’m sorry, neither am I.

Photo from flickr by Fofuras Felinas

Bloggers are not sucker for freebies and free events. In fact, there’s no free lunch in this world. Nothing is free. There’s always a give and return, even for free stuff. And very importantly, we do not owe anyone anything. No one is paying us to blog about the things we’re blogging, unless specifically for an advertorial. So many of us would like to see ourselves as providing a ‘service’ for your company by blogging about the product/ show/ event or whatever that we think is appropriate to.

Couple of months back, I started one which I thought was a relationship (or sort) with this person from an agency. Attended few of their invitation and I’ve wrote pretty good posts for them. But as this relationship continues, I find that there’s no-relationship at all. This person just did the 101 things that’ll pissed people off. Well, perhaps not all, but at least she did pissed me off. And I’ve got quite good tolerance for such things already.

(Part of) the 101 things that may pissed bloggers off…

{-} sending super last minute invitation
(although I’ve to say some people are pretty good at handling last minute invitation. but still not smooth enough. they’ve forgotten we bloggers are very well connected! but we’ll let it go this time round.)

{-} sending an invitation to something that is of no interest to the blogger
Please read our blog or at least check out our tag cloud, categories or random posts or read the about page to see what we are interested about.

{-} saying something like “I don’t believe you mentioned it to me…”. Perhaps its just me, but those words are pretty harsh and uncalled for. If you don’t believe me than why are you inviting me to your events? Because no one else is blogging about it?

{-} arriving late for our appointment! Gosh! This is 100% NO-NO! (But it happened!)

If one person in that agency has already committed four of the 101 things, I guess this agency is not ready for social media.

So since you can’t be bothered, so am I.