Jan

25

Microleading Your Tribe

Filed Under Books, Management, Social Media 

I can sit here and quote Seth Godin’s book Tribes all day, but that would spoil it for people who haven’t read the book yet. If you are a Twitter user and you picked up Seth’s latest book, you might automatically think that there will be a whole chapter dedicated to building tribes through Twitter. But there isn’t. What you will find as you read through it is one short section (pg. 34 & 35) and a few other quick mentions of Twitter throughout the entire book.

In that short section, he briefly explains what Twitter is all about and then mentions one example of how Laura Fitton (@pistachio) built enough trust over time to grow her following to just over 16,000 people. Laura obviously saw huge potential in using Twitter as a tribe building tool early on. While building her own tribe, she also impacted the lives of many others who have now managed to build tribes of their own.

The essential lesson is that every day it gets easier to tighten the relationship you have with the people who chose to follow you.

There are hundreds of other examples of leaders increasing their reach though using different online mediums. The first two that come to mind are Guy Kawasaki, who started with his blog How to Change the World and Gary Vaynerchuck, through his Wine Library TV videos. Godin emphasizes in the book that although these online methods can be very successful, they are still not the only answer in building a tribe of followers.

But never forget: it’s about quality not quantity. You will hear this many times on Twitter and its been discussed over and over. I am sure there are some users (like Tad Chef) with 200 close followers that are getting the same amount of benefit from using Twitter than some who have 2,000 uninterested people following them. 2,000 close followers could take a few days or a few years for some people to attain, but the best thing you can do it just stay patient and continue to lay the foundation. A tribe leader must always focus on gaining the trust of people first no matter what method they are using, online or offline. Connect with me on Twitter @jsmakr.

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Comments

  • Thanks for this! Amazingly enough @guykawasaki is one of the folks who, by virtue of being willing to listen to and acknowledge my wild-ish ideas about Twitter, helped me gain credibility in a big way. It was a pleasure and a privilege helping him see the value and get started on Twitter in the first place.

    Once again, thanks for the call-out and the kind words.
  • Thanks Monica. I appreciate your feedback and I agree with you. When I wrote that, I was thinking about people who would rather form close relationships with a small group of people rather than looser relationships with a larger group. But those people probably aren't out to form a tribe of their own.

    Of course, every marketer or brand is out to try and form the biggest tribe possible so they are much more interested in larger numbers.
  • I don't agree with "quality, not quantity." As a leader, you always need to be looking behind you to make sure someone's still following. I do think people with 200 followers get a great deal from their network (or 1000+, which is what my small network is), but if your purpose is to market something or increase your blog/business visibility, more is clearly better, even if those people are not as loyal to you.

    Thanks for sharing the post with me via Twitter!
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