Fire up your mind and participate

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” (Plutarch) from the Jack’s Wining Words Blog. As usual, Jack’s words serve to provoke thought about what I’m doing to fire-up my mind. There is a tendency to passively fill one’s mind by reading or researching, but never taking action on the information that is gathered.

In forums like Blogs and SNs that tendency plays out in the number of people who are “lurkers” – those who sign in and read the posts, but never comment or post themselves. That is passively filling your mind, but not taking any action. When you read a Blog post or discussion topic you should have some reaction, one way or another. Do you agree with the author and maybe have some experience of your own to add to the comments, or do you disagree and want to say so and share your point of view on the topic. Either way, you have something to say, so say it. Post a reply.

I teach people in my company about SNs and how to sign up for them and use them. I don’t go into a bunch of stuff about personal branding, but I do talk a lot about participation. I have noted several local Realtors who signed up for SNs like Facebook, LinkedIn, AtiveRain and Twitter and never returned after the day that they sign up. I guess that somehow they believed that just the act of signing up and being able to say “Yeah, I’m on (fill in the SN here)” is enough to make them seem cool, modern and up-to-date. Wrong! If you don’t participate you are invisible.

Some Realtors in particular have also decided that these SNs are like big, public advertising boards, sort of like the bulleting boards at the local supermarket or hardware stores. So they just post and post away putting their listings on them, without ever really participating in any other aspect of the site. Apparently they have nothing more to say than, “I have these houses for sale.” Rather dull, don’t you think?

My view of these sites is that they provide an electronic equivalent of a good cocktail party with others in our profession or with members of the general public, or both; and, as such they provide a forum for discussions between the partygoers. Now, you have choices of how you are perceived at the party – you can be the wallflower who stands in the corner and never talks to anyone, or you can be the bore who incessantly talks only about themselves, or you can be the person that you avoid because you hate to get stuck talking with them, or you can be the person around who others gather because you have interesting things to say or you contribute intelligently to the conversation. Which are you at the party and on the SN Blog/discussion sites?