This is why you’re not Seth Godin.

Seth Godin is an insanely successful entrepreneur, marketing author and speaker.  Is his social media model of broadcasting without engagement scalable for you too?

I recently received this inquiry from a friend:

I launched a new blog on Sunday. It’s sort of a quote of the day/micro blog for entrepreneurs.  It posts each morning at 9:00 and I have it auto-tweet so people can follow it that way.

My question is:  Should I begin to follow a bunch of people on that account or should I just use it as a way to have people learn about the blog?  My model is Seth Godin’s blog. He has over 137,000 followers but that Twitter account follows 0.

Well, if it works for Seth, why can’t it work for you? Let’s take a look.

To be successful as a social media marketer, you have to find a way to move your content through an engaged network.  To achieve this, you need a) a content strategy and b) a network strategy.

Seth certainly provides interesting, consistent, and relevant content and let’s assume my friend does too. In this way, they both have a content strategy that could attract readers.

The second critical issue is “network strategy” … we need a place for all that cool content to go.

Seth Godin is a rare commodity on the social web: A true celebrity. Like Lady Gaga or a famous athlete, Seth has an engaged network purely because of who he is.

If you are reading this blog, I’m guessing you are not a celebrity. If you are, please let me know so I can tell my mother. She doesn’t get the Tao of Twitter thing at all!

So without a built-in network, we have to earn our tribe the old-fashioned way — by actively seeking those who would be interested in us, consistently engaging with those folks, and being authentically helpful. It’s difficult to do this by auto-broadcasting blog post links from a standing start.  In fact, it’s probably a recipe for failure.

People don’t want auto-tweeted ads for your blog. They want you. They want to make friends and build new business relationships. And then, maybe, just maybe, they will read your blog posts.

“Seth Godin” is not a scalable business model for new bloggers and there are no shortcuts. To build social media success from scratch, you have to work hard at it — one connection, one blog post at a time.

Right?

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