Is your business keeping too much information to itself? Social and digital media strategist Bryan Kramer says sharing stories, knowledge, and emotions with others is just as important to a business’s likability as it is to a person’s.
His new book, SHAREOLOGY: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy is based on decades of Silicon Valley experience and more than 250 interviews. Sharing socially—in person and through media—deepens the connections between companies and their consumers the same way it does between humans, he argues.
In Shareology, Kramer provides step-by-step details for extending the impact and reach of your business’s social sharing. Sharing content, he says, can improve your sales, and personalization can boost the emotional intelligence of your marketing. But key to your content strategy should be active listening and, well, being human.
In fact, Kramer’s first book, the bestseller Human to Human: #H2H, made the case for dropping corporate speak and marketing lingo. Instead, he urged brands to promote products and services in plain human language. The novel idea was so popular that it sprouted the “human business movement.”
Kramer says that what he calls “the human economy” has struck a chord in the business world because, while technology has made it possible to live without interacting with other people, business is “fundamentally about relationships and building trust between two or more people.”
“Humans want connection,” he says. So if you want to connect with customers, share content. “People start to align their perception of the content you share with you. You are what you share,” he says.
Don’t like the way your brand is perceived? Simply change what you share. It’s how “most politicians, even presidents, have changed the perception of who they are,” he says. “It’s such a simple idea, but not the first one people lean toward. By human nature we want to continue to share what’s important to us instead of changing the way we share.”
Don’t expect your sharing to effect change overnight, though. He compares a single share to one person standing up in a stadium to initiate a human wave. “Sometimes it takes off and sometimes it doesn’t,” Kramer says. “When it does, it starts with a small group that gets bigger and bigger before it might go around the stadium ten times. It took Krazy George three years to get everyone to understand what he was trying to do when he started the wave. It never happens overnight and it always starts with one person.”
