Pay It forward..
One of my biggest suggestions for those that are joining the online community is to get involved. Act in ways that you wish others would act towards you. I have a friend who owned a restaurant for many years, and she told me that she loved when guests gave her positive reviews on yelp. Before she said that, I never really thought to give reviews on yelp, in fact I didn’t even have a yelp account. However, I ate out all the time, and would rate and discuss my thoughts between friends, but I never did with the greater online community. So after she shared that with me, I started rating tons of places I visited on yelp. Good or bad, but mostly good; I wanted to contribute to the online community and get involved. I’m in this space professionally so I figured I better get involved in this space recreationally, and plus its paying it forward, the more you give, the more you get. Once I started doing this, I almost felt that karma started to help some of my other online projects. So now I go around liking business on Facebook, dropping positive reviews on yelp and Google+ and talking online about great experiences.
In fact, just recently, me and some friends flew out to Arizona for a friends birthday to go sky diving. Yes skydiving. I wasn’t too excited about it, because I am terrified of heights, but I was willing to take one for the team. To cool down my nerves however, I made sure that there was enough other entertainment going on to distract me from our final destination. So I made sure we had dinner plans, drinking destinations, and a couple clubs lined up for the day before our sky diving expedition. What really took my focus off the sky diving however was renting a limousine to take us around the town while we liquored up and had a good time. I didn’t think much of this because we have rented limos as a group numerous times before and it just sort of seems like the norm when we go out as a big group. But this was different, we rented a limo from phxlimoservice.com and these guys were worlds apart from previous companies we went through. From the driver to the actual limo, to the follow up call we received the next day asking about how the service was, it was just unreal. By the time sky diving came around the following day, I didn’t have one ounce of fear because of how in awe I was of the great night we had the day before.
That was of course until we got up to 10,000 feet and I nearly sh** myself, but by that time it was too late to back out so I jumped. The whole experience that took place on that trip was by far the best time me and my friends had probably ever had together, largely due to the way this limo company catered to us. So I just blasted these guys with praise online, hell they deserved. I gave back to them online, for how they had given to me and my friends while we used their services.
So what I want to emphasize in this post is to pay it forward, get connected, get involved. Whether you are a restaurant owner, a part time blogger, a store owner, or whatever, you need to get out there and support the online community. This will result in positive karma points, because its the right thing to do, and it will also create exposure for your personal brand. The more times you talk about someone or something, the more your out there, and the more your out there the more likely it is you will be found by others.
Take what I said here with you, and begin to connect with others online. Meet friends, rate restaurants, talk about good experiences and so on. The web is a big place. The more you get involved, the more success you’ll find you have in it.
