Sometimes colorful and illustrative language can get the point across when the reader can relate to what's being said.

"Bake a bigger pie. There are two kinds of people: eaters and bakers. Eaters think the world is a zero-sum game: what you eat, someone else cannot eat, so they eat as much as they can. Bakers think that the world is not a zero-sum game—they can just bake more and bigger pies. Everyone can eat more. People trust bakers and not eaters." I just love that quote and it's so applicable to the stepping game... and using social media.

When we look at the steppers community and break it down to different segments of its population you find the obvious... firstly come the dancers. They are at the top of the totem pole. It's a pre-qualification to be considered a stepper you must dance. They are the stars of the show.

A subset of the dancer segment would be the instructors. With their guidance and training they teach the dance to the public.

There are DJ's who make the music flow at the sets and events and without their expertise in music and knowledge of the steppers genre and ability to gage what a crowd wants to dance to there is no set.

There are the promoters who are the grease that keep the wheels turning. They are the ones who in many cases pony up the money to hire the DJ's, rent the space, advertise the event and so much more with the expectation of putting on a quality event and to make a profit for their work.

A subset of the promoter would include web people, photographers, videographers, caterers, and other purveyors who work in concert with the promoter within their various roles to help put on the production we call events or even weekly sets.

Many of the roles are interchangeable. There are promoters who are DJ's and instructors and vice versa. It's important to make these distinctions because each role in the community is important to its survival and growth.

There's one thread that ties all of the people in the community together and continues to move the art form forward and that's their individual and combined passion for stepping.
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Continued

Over the last couple of days I've been talking a lot about social media and the roles each of the major social media sites play (or are supposed to play) in our journey together as a community. I'm speaking to everyone because shared knowledge is a good thing. In other words I'm doing my best to be a great baker (as in the analogy at the beginning of the column).

Unique, different, yet similar in so many ways Google jumped into social networking with both feet and it confused a lot of people (including me) in the beginning. I believed it would replace Facebook (and it might just do so) but not in the way I expected.
Before I get into this I do want to step back and show you some things you may or not be aware of. On Facebook, literally all of the changes we've seen are the direct result of the appearance of Google Plus. The timeline is the way Facebook is reinforcing the fact that the site is about people (as I explained a couple of columns ago).

The new enhanced photo albums, the increased amount of space to write posts, changed chat and Skype videoconferencing, the new 'groups' features are all results of the sudden competition they perceive. Would they have done these things if Google + hadn't appeared? Perhaps but we will probably never know. I do know Google + is different and serves a different purpose from Facebook.

When I went on Google + for the first time I went nuts making circles for friends, the steppers community, steppers music, steppers videos, steppers promotion... you name it, and I created a circle for it. There were a few steppers on the service and I found a few! I didn't realize the power of posting to the public in Google + at all. I thought people would see the circles I had created and well... I was (mostly) wrong.

I learned to share circles but still... crickets chirped but I wasn't seeing much more. I couldn't see what was going wrong. I made changes and adjustments to how I posted and when I started to post to the public feed things started to change. It's mostly been happening through the steppers song of the day posts (Music is universal) but people from all over the country (and the rest of the world) have been adding me.

We all made the mistake of not adding 'Public' to the posts we want to share. It turns out when you post publically your 'reach' goes well beyond the relatively few people Facebook permits our initial posts to be seen. While I'm potentially reaching a million or two friends of fans on Facebook Google + is exposing my posts to over 100 million people... and that doesn't even count the people who see the social search results on Google's main search!

I didn't realize all of that until I looked at this site's analytics and saw a spike in new visitors. They may not all be dancers but word of mouth travels and in time as a result more steppers will join the community.

I'm not going to let this column get any longer today so I'll continue tomorrow because it's central to what I'm trying to do. Remember one thing the web is much larger than any of these sites and the secret is learning how to leverage our use of them for the greater good.

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Matching The Medium Part 2

Discovering workable solutions... #steppersbeatcolumn

Yesterday I said I'd talk about how I'm working on a workable solution to some of the social media malaise the genre suffers from.

One of the misunderstood tools we have at our disposal but we hardly use is discussed today as I work toward 'workable solutions' to build a plan.

One of the things most of the world has managed to understand how to use is Twitter. After all if you want immediate responses and if you want to know what's going on you can look at Twitter.

We've seen it used in so many ways by everyone from musical artists, movie stars, corporations, politicians to regular folks who want immediate feedback. It's not there to carry extended conversations it's just there to get the word out about anything in a quick and immediate form to a large audience. Continued and Comment

Matching The Medium Part 3 Matching The Medium Part 2
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