A real life example of the Power of Social Media,

Recently, I was scanning through my Linked in profile and I saw a post that caught my eye.  This is the post “I have a bet with one of my colleagues today. He thinks that using LinkedIn is a waste of time and does not see the benefit. So he has agreed to give me £1 for every like/comment I get. Considering I have over 2000 connections I reckon I will get £300 easy out of this. Start liking this update people!”

I thought it interesting that I could see a post by someone outside of my network so I thought I wonder how many people I could connect with too.  So I copied the post, changed the £1 to a $1 and change the # of connections from 2000 to 400, and no I did not actually make a bet with a colleague, and put it on my profile.  I really just wanted to see how many people would respond to it and how many people I could connect with.  I had only 400 connections at the time so  I thought I might get 300-400 responses.

Boy was I wrong, within a week I had over 16,000 likes and comments on my post.  Many of the comments were from people around the world on every continent.  After thinking about this for a while it made me realize that the world really is connected like no other time. 

Many of the comments wanted a piece of the action, many wanted the proceeds to go to charity but overall the comments were very positive as to the benefits of using social media to connect with like-minded people.

I now have connections with people from all around the world from people that I have never met in person. The reason I have connected with all these people, most who will never need a mortgage in the US, is that I believe there is a lot to learn from these people. 

I am really looking forward to learning from them and gaining knowledge that before was a lot harder to get. 

So an innocuous post seems to have gone viral.  Feel free to send me a LinkedIn request.  I would love to learn from you too.

Bob  Kenney,