Hammer Time!

Mc Hammer is a guy who really understands social media. He really lives and breaths this stuff. This week he spoke at Harvard for the Gravity Summit on social media, which was streamed on CNN.com/live. What really caught my attention was this: He was asked to speak at the conference via Twitter DM. He accepted the offer, and flew himself out to speak.

If that doesn’t tell you how seriously he takes his tweeting, consider this: Someone asked him if he was affected by Twitter’s outage a few weeks ago, he responded by asking if that person was affected by waking up in the morning.

The man follows 30,000+ people, so he of course does not see every tweet. However, Hammer has several huge monitors at home so that he can see as much Twitter activity as possible. In fact, while promoting one of his projects, he randomly saw a negative comment come into his stream. Rather than letting it be, and letting the negativity grow unchecked, Mr. Hammer decided to inject his opinion into the conversation. The negative commenter, was basically blown away that Hammer paid enough attention to his stream to catch his comment. The negativity ended there.

To sum everything up, MC Hammer cares (A LOT). It has helped him to build a Twitter following of 1.5 million (give or take a few hundred thousand.

The point I am attempting to make is that social media is not a set and forget process. You have to dedicate a lot of time and effort into building connections. If you aren’t willing to put in the time to make the little connections, nobody is going to want to connect with you.

This time and effort is so important that it can encompass your very being as in MC Hammer’s case. But the payoffs will come back to you in ways you never thought could happen.

There is an excerpt of his keynote below: