I'm already laughing thinking about the people who may end up at this post looking for fishing tips on Google. If that is how you got here, I'm sorry but besides throwing a line in the water and hoping something grabs it, I don't have much for you in that arena. I recorded episode 75 of Managing the Gray today and on it I gave all the steps needed to start building a social media strategy. When I listened back I realized that some agencies and individuals would NEVER share that information with the world because they feel that is their special thing to keep behind closed doors and only share when you write them a big check.

Where the fishing comes in is around the old saying about giving a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he can feed himself forever. I guess how I'm looking at this space is that I want to teach everyone to fish. This might be through my podcast, public speaking or this blog. It is why The Advance Guard does things like write a white paper on Facebook Pages or freely shares tips to make that page even better.

My hope is that once you know how to fish that you will come to me and my company to figure out how best to cook it.

Let's face it, with all the tools out there you can set up multiple profiles, a blog and a twitter account all on your own. Once you know what is hot and where to look you can do that. But, if you really want to use them right and be successful, then you have to know which ones work well together and how to integrate them into everything you are doing. Same thing with fish. You might be able to catch/buy a whole fish and bring it home, but then what do you do with it?

This was beating up my brain so much that I had to get it out there. It started with a conversation around the echo chamber of the fishbowl and then I started thinking about all the sharks and bottom feeders swimming around in that space. Somehow, that all lead to this post.

What are you doing to teach people how to fish in the the social media waters?