Business Insight Zone

Since last week’s post, “Dale Carnegie and the Social Media,” it’s like I’m seeing Dale Carnegie everwhere I look. (But not literally — that would be ghoulish.)

First, in the comment thread of the post, Daniel Riveong pointed me to his own 2006 article about Social Media Optimization:

If the Social Media is about “Engaging People” and “Conversation” why are we reading still reading just the Cluetrain Manifesto? We should be reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” as well. Read up on it. Can you see how it applies online?

(Mark Drapeau of Mashable also pointed to his article “HOW TO: Win Friends and Twinfluence People,” though it might be disqualified on a technicality since, beyond the wordplay in the title, it doesn’t reference Carnegie directly. It does talk good sense in the Carnegie style, though.)

Then, I came across “Why Dale Carnegie Would Be an Awesome Blogger” at the Schipul.com Blog:

What I am saying is if Carnegie was still around, I would invite him to come have a beer, watch a Dallas Cowboys football game, and discuss his latest blog on why “a man without a smiling face must not open a shop.”

The Schipul blogger goes on to give five excellent reasons why Carnegie would have made a good blogger.

Finally, law blogger Kevin O’Keefe riffed on my own post and applied Carnegie’s “Six Ways to Make People Like You” to attracting Twitter followers and blog readers:

Blogging and Twittering is all about the other guy, not you. Talk about others’ problems, not yourself. Provide helpful answers, insight, and resources to help others solve their problems.

Kevin knows what he’s talking about — he has 2,500 Twitter followers.

Carnegie’s book is timeless because it talks about the timeless interests and motivations of human beings, whether they’re meeting face-to-face, over the phone, via the Internet, or any other way. You can make yourself more likeable, doing so is good for business, and the social media give you more ways to do this than ever before.

Long live Dale Carnegie!

Category: Social media, The language of business