Their terms, not yours

One simple law of the social web is that life is better when you let your supporters connect with you on their terms, not yours.

You may want them to join your NING community, but they’re perfectly happy reading the forum posts without replying. They know someday they might want to meet people in the community, but right now they’re a bit shy.

You may really want them to join your email list, but they’d rather connect with you on Facebook. They get too many emails anyhow, and yours would mostly likely get deleted. And why is email better than a Facebook connection anyhow?

You may want them to do a lot of other things as well. And that’s all fine and good – we all have our wants. But you can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. The ease of unliking, unfollowing, unsubscribing is a click away and a natural-born right.

How to let them connect with you on their terms

Your job, plain and simple, is to give them as many opportunities as possible to connect with you – on their terms.

• Include these opportunities on every page in your website.
• Include these opportunities in the sidebar of every email.
• Include these opportunities in each social media site.
• Include these opportunities in all of your printed material.

They will love you for it (or at least like), and you get to lower your daily dose of Xanax.