“Surprise & delight just 1 customer in today’s social media world, and the WORLD may hear about it…” via @DaveKerpen

All too often I have an immediate and jaded reaction to these kinds of statements. But Dave Kerpen lives it, breathes it and runs a business on it. Dave is the CEO of NYC-based Likeable Media, a very successful and nationally-recognized social media marketing firm. Dave is also the author of Likeable Social Media, a NY Times best seller and is followed by more than 20,000 people on his personal Twitter account.

All of which is to say there is no good reason why Dave would offer to help little old me. But on two separate occasions, he has. To be fair, he hasn’t directly offered to help me, but has offered to help anyone who asks for it on Twitter.

Both times, Dave offered to retweet anything someone sent him in order to help get their content out to a larger audience (his audience). He gives a short window of time for people to tweet him, and then true to his word retweets those pieces of content to his followers. I have no idea how many times he has done this, but I’ve seen it at least twice and was able to get Dave to tweet out my content of choice to his thousands of followers.

In my case, I quickly sent out one of my blog posts on each occasion. And truthfully, I saw very little bump in traffic or many additional twitter followers at all…but that’s not the point.

I don’t quantify Dave’s generosity by the number of clicks it gets me. I don’t quantify it at all actually, I just accept it for what it is – a generous and selfless gesture from someone who genuinely works to connect, collaborate, help and offer real value to others. If anything, the measure of my appreciation really only comes in my own willingness to help others in a similar way. Perhaps that’s what Dave means when he says the “World may hear about” just one act of surprise and delight.

Not for nothing, but this is also a great lesson in social media for businesses – how do you measure the return on your social investment? Could you do it by clicks or followers? Sure, you could. But a better question is how do you measure the good will invoked by an act such as Dave’s. I won’t go into it in this post, but I’ll say this – I’ll take the good will, you can have the clicks if you want them.

So yes, it’s a great social media lesson, but an even better lesson in practicing what you preach.

Thanks Dave,

Robert

About The Author: Robert J. Munson is a marketing and public relations strategist based in Baton Rouge, LA. His firm, RobertJMunson, specializes in modern marketing strategies including social media marketing, content marketing and corporate social strategy. Follow Robert J Munson on Twitter.