Do You apply Reciprocity to your Social Media activities?

Practice what you preach!  That is an old saying from my youth...And at a speaking engagement I had to  practice what I had just preached...

My presentation was to a group of local Job Seekers, Facilitators and Job Developers and 4 other excellent speakers - the title of the event was #UnJobsearchKW.   Being the last speaker, it was my task to pump the attendees up and provide them with some insight to what social media tools recruiters use in finding candidates.

After all the presentations were completed, an open forum took place, where each of the speakers availed themselves to the audience to answer questions more specific to the attendees needs...

One gentleman made a beeline for me and introduced himself as someone who had been trying to 'attract my attention' through various social media and traditional outlets, and sought my help with his job search.  Within a few seconds I recognized 'him' from his previous attempts to connect and asked why he had not returned my messages I had left for him previously (he had some excellent and in demand skills and experience).  He said "he only talked to people in person as he found that he had greater success that way".  He did say how much he enjoyed the shared information I put out on the various sites and that my presentation was very good, especially one particular slide:

So why did he 'only talk to people in person'?  Simple really - he has a severe hearing impairment and even with modern technology has found people on the phone mis-hears him or he mis-interprets what they say. One of the features I suggested he utilize is video calling [Skype or Google Hangout] either of these would all him to see and be seen by the interviewer.

So what does this have to do with 'Reciprocity'?  Not only had he seen information that had been shared by myself and others - to his benefit - but he had also heard the words and deeds put into action at the presentation and then shared his experience [challenges].  Reciprocity is 2-way, everyone must share knowledge, experience, views, opinions, thoughts, etc... with the wider world - you will never know who might 'see it' - but someone will.

May 2014 prove to be more reciprocal than 2013 - John