Back in June, I wrote a post called Social Media for My Business: 16 Lessons Learnt so Far, where I talked about some of the things that I had learnt on my journey over the last few months. Later that month, I started to expand on some of those lessons in this post (Social Media is like any other part of business it needs goals to keep it on track), which focused on knowing what you want to achieve out your social media strategy before you get started.

Going over the rest of the lessons, I noticed that some of them naturally bunch together so today I want to talk about two of the lessons about geography and what I have learnt.

The lessons were:

• We can be everywhere

The internet opens up potential markets across the globe and, so, thinking globally will help you expand your reach. Don’t be limited by geography.

• Don’t try and be everywhere

Reflecting on lesson 2 can mean that we get over-stretched. So, pick what fits and works for you.

What have those meant for me?

One of the main reasons that I started my blog and social media journey was to write a book. I am pleased to say that that journey is coming to an end and I should be in a position to release something sometime in September. Very exciting :)and I will let you know more about this in due course. Over the course of this project being plugged into the global social media network has helped enormously. Here’s some of the ways that I have benefited, specifically, from social media’s global reach:

• I have been able to reconnect via facebook (my posts syndicate to facebook) to an old university colleague, Roy, that I found via another old friend. I have not spoken to him in around 18 years. He is now based in the USA is currently reading my draft and will be sending me comments soon.
• In addition, I have another 3-4 different people in different countries reading a draft copy of the book and will be sending me comments and feedback. All through met and connected via social media.
• I have been able to connect with a lovely lady in Wales, Eleanor, who runs a charity (http://www.giveabrick.com/) that has offered to copy-edit the book for me. I’m going to donate 10% of the profits of the book to her charity as I think its a cool project.
• Through other contacts I have made I will be able to connect to a number of successful authors from around the world to review the book….can’t reveal names as yet.
• I have been asked to contribute to a number of other projects as spin-offs in more than one country.
• I will be setting up affiliate relationships with around 8 different businesses in 5 different countries, across three continents.
• The project has produced more local offline networking, launch and seminar opportunities to promote the book.
• Finally, the book will be populated by some very cool cartoons. These will be done by the wife, Rei, of an old student of mine who I reconnected with on Facebook. They were based in Japan, came to France and are now in London for a little while.

The downside.

This has taken a lot of time and has meant that a few other projects have suffered. However, I have decided to focus on pushing this one through to completion with the help of my new global network.

How has social media allowed you to expand your reach across geographies?

Thanks to helinton for the image