Blog to Win Friends and Influence People

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Dale Carnegie classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. In the book, Carnegie outlines a timeless approach to building people skills. It's a throwback to an era when civility ruled.

Over the weekend someone took a cheap shot at me, scored a lot of links and generated a lot of traffic to her blog on her very first post. Robert French summarizes the whole event here. The blog, which rhymes with Smurfette, is clearly going to dish out salty gossip and innuendo about the PR business, starting with me. The entire episode, which honestly I didn't pay a lot of attention to, inspired me to revisit Carnegie's classic. Carnegie's tenets provide a solid reminder or two about how to take the high road in the blogosphere, which at time is a rough and tumble environment in a world filled with vile and meanness.

What follows is a summary of his ideas. My comments are in italics. Model these and you will go far in the blog world. I haven't always followed this road, but it's always been my intent to do so. Wouldn't it be awesome if we all did?

Fundamental Techniques for Handling People:

    * Don't criticize, condemn or complain. Advance or build on the dialogue, even if you disagree

    * Give people a feeling of importance; praise the good parts of them. Link to the posts you disagree with, but point out the parts you agree with too.

    * Get the other person to want to do what you want them to by arousing their desires. Put another way, make dreams come true.

Six Ways to Make People Like You:

    * Be genuinely interested in other people. Read lots of blogs for different perspectives.

    * Smile. Put your picture on your blog.

    * Remember and use people's names. Remember where you read things and credit the bloggers who wrote them.

    * Encourage others to talk about themselves and listen to them. In other words, welcome comments.

    * Discuss what the other person is interested in. Add value to your readers.

    * Make the other person feel important. Take all your feedback seriously and adapt if needed.

Comments

[Mario]

Actually, if you're interested, there is a more detailed summary available here:

http://www.notesofintelligence.com/influence/

[Jürgen Bonne]

I cannot help but think about the recent debate regarding Robert Scoble, the Vista delay and what Jobn Wilcox replied to him.

Here's some links for anyone who missed it:

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/24/where-the-heck-is-scoble/

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/27/joe-wilcox-laughs-at-me/

http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/014537.html

They would have been much better off, if they had acted in a way conforming to Dale Carnegies / your tips.

[Mike]

Old principles, new media. :)

[David Burn]

It's kind of hard to be a critic, if you can't criticize. But I'm all for doing so in a civil manner.

[scott]

Cool. I'm better at remembering names on blogs than in person, when I often embarrass myself.

Not that I don't also embarrass myself on the blog.

This is actually not a bad idea for a book project, Steve.

[Chris Heuer]

Tim Sanders did a great job of retelling Carenegie's work with "Love is the Killer App", a must read for bloggers IMHO. Kristie did a great little write up on it a while back.

[Jen]

I still love you. However, I'm only in Step 5 of Josh Hallett's Life of PR Blogger (http://hyku.com/blog/archives/001047.html). Supposedly, I'll begin hating you soon. Or perhaps I'll skip that step and move on to 7. We'll see.

[Robert Scoble]

Steve: awesome advice! I'll try to live it!

[John Pospisil]

As Oscar Wilde said there's only one thing worse than being spoken about, and that's not being spoken about...

All the best
John

[Kami Huyse]

Steve; Glad to see you promoting this, I think that ad hominem is something we can all live without and more civility an ideal to which we should aspire.

Thanks for the post and for the right attitude!

[Aaron Brazell]

Imagine if people actually tried to live their life by these principles and not just their blog life. I love it when the blogging plane crosses the real life plane and people genuinely handle their affairs in both worlds in identical ways.

[Nadia]

Wow Steve - you did a really good job linking the principles to blogging. While I was already aware of how one could apply the principles to daily life, your entry really made things click for me, as a blogger. Thanks for that!!

[Sergiu]

I think Steve did more than linking the principles to blogging, I think he actually made a pretty good review about social networking, and speaking of social networking this blog might be even more useful than myspace. Why do I say this? Well.. yes I do agree that making friends online is a good thing, take for example http://www.mylol.net - young site, yet another attempt to make something good out of the community, but there is way more than this and its in the human mind. Learning how to blog, actually tells you how to socialize better with people, and this might be an advantage thinking how technology evolves and makes us stay in-doors. We don't go to the cinema, we watch it home at our dvd player, we don't go clubbing that much (I do but..) because we can stay all night and chat on yahoo messenger, and yet there are websites that teach you without even wishing to, how to make out of yourself a good person. I trully and honestly believe that this is a great post.

[steve]

"Friends are always friends no matter how far you have to travel back in time. If you have memories together, there is always a piece of your friendship inside your heart." Kellie O'Connor

http://www.lovecarnival.com/friendship/making-friends.html

[Michael Bass]

The principles of Dale Carnegie work very well with in-person interaction, however I feel that social networking has deluded civility into oblivion. The top social networking gurus have thousands of followers, do these people actually have this many "friends"? probably not. It's more like a popularity contest. People hear about these gurus and want to be friends with them only because they like the message. The anonymity clouds things even further and you're left with 'networking gods' who can act as childish as they choose while also having the ability to drive tons of traffic to any site.