What rats can teach us about social media

I was reminded of an important lesson after reading how a farmer in Bangladesh won a colour television after slaying a whopping 83,450 rats– the figure is confirmed as he collected the tails as proof.

Now I grew up on a farm west of Newbury in West Berkshire and recall after a warm summer and a mild autumn during the early 1980s when the bumper harvest had also led to a equally bumper crop of rats and being a keen marksman I was hired to kill the greedy vermin at a lucrative bounty of 10 pence per rat (this was the 1980s!).

The first day a couple of hours of prowling around and taking aim led to a dozen rats being killed and brandishing their severed tails as proof I scooped £1.20. Day two appeared more successful with 20 rats and day three it was 29 and day four it leapt to 38… On day five it would have been 45 but by then the rescued tails from the first days kill were becoming a bit ripe and my Dad, well, he smelled a rat!

However, I had stumbled upon one of the capitalist truths that it is better to do something once and keep earning a reward, than keep simply selling the same service over and over again.

So while recycling rats’ tails was going to be a short lived venture, in the modern world of search engine optimisation and the viral buzz of social media minded public relations and blogging, recycling can work to your advantage.

Content is the equivalent of rats tails and relevant content can be shared again and again and consistently attract new readers to your blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and so on.

For example, do you offer free downloads? Tips or guides are excellent examples. In itself these attract Google, not least when grateful visitors to the site enjoy them and link to these downloads. So written and uploaded once, they are regularly downloaded again and again.

Of course blogging is fundamental to this approach and this blog post once published here on Buzz will keep on performing and delivering readers for many months and years. Indeed that Telegraph article I linked to above was written back in October 2009, bookmarked in my ‘blogging inspiration’ folder and alighted upon today to inspire this post.

So what can your business offer that would be your rats tails?