Networking as it should be!
Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to mail prospects to generate leads, if you didn’t need to advertise, if customers just phoned you up?
You know that every now and again you get a phone call out of the blue from a new lead saying “a friend of mine recommended that I called you…”. This is referral marketing, and whilst it is absolutely the best way to get business, it’s also one of the most difficult to get to work.
A few years ago ‘networking’ became a new phenomenon to sweep the business world, the idea was that you would go out and meet people, tell them about your business, and that they would tell all of their contacts who would flock to buy your product. Sadly, the lovely ideal didn’t really pan-out like that. The problem was two fold, firstly everyone is too busy selling their own business to worry about selling yours! Secondly, in order for one of your business contacts to remember you and have the confidence (and motivation) to sell you in to one of their clients, they have to know you very very well indeed… that’s an awful lot of breakfasts.
However, the fact remains that this is still a darn good way to get business, because these guys phone you up wanting to buy.
Well, have you ever thought that social networking is a bit like a very streamlined version of real world networking… perhaps that’s why it’s called social “networking”!
The fact remains though that most people don’t seem to recognise that they are very nearly the same thing. Social networking is kind of like having breakfast with an ever increasing group of people every day, but without all the calories!
- You can tell a large number of people what you do, often.
- You can share some of your expertise
- You can listen to what they say, and make comment/ask questions
But unlike real word networking, you don’t have to be in the same room at the same time as these people, and it doesn’t matter of the meeting is 100 strong, rather then the more usual 30 of a face to face meeting. But perhaps the best thing about social networking is that unlike face to face networking where you rely on the ability of the people you meet to be able to sell YOUR services, with social networking your message is passed on in as pure a form as when it left you.