Everyone’s abuzz about social networking lately. Last year I got LinkedIn and now my 132 contacts and I are all part of the human daisy chain of “who do you know who knows someone who knows somebody I want to meet?” I figure if I add enough contacts eventually I will indeed find that Kevin Bacon is just six degrees away.
I joined Facebook and last month a friend from elementary school dropped in to chat online. She’s a physicist now. No wonder she always beat me at Parchesi.
Once of my colleagues recommended Jigsaw last week. The service is aptly named. If you can put the pieces together and figure out what they do, you’ve earned the right to be on Jigsaw.
Even the bars are getting into the game. Harry’s Banana Farm in Lake Worth has someone on staff who should be in the copywriting business. Last week their sign read “You Twitter My Space and I’ll Google your Yahoo.”
Signing up for social networking sites is easy enough, but once you’re there, then what? Can social networking really benefit your business?
The answer is yes. To be successful at it, though, you’re going to have to change the way you think.
The best example of a successful marketing effort using social networking came from a colleague in another market. His firm had been hired by a company that was launching a new product. This product was purported to age wine through the use of magnets embedded in a round base surrounding the bottle of wine. Skeptical? So were a lot of potential customers.
My colleague, an avid Twitter user, put a Tweet out to his network talking about the product and questioning whether or not it really worked. Before long, he was receiving lots of Tweets telling him how wonderful the product really was. He rebroadcast the positive responses and news of this new product has now spread far and wide in the Twitter community and beyond. The product is getting huge publicity and it all started with one little Tweet.
That’s just one example of how social networking can be a powerful tool in promoting your business. You just have to figure out how to best use it. Keep trying. Kevin Bacon is closer than you think.
No comments:
Post a Comment