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Building meaningful business connections through social media

Aug 4th

6 comments

This is the second in a series exploring the keys to achieving business benefits in social media:

Connections + Meaningful Content + Authentic Helpfulness = Business Benefits.
Now, we’re going to dive into each element to build a strategy for YOUR social media success! Today we start with CONNECTIONS.
Think of the social media landscape as a garden … being planted in a desert! To get something to grow, you need to plant a LOT of seeds, which are your connections. Then you’re going to water those connections with meaningful content and authentic helpfulness, which I will cover in subsequent articles.
I’ll give you seven delicious ingredients for the business connection recipe, but before I do, I’d like you to consider two things 1) What is the profile of your best customers, and 2) Where are they likely to be hanging out? If you can answer those questions, your quest for great business connections will be so much more successful! Here are two resources to help you out (click links)
CUSTOMER PROFILING
FINDING YOUR CUSTOMER “TRUCKSTOP”
OK, let’s mix up a fresh batch of social media business connections:
1) The Advanced Search feature on Linked-In is your best connection-finding buddy. You can find high-potential connections by location, company, industry, even business title. Offer to link with these people as a first step toward building your targeted audience.
2) Participate in Linked-in groups and forums. What better way to build relationships than to get involved with online groups of like-minded professionals? So many people sign up for Linked-In and forget about it. Get your skin in the game and actively ENGAGE new connections. A new national contract of mine began with a lady who liked my answers on Linked-In!
3) Find online journals related to your industry. Look for comments that interest you. In the comment section, note who is there – their comments often point readers to their Twitter name, Facebook or Linked-In page. Connect to them. Engage.
4) Use Twellow to find targeted industry connections who are actively involved in Twitter. There is a related app on this site that you can use to search people by state or city, which is so important if you are a small business serving a targeted geographic area.
5) Steal contacts from your competitors. If you can find your competitors on social media channels, you can also find their links and followers. This is public information for all to see and so it is perfectly acceptable. P.S. They can do the same thing to you!
6) Use http://my.peoplebrowsr.com/ to do high-powered searches for relevant Twitter users by just about any demographic category you can think of.
7) Have you participated in Twitter “discussions” on subjects related to your area of interest? These discussions are demarcated with a hashtag (#) so you can search for the term and follow the trail of the discussion, whether you are following the people or not. Here’s an example. In the search field in the right hand column of Twitter, I searched for #SMROI because I want to find people who are talking about social media and ROI. I will see a timeline of the discussion and all the people who are participating. Follow them!

There are hundreds of ways to build targeted contacts but these are a few ideas that have worked for me and my clients. What is working for you? Please share in the comment section below.

This article is part of a series on creating business benefits through social media. Other posts:
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A formula for social media business success

Aug 2nd

45 comments

Starbucks.  Dell.  Mark Schaefer.

Yes, I am now up there with the mega-brand big dogs, at least momentarily, in an article in Forbes recently. Not only that, but I was acknowledged as a Twitter marketing authority in the same breath as Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang, two national marketing luminaries.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know that I make up about 75% of what I say and fabricate the other 25%.  You’re thinking that now too, aren’t you?  No, it’s true. I’m really in there.

How did this happen??  Through social media, of course.  And it’s a great case study on the Social Media Formula for Business Benefit:

Connection + Meaningful Content + Authentic Helpfulness = Business Benefit

Let’s see how this worked in the real world.

CONNECTION

It started about nine months ago when I attended a free webinar featuring Nathan Egan, a former Linked-In exec who had just started a company call Freesource. I thought he was an exceptionally bright guy and decided to comply with his public request to “link” with him. I also looked him up on Twitter and he became one of the first people I followed.

 MEANINGFUL CONTENT

Through his posts, I grew to appreciate Nathan’s vision and he became a regular reader of my blog. He was so interested in one particular article that he called and talked to me for over an hour, deepening the respect and connection between us.

 AUTHENTIC HELPFULNESS

Our friendship has grown and now we routinely support each other. We discuss new ideas and bounce around solutions to business challenges. Nathan recently asked for my help on a new app his company was developing (which I will also be featuring on a future blog article). He has tweeted out my blog posts, helping to grow my readership. That’s what social media is all about!

BUSINESS RESULTS

When Nathan was interviewed by Forbes, he was asked if there was anybody he could recommend who had done an exceptionally good job nurturing business relationships through social media. And he thought of me.

So now I had an opportunity to extend content and helpfulness to a reporter at Forbes. Over a lengthy phone call, I brought him up to speed on my experiences, my client’s social media successes, and ideas about the future of social media. And now we’re friends, too.

As Nathan’s business has expanded, he turned to me to take over some of the company’s marketing functions he no longer has time to handle.  Our social media connection has turned into a fantastic opportunity for both of us.

That’s how social media works for business: C + MC + AH = Business Benefits. Look at ANY B2B or B2C success story and these three elements were in place — none can be missing. Over the next three days, we’re going to look at this STEP BY STEP and come up with some new, actionable ideas that you can use to realize your own business benefits from social media.

But here’s the best part. YOU AND I ARE CONNECTED, TOO! Who knows what will happen NEXT?

If this article made you think, please consider leaving comments.  I’d love to hear from you!

Other articles in this series … each one builds on this theme:

Part 2: Building meaningful business connections

Part 3: The biggest obstacle to social media business succcess

Part 4: Authentic Helpfulness: The economy of giving

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Successful business blogging in just one step

Jul 18th

2 comments

This is a map of Macedonia. It will only make sense if you read the article : )

My friend John Bottom is a gifted B2B marketing professional with London-based Base One, and blogs for his company site, Beyond. John posed this question to me today:

“If you had to give me the top 5 tips for blog success, what would they be? Let me start you off:

1. Good, original content
2.
3.
4.
5.

I think John has already completed the list. That’s all there is!

I would further define “good” content as writing that is:

a) Consistent with your personal passions and interests
b) Focused on one broad subject area so as to not confuse your readers
c) Interesting, useful and entertaining

You might find it strange that I didn’t mention that your writing should be consistent with your reader’s interests. That’s because it already will be. If you write consistently on a subject you are passionate about, your audience will find you. You’ll all get along fine!

As a relatively new blogger, that has been my biggest learning, I didn’t find my audience, my audience found me. A very humbling experience, actually.

My biggest frustration is that I wish I could get to know my readers better. This week, I had 10 new readers from Macedonia. Hello! How are things in Macedonia? What are your business challenges over there? Or in Greece, South Africa, Cambodia and all the amazing places where {grow} readers live and work. What are you learning about marketing in 2009, in a recession, in our digital age? What should I be writing about? I want to know these things! Connect to me!

And by the way, have I told you lately how much I appreciate you being here? Thank you SO MUCH for reading, commenting and sharing my blog … in Macedonia, and all around the world.

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Social media time shock strategies

Jul 16th

No comments

This is Part 4 of my interview with Dr. Ben Hanna, former eBay exec, online marketing pioneer and VP of Business.com.

One of the things most people learn is the tremendous amount of time it takes to effectively manage a social media campaign. How are you personally managing the time shock on top of your other traditional marketing duties?

Just like SEO, social media has a reputation as being “free” but both require a significant, ongoing time commitment to deliver a tangible impact on the business. The short answer to your question is that it is possible to manage the social media time commitment through a combination of pre-launch research, clear focus on goals and active project prioritization.

We researched the current state of B2B social media before we launched our blogs and Twitter accounts, and the time commitment issue came through loud and clear – the B2B social media success stories involved dedicated, consistent focus on initiatives over time, and the complaints about social media not working typically involved one shot campaigns which didn’t work as intended or consumed time/resources far beyond their value.

With about two FTEs worth of time to dedicate to the effort, and knowing the risk of over-commitment, we chose to launch a blog and Twitter account for each side of our business — @whatworks and the What Works for Business blog for general business challenges/solutions, and @B2BOnlineMktg and the B2B Online Marketing blog for B2B online marketing challenges/solutions. We felt we could learn most quickly by comparing performance of the blogs and Twitter accounts but, if driving immediate business results was more important, we would have focused more narrowly.

After launching our social media initiative, clear focus on goals and active project prioritization kept the time commitment manageable (with an emphasis on the “manageable” part – there are still times where the team and I have no choice but to power through an unforeseen time sink).

For example, it quickly became clear that the What Works for Business blog was performing much better in organic search results than the B2B Online Marketing blog, one reason being 2-3 new posts per day for What Works for Business vs. one post per week for the other blog. It’s easy to look at that as a problem and start putting in the considerable extra time necessary to keep both blogs at 2-3 posts per day. Our goal, however, wasn’t to maintain performance parity between the blogs, or hit certain performance targets in the initial phase – it was to learn from the differences between the blogs. Seeing how content volume can affect organic search performance is valuable input for future project planning and resource allocation, but it isn’t a “problem” to get sucked into fixing at this point.
Tomorrow: The final part of our interview — The next evolution of B2B marketing
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