Platforms
Networking Tips |
Networking results in sales and deals and is therefore important for all businesses. Most of us are so tied up running our businesses that we hardly take the time out for professional networking. The good thing is that even a few minutes every day for online networking can go a long way.
First of all, make a mental distinction between the two types of network groups:
* Your peers, colleagues, like-minded folks, could-be partners, vendors, industry authorities’ etc.
* Your potential clients, potential customers, potential audiences.
* There are many things that you can do to network;
1- LinkedIn.com is great for staying in touch with your professional networks and to share business advice. It’s a social networking site where you can manage your contacts and find other relevant people to connect to. You can choose who to add to your network and have intellectual discussions over the platform. Just like in real life, you can meet people that your friends know (second degree connections). The power of this community is great, because you can find a lot of business opportunities there.
Make a good profile for yourself and add connections to increase your visibility. Add links to your website or blogs so that you can redirect traffic to you through your LinkedIn profile page.
2- Create a following online. Networking is all about being in touch with your contacts on a regular basis. If you choose to follow relevant people on their micro blogs, blogs and sites; chances are that a good percentage of them will follow you in return based on internet etiquettes. So, choose your contacts wisely. I follow people in the event and social media space because that’s what I do.
3- Correspond regularly with your contacts through comments on their blogs, walls, Skype phone calls, email or other online mediums. You can set up reminders for emailing or sending cards if you have a busy schedule, so that you don’t forget about one of your biggest assets - your network…
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Networking Strategies |
If you can remember the first time you signed up for Facebook and you had no friends or very few. You hear all these strategies for utilizing these platforms but with few friends to start with, it’s kind of hard to be taken seriously. I am often asked where to start?
Social marketing is all about getting the most out of social networks. Here are some techniques that can help kick-start your online networking:
Step 1 - Create your presence
First of all, create your presence on different social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Set up your accounts and customize your profile pages.
Step 2- Build out your network
Once you have your pages all set up, you need to get people onto your network. First of all make sure you can distinctly define what kind of people you would want to add as friends. These will be people who can benefit your business in any way. People who are part of your market segments, people who are domain experts, people who can benefit you through synergies, people who are influential in the industry, people who look up to you as an expert. Most importantly, people who will listen to you and who you find interesting.
There are different levels of potential friends on social networks: First of all, add all of those people that you know directly. If you know someone, then approach them in a way you would do a real human being and not a robot. That is, introduce yourself.
I get friends requests all the time from spammers who use automated software for sending invites or cut and paste the same message to hundreds of people they find in other people’s friend networks. Be realistic – that’s no way to befriend people. Be warned that if you do this you can be locked out of the platform for spamming; your IP address can be blocked from ever accessing the domain again…
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Twello |
Another tool needs mentioning is Twello. It’s a directory that lists people under every profession by how many people follow them in twitter. If I want to find event planners that are active in micro blogging with a big social following all I need to do is go to Twello and search for Event Planners. I will find 500 professionals listed by their social popularity. I was on the front page at number 8 when I last checked…
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Twitzu |
Twitzu is an application which allows you to create event pages for your events, whether it’s a small meet-up, a private gig or a massive party; and send the invitation to your Twitter followers.
Personally, I think Twitzu can work better for smaller scale events and meet-ups, provided that your contacts are all Twitter users. Some people ask why they can’t just send out the message via Twitter. Well they can if they want to; the benefit Twitzu adds is that you can have a simple event page with the details of the event and venue. And it also has that auto RSVP processing built into it which is a great time-saver. So, if you can’t fit the entire invitation in 160 characters and spend the time to process the replies, use Twitzu instead.
Another good thing is that it shows a list of all of the people attending. So if someone you have invited is curious to find out who else is coming, he or she can simply look at the event page to find out. They can even send twitter messages to other attendees to discuss plans for attending.
Does this remind you of little kids in a classroom passing along notes on a small piece of paper hushed and secretly “going to the game?”, “who else is coming?”, “Jane’s going to be there as well”. Building systems that people are already used to or familiar with in real life is the way to go with social apps. The less you ask people to shift away from how they like to work, the larger the customer-base you will attract. Twitter, apparently, isn’t all too different from real-life, and hence using it for sending invites is just a natural next step for our events…
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Tweetdeck |
Tweetdeck is a desktop application that shows you the most tagged words being used across twitter in real time. You can see a host of tags on the page all the time and the size of the words increases the more they are used, thus giving a simple visual cue of its popularity. You can monitor specific words as well. This is a phenomenal tool if launching events as it’s like real time stock trading. You can watch certain words and study their popularity throughout different stages in an event launch / marketing cycle.
If you use the Tweetdeck tool to graph your keyword popularity throughout your marketing campaign, you can measure those parts of the campaign that had the greatest effect. That gives you invaluable data for your next event.
If I see any word that interests me being used a lot, I go to tweetscan.com and put those words into their search engine to see a list of twitter users who have used them in their tweets recently. I can then follow these people to their twitter messages and engage them into a conversation. Now, imagine if a big concert is playing and I have tickets to sell. My tweet deck tells me when the demand for those tickets is high and my tweetscan tells me exactly where I can find people who are looking for tickets. My competitors are paying $1.20 per click @ a 6% conversion rate on Google to get their tickets in front of these same people.
These useful tools in conjunction with Twitter make it such a wonderful marketing tool. I’m sitting here working at my desk, my Tweetdeck is updating as different words reach a certain volume. I can open up TweetScan and search for all the twitter users saying those words in their tweets. I can follow all those conversations in real time and go through the blog posts, videos and social networks that host the content they are all talking about. You just cannot get access to information this recent and relevant by listening to the radio or watching TV.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Twitter delivers Events Listed more traffic than Google search on any given day. Become immune to the Google slap by managing your Twitter campaign professionally.
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According to a recent survey, the maximum percentage use (almost 30% of the people who use twitter), is to share links to items of interest. Imagine if YOU were the item of their interest. Yes YOU! Let’s suppose you’re about to launch your product and have rolled out an elaborate marketing campaign. Your launch has created a stir in the market and people are interested in knowing the progress. The interest makes them start to update each other using micro blogging tools, such as twitter, about whatever piece of news they can find about your launch. (“I think they’re going to launch a phone this time. Imagine that. They call it the iphone or something…”). The micro-blogging aspect of it significantly increases the hype curve. You can launch when the timing is perfect and people are most receptive.
Now, during the launch event, keep the excitements rolling. Don’t stop there. Use their third party tools like LiveTwitting to give live updates on the event. Have competitions over these platforms if you want.
Like I mentioned in the Social Bookmarking section above, a good ratio for link-baiting your own content (as opposed to blatant self-serving) is 1 to 10. You can try to engage specific people by adding the “@” sign before their twitter name (e.g. @SimonFord). If I follow you and you don’t follow me then you won’t see what I say at all. Even if I aim it “@you” directly. But I will see everything you type out. Now if I type ten messages @you (when you are not following me) you will get them all of a sudden in your archives whenever you do start to follow me. All of the people who are following me only see half the conversation because you are not following me. They see what I type to you but won’t see what you type back unless you are following me.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Twitter delivers Events Listed more traffic than Google search on any given day. Become immune to the Google slap by managing your Twitter campaign professionally.
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Live Streaming And Micro-Blogging |
Micro-blogs are mini posts or updates that can directly be sent to blogs. There are a number of services for micro-blogging, like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. Social networking sites like Plaxo, Facebook and MySpace also have micro-blogging features in them, called status updates.
Micro blogging appeals to people because it is immediate and because they can send the updates through portable mediums as well, thus making it more accessible. You can send messages as text, video or audio. You can also use cell-phones to send and receive updates.
For events, I would say, one of the most valuable things is how you can give live updates of your plans or of the events themselves as they unfold. So those people listening in from home will know just how remarkable the event is. If your updates are combined with Google Maps (maps.google.com), the experience will be even better. Takes me back to the time when we used to send videos, feedbacks, thoughts and thanks only a day after the event - once everything was well over. This was only a few years back. Now, it’s amazing how we can give minute by minute updates to people all across the globe. Even if our community isn’t present at the site of an event, our bond still grows because they know exactly what we’re up to. We once had an inauguration that we were twittering (using www.twitter.com) about on an hourly basis. After a while we started to receive messages from curious readers with questions like “has the ribbon been cut?”, “does anyone like the new painting additions?” etc.
I am currently in the middle of planning a massive reunion (global) event for a client. My role is to market multiple parties in different locations throughout the world over the same 24 hour period, early next year. Attendees are working holiday-makers and international students who all lived in Sydney Australia at some stage over a 10 year period. Each event will have its own event page on the Events Listed application that will stream micro blog posts down the page. These pages will be posted on big projector screens at each venue so attendees can read messages posted by their friends all over the world. Those who cannot attend a venue can sit at home on their computer and join the party…
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Wikis |
Wikis are also a great marketing strategy in gaining authority within shared wiki collaborative sites. A lot of event planners watch these sites and they are favored in Google search results so you can get great search exposure. If you are active in wikis people will learn about your authority which will pull them into your world. When they get into your sales funnel, if built out right, they will follow your bookmarks, blogs, twitter feeds and videos. What is the cost of acquiring a customer? If you spend an hour a week contributing to wikis to gain prospects who follow you because they want to learn from you. What would you pay in advertising to gain the same advantage to your marketing efforts each week? This is just an hour of your time.
Think of wikis like conferences with hundreds of attendees. Each time you contribute to a wiki you are standing up in the conference and contributing to the group’s collaborative efforts. Except in wikis every time you do it people can click through into your blog or site (sales funnel) which cannot happen in a conference. In the offline world they’ll have to find you after the conference is over to get your card and then they have to get that card out later and enter your name into the computer. Those who do get through this process will always make a much better quality prospect because only those who really want to connect with you, will. That’s why you still need to be at these offline meet-ups but when you get there you want everyone to already know who you are from your online marketing and social networking efforts as opposed to arriving anonymously. This way if you stand up everyone already knows how to connect with you. It’s this group who extract most value at offline meet ups.
We have already discussed the benefits of building relationships with your customers through social media marketing. Here are some quick steps that you can follow to see how you can leverage wikis in planning and managing your events.
If your event allows multiple stakeholders to get together to do any of the following…
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Professional Networking |
Websites like LinkedIn.com are built specifically for building your professional networks, adding professional contacts, closing deals, forming work relationships, finding vendors, doing consultation projects, and so on. Needless to say, the impact this has had on businesses and individuals is profound.
It was made in 2003 when the surge in social media networks was on the rise. Within 4 years it had astounding numbers to show: 3.2 million visitors / month, growing at 485%/year. It has 24 million registered users spanning in 150 countries. This means that 24 million people are connected to each other professionally all across the globe by using LinkedIn. Five years ago if I had asked you to imagine sharing your business card with hundreds of prospective clients or recruiters in one instant, you would have laughed it off. Things have changed, and LinkedIn is perhaps one of the best demonstrations of useful social applications.
Just like Facebook, you can maintain a list of contacts called connections. You can then get connected to the connections of your contacts. These second and third degree connections make a great real life parable. You go to a party and spot a friend sitting on a table with some people. You walk up to him and he introduces you to his friends. You chat a while and share contact details with your new acquaintances and set up another get together. In the next get-together you get a chance to meet and network with the friends of your new acquaintance. LinkedIn works the same way by allowing you to find people through trusted mutual contacts.
The idea behind the ‘gated-access approach’ is to build trust…
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